4 Easy Steps to Prepare Your Garden for Winter!

November is a great month to start preparing your garden for the winter. Here are four ways that I get my garden ready for the cold weather. Autumn is a brilliant time for preparing bare earth for what it's going to accommodate the following year, whether you're making a flower bed or a border or attending to your veg patch in your kitchen garden. This is the time to get the soil in good heart so that when spring comes plants will really thrive. Now on the veg patch we used to dig to the depth of two spade blades, double digging. Gosh it was hard, we don't do that anymore, we do surface cultivations. If you're bringing a plot under cultivation for the first time or digging a brand new border, then yes, dig to the depth of one spade blade and work in plenty of organic matter. You can do it from your garden compost heap or you can get it bagged as soil improver and just lightly work that into the surface. And this sort of cultivation to sort of half the depth of the prongs of the fork is quite sufficient. If you find that the soil is either too wet to cultivate, it sticks to the prongs of your fork, or it's too hard with frost, stay off it. Organic matter like this is good for any kind of soil. On sandy soil it will help hold on to moisture, particularly in dry spells. On clay soils, if as well as putting in organic matter you add sharp grit, lots of it, that will also improve drainage. And grit doesn't rot down like organic matter does, it lasts far longer. The combination of the two things on the clay soil, built up on the top, will give you wonderful growing material. And at this time of year, that's the only cultivation you need. It can stay like that right the way through the winter, pulling off or hoeing off the odd weed that might still come through, and then your ground is ready and waiting for those crops it's going to receive come March and April. Certain plants need to be brought into the warmth for winter. Frosts will kill them, things like citrus fruits, oranges, lemons. Bring them into your greenhouse or into a brightly lit room to make sure they survive the winter. Another tender plant that's popular these days is the olive. It's probably a good idea to steer clear of olive trees nowadays because of a disease called Xylella. But over the past few years, if you've bought one and you want to protect it and you know it's healthy, you can get rolls of white fleece and you can wrap that round. You can also get these fleecy bags which are much easier to use. Fit the bag over the plant and pull the drawstring at the bottom tight, just to insulate it a little bit more. One plant you do need to pay attention to this time of year is the dahlia. They have tubers at the bottom, these big fat roots, but they are frost tender. If they get frosted, they'll go mushy and rot. So you have two options. You can leave them in the ground, having cut back the top growth, and mulch the soil with about eight centimetres, three inches of well-rotted compost or manure to lag them in effect and stop the frost penetrating. Or you can dig them up, as I have done with this one. Shake the soil off the roots and then cut back the tops even further, to about ten centimetres, four inches. And as soon as they've dried, I stick them under the potting bench and I leave them under there, just like that, right the way through into March, when I take them out from underneath the bench, start them into growth again and keep them either as plants or take cuttings from them. And that way, because I've kept them frost-free, they're guaranteed to survive. Come November, you might be tempted to wade right through your borders, hacking everything back. Don't. Be selective. Things like this catmint here, Nepeta, that's pretty much finished and you can certainly have into that with your shears and take it back as far as you want. But when it comes to things like this geranium here, there's a lot of green growth on that still. Be selective on what you're cutting off there. These straggling shoots down the front, you can take those off, but leave that central green growth. Leave also any plants which are going to offer food to the birds through the winter. Things like eryngium, the sea holly and grasses, which look wonderful when the frost is on them and the winter sun set low is shining through them. So by all means, cut off things which you know are not going to be any use to wildlife and any use to you to look at, but do it bit by bit by bit. So I'm being quite dramatic with this catmint, but as well as just tidying up the garden, what it's doing is stopping this material here, which if I'd left it on, it's got a hairy leaf plant, would have started to rot and just go down and make a soggy, gungy mess as we approach winter. Better to let the air circulate around it when it's cut back and it will overwinter with those roots below ground. So as a general rule of thumb, if a plant is dying back and looking brown, you can cut it off almost to ground level. If it's green and still growing, leave it. It'll feed the roots by sending the nutrition down and you're robbing it of doing that if you take off good green growing foliage. So there are several clumps here now that I've cut back, but still plenty of health in there, nothing has died out and they'll go through the winter happily like that. So here you have before and after. It's very satisfying to get jobs done in the garden, have everything looking better, but it's also important that you take time to relax, looking at the seeds you grew this year and to look forward to some you might sow again next year or new things to try. So I go through my old seed packets thinking, oh that didn't do very well, that was great, I must grow that again and make notes in my book on what's going to go where. And there's nothing like anticipation of what's to come for cheering you up. Sweet peas were great up the obelisks. I had to water them a lot to keep them going through the really hot weather and kept picking them so new flowers were produced. Cosmos this year, wow, they were amazing. So I definitely like those, especially the candy-stripe ones. They did really well. You might think of autumn as the end of the year, but in a way it's the beginning of the next year in terms of planning. It's dreaming if you like, but dreams can turn into reality with a few packets of seed and a bit of careful cultivation. Farmers always think that next year will be even worse. Gardeners know that next year will always be better than this one. It's my dream to take gardening and the joys to as many people as possible. So if you haven't yet subscribed, click below because there's lots more content to come.