Garden Gnome Autumn

Let’s enjoy the beauty and harvest of our land in this mellow, fruitful and misty season. Whether we have rolling acres, an allotment plot (like the Queen), a small town garden, patio or window boxes on a balcony, we can create an oasis of delight and productivity.

So how did our gardens grow this year? There’s a feedback form to fill in and return, and a November meeting for us to pool our experiences; it’s a grand thing to belong to a group which gives us an opportunity to look at where we fit in the bigger picture. For instance if our leeks were a total flop besieged with leek moth and rust, but everyone else’s were too, we don’t feel quite so cheesed off, as we probably couldn’t have done much to prevent it anyway. Do come along to the meeting on Friday 13th Nov to give us the benefit of your input. See feedback form.

The main thing for good crops is obviously the soil, plus enough water, light and warmth. A quick trip to the Weald allotment site to see the fab BHOGG plot on Open Day, made lots of us very envious and a little dispirited at the contrast between our veg on chalky Brighton soil, and those on the clay weald which are burgeoning. But we are stuck with the type of soil that we have and we have to make the best of it; from my memories of the early days of the BHOGG plot, digging out weeds is infinitely easier in Brighton than Hove! Plus we can get off to a faster start in the spring as the lighter chalk soil is not only easier to dig but also warms up much sooner than the heavy wet clay. But we do need to water and feed more, as the clay is both more water and nutrient retentive.

Forgive me for repeating the obvious: whatever type of soil you have, it will benefit from the addition of bulky organic matter, and with the problems caused by herbicide residues in non-organic farmyard manure, the best options are home-made compost, (in a worm-bin if you are a very small scale gardener) and green manures. And now is the best time to do both. You’ll be clearing your crops now; chop up the haulms (the old stems and leaves) with a sharp spade, (leave the roots of peas and beans in the ground as they have nitrogen containing nodules on them,) and try to fill a bin all in one go if you can, mixing a variety of different things including scrunched up newspaper and raw kitchen scraps. Keep a dustbin of water to put weeds that are flowering or seeding into, plus nasty perennial weed roots. Then sow the newly cleared ground with green manures such as: field beans*, phacelia, fenugreek*, limnanthes, mustard, trefoil* and winter tares* (* denotes nitrogen fixing). Mustard and fenugreek will be killed by the frost but the rest will survive a mild winter. Even the dead foliage will protect the soil from erosion and capping, caused by heavy rain; and the micro-organisms and worms will have their winter feast; and when we come to turn it all under in February and March the soil will be lovely and friable (breaking easily into a nice granular crumb structure), not all cloddy and horrid unless we walked on it when it was wet.

If you can get hold of “clean” horse manure, now is a good time to get it, stack it with straw, dampen it all down and cover with plastic sheeting to be rotted down in time for spring use. Likewise, if your bins are full of compost, turn it out and cover it, don’t spread it until spring or the nutrients will be largely lost over winter; or you could spread it on the soil and cover it with cardboard and plastic sheeting, well weighted against the winter storms. If your ornamental beds need mulching use well composted chipped bark. Worm compost is excellent for top-dressing permanent planting in containers, e.g. evergreens or fruit bushes, but again wait until spring. It can also be used then to beef up the new growing medium e.g. organic multi-purpose compost, used to fill the containers. Do bring the worm bin indoors for the winter; worms will die in the cold.
So enough about the soil. You can plant out Japanese onion sets and garlic mid-month, also spring cabbage, do protect it from late butterflies and pigeons with fine netting over a frame. Give leeks and winter brassicas a feed. Plant spring bulbs; take hardwood cuttings in October. Trim hedges now so that you aren’t tempted to do it in spring when the birds need all the privacy they can get. If you have a nice lawn do the autumn care plan on it soon i.e. raise the height of the cut, scarify with a lawn rake, aerate with a fork or better still a hollow-tine aerator and top dress with sand and sieved compost plus a high potash/low nitrogen/medium phosphate feed, work it into the holes with a brush or the back of a rake; if chafer grubs or crane-fly larvae are causing brown patches then use the appropriate biological control.

Now is a good time to plan changes and begin preparation for them; perennials and shrubs can be moved; if you fancy planting a wild-life hedge, or getting new fruit trees and bushes, order them now and prepare the ground, on light soil they can be planted in early winter but on clay wait until late winter, as they don’t like their roots to be cold and waterlogged.

I think I’ve said enough for now, except that it would be lovely to see you at our October Harvest Supper on October 3rd. It really isn’t compulsory to bring food you’ve grown and cooked yourself; great if you can, but if you can’t a bottle of wine will do instead, there’s always heaps of grub, so come with or without food, there will be spare crop feedback forms there too for our data collation for the November meeting. Don’t be shy if you haven’t been before, we are a friendly bunch, especially after a couple of glasses of wine!