Prepare your garden for winter

Thursday, 28 October 2010 12:00 AM

Even if you're not the green-fingered type, there are easy steps you can take now to ensure your garden is in the best shape it can be by the time spring rolls around. Lucy Hart, a team leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, shares her secrets.

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• Get digging and planting: Now is the perfect time to swap over your seasonal bedding. Take out your summer plants and replace them with your pansies or whatever it is that you want to have in the spring - if you establish them now, hopefully they'll start flowering. Consider digging up tender perennials, for example dahlias or ricinus, and bringing them inside to protect them from the frost. Plant lots of bulbs before the ground freezes: in spring time they're a real sign that everything's coming back to life.
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• Leave the leaves? If you have leaves on the lawn, clear them because the rotting process can damage the grass. If, on the other hand, you have a flower bed or soil surrounding your tree, let the leaves rot if possible, because it's good for the tree's life cycle. It can look a bit untidy but it's a good habit to get into.
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• Make some mulch: If you collect leaves from the grass, put them in a cage or basket and let them rot down. The mulch - the compost that the leaf mould creates - is a wonderful organic material that's fantastic for improving soil. Small, non-waxy leaves like those from an English oak work best.
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• Protect your trees: Wrap tree ferns up with fleecy material. Do this for the trunk as well as the top of the tree, as the trunk is particularly susceptible to cold weather. Here at Kew we are actually building wigwams around our palms and cycads - given last year's vicious frosts, you can't be too careful.
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• Leave herbaceous perennials alone: A few years ago, everyone used to cut back their herbaceous perennials and 'put the garden to bed', but modern designers like Piet Oudolf are introducing the idea of leaving herbaceous plants with ornamental seed heads alone. Although they go brown as they die, they will look very pretty when a frost sets in. This also helps to protect the soil from the elements, lessens soil compaction and provides a food source for birds.
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• Prune your roses: We have been pruning roses since September but you can still do it now. Train climbers against a wall and take long laterals back to one or two buds. Don't do this when it gets really cold though as it can damage the plant.
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• Aerate the lawn: Although the best time for maintaining your grass is September, there's just about enough time to prepare it for winter now. Rake out all the thatch as this will really aerate and de-compact the soil; go over it with a fork so that you're creating air holes; then propagate it using a sand and topsoil mix, over-sewing with more grass seed to increase its lushness for next year.
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• Mist your houseplants: If you have houseplants, make sure you don't overwater them - with the decreasing light levels, they won't be growing as much. Also be careful where you position them; if they're on windowsills then radiators could dry them out. Either reposition the plants or mist the leaves to create humidity and prevent the dry air from making them go brown.
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• Relax: Once the really cold weather sets in, take a step back - when the ground's frozen you can't do anything anyway. Take advantage of the time indoors to look over seed catalogues and plan what your garden will look like next year!
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To find out what's going on this winter at Kew's Royal Botanic Gardens, check out the website.

Interview by Ele Cooper

Tags:
• gardening features
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• how to
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• winter gardening