Get a good-looking garden in winter
As the weather turns colder, use the drier days of early autumn to tidy up your garden so it looks great, even in bad weather.
We are not blessed with the climate of southern France, where you can probably sit outside in your sandals with a glass of wine and a good book for most months of the year. Oh no, we in the UK are already beginning to shut up shop before the first conkers fall from the trees!
However, just because we’re not sitting outside, doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a decent view from the cosy indoors. Here are a few tips to get your garden ready for the colder months.
Do an ‘autumn’ clean
• Pick one of the nicer days in early autumn to get outside and have a good tidy up. Stray footballs, discarded skipping ropes and plastic flower pots should be put away in the shed, and leaves swept from patios. In winter some of your garden wildlife will appreciate a few nooks and crannies in which to shelter, so you don’t need to completely empty the garden of the logs and stones, but toys left out will batter around come the windy weather, and rain will damage summer gardenware, leaving it unfit for purpose next year. And items left on the grass will leave your lawn patchy come spring.
• Keep the compost heap, if you have one, in a neat and tidy area, allowing it to get on with its natural course of things over the coming months, without any more attention from you.
• Tie up stray branches and stems. Those taller plants around your borders that have sprung up in the warm, wet months of the year will begin to bend and break as the weather gets more squally, so make sure new growth is properly tethered.
• Some plants will benefit from a good layer of mulch covering through the winter – for example, tender, more delicate plants, which might survive outside in colder months so long as you don’t get a prolonged, harsh spell of weather. However, if you have soft fruit bushes, clear away the mulch from around their base so that seasonal pests can’t harbour there.
• If you collected leaves up last autumn, the leaf mould will come in handy now to scatter around the beds where you want to plant in the spring. Set aside this year’s leaves to do the same next year.
• Add a splash of colour in colder months by putting out a couple of potted plants – tough but pretty plants like primula or heathers look good. Place them somewhere you’ll be able to enjoy them from the windows, but where they are not too exposed – a windowsill, or along the sides of a shed perhaps.
You don’t have to completely abandon your garden for five months, but getting it in order now will keep it looking great on sunny autumn afternoons and grey winter mornings.