Preparing for Winter

The end of October saw sunshine and lots of butterflies feeding in the garden, and then November arrived with a deluge of much needed rainfall, although spread out over a few weeks would have been nice. You can never please gardeners when it comes to the weather! 

I am slowly working my way through the vegetable beds preparing them for winter and for next year's growing season.

As long as the soil is not left bare over the winter I'm happy to use either plants like the phacelia I wrote about before and now just coming into flower, or an organic mulch. 

Stuff I've used includes homemade compost, horse manure begged from friends or once an amazing find at the garden centre, where they had an entire pallet-load of bags of mixed horse manure and composted seaweed reduced from an eye-watering eight or nine Euros a bag to just a Euro each. The writing had largely eroded from the bags which were themselves falling apart. It made a bit of a mess in the boot of the car, but I had the lot and it was gorgeous! 

Last year I year also experimented with a deep layer of mixed and chopped grass clippings and leaves, the result of the last cut of the coming after many of the leaves had fallen. The soil beneath was light and friable when I came to plant, but a little on the cold side. So a qualified success - the layer was definitely too thick. This year we've (probably) done the last cut at home, but with a couple of client's gardens still due to get one more cut, weather willing, we may yet get to repeat the experiment.

In Bed 1 I've started clearing the lettuce, shiso and basil plants that have bolted or flowered, before topping the soil with a layer of garden compost. As I will be installing the little poly tunnel here over winter it will benefit from an additional boost of nutrients. This bed is one of the original plots we made and the soil is pretty deep and fertile after ten years of adding organic matter.

Beds 9 & 11 are a different story; the soil is poor and thin, the clay beneath solid and impenetrable and the whole of Bed 9 is overshadowed by a massive oak tree standing in the corner of my neighbour's garden. I principally grew courgettes and tomatillos here with a couple of spare pepper, chili and aubergine plants that I couldn't fit in elsewhere. Nothing thrived - the combination of a long hot and dry summer, poor soil and the tree pulling every available drop of water resulted in a poor harvest all round. The bed is scheduled to have beans and legumes next year so will need a good boost of moisture retaining material to keep them happy. I've started with the last load of grass clippings which do have a few leaves mixed in, and I'll add loads of homemade compost as I sow winter peas and broad beans in the next couple of weeks. Bed 11 produced the smallest haul of pumpkins in five or six years.

My crop rotation is always a bit of a balancing act, trying to avoid planting the same things in the same spot for more than one season, but also trying to avoid putting moisture and food loving crops in the beds that are rather lacking in both of those! I've been reading about someone who has abandoned any attempt at crop rotation and simply plants where she has a space. I can see the merit in this but as I can also see myself wandering around looking for lost produce when I want to pick for the kitchen, it may be too random for me. I missed an entire row of golden haricot beans this year because I'd popped them in amongst some tomatoes where there was a gap and then completely forgot about them. The beans were tough and inedible by the time I noticed!


So jobs for the week - 
Prepare the ground and sow winter peas (douce Provence) and broad beans (Aquadulce Claudia, Witkiem Manita & Dwarf Sutton). First sowing should have been done in mid October but I was away and missed it, so I'll double up on this one.
Continue to clear and mulch the veg beds as the vegetables are used up  - we are still picking tomatoes, chillies, peppers and aubergines, but these will not last much longer.
Sow winter lettuces and plant out the previous batch. Sow radish, turnip and beetroot in the tunnel.
Collect leaves and put aside to break down, leaving some on the ground for creatures that rely on leaf litter to pupate in, hide from predators in and feed on.
Prepare the ground for planting as autumn is the key season for planting many trees and shrubs; the ground is still warm and the rains will promote a period of root growth before the plants fall dormant over the winter.
Start planning for next year ...