Garden Feature with Andrea Sinclair

AUTUMN GARDENING TIPS

The Autumn nights may be drawing in but there's a lot you can do now to make your garden even beSer next year! Thinking about your soil, feed it with appropriate feed / mulch where necessary and take Eme to stand back and look at your borders. What worked and didn’t work – it’s easier to look at this now before everything dies down. You can mark your border with stakes to remind you what has to be moved, if perennials have become too big why not divide and pot up for placing somewhere else in the garden or give away to friends?

Once most of the crops from the greenhouse have been harvested give it a good clean out. A good job to do on a chilly day! Another job to do is wash out your plant pots, scrub garden tools and I use an oily rag to rub over all the metal work. Great saEsfacEon to see everything clean and Edy and ready to be put to use again.

If you have tender plants keep an eye on the weather forecast and protect them from the frost. Most of my tender plants (Cannas, Banana, etc. which I grow in huge pots) simply get liled into a frost free area, not heated and I barely water them throughout the Winter. In the Spring, as soon as the chance of frost has passed, I feed and water them and pop them back out in their pots in the border.

Indoor bulbs

One of the joys at Christmas has to be the ‘indoor bulbs’. One of my favourite bulbs for this Eme of year is Narcissus 'Paper White' these are planted in their indoor pots in September. Their natural flowering period is January or February, but good quality bulbs will flower in 6 to 10 weeks from planEng. Appreciate the heady indoor fragrance of hyacinths, the exact Emings for hyacinths will vary according to the culEvar. Just follow instrucEons on the label when you purchase the bulbs, some are specially treated for growing indoors and look wonderful in a ‘hyacinth’ water vase. A Christmas favourite is the dramaEc blooms of Hippeastrum (amaryllis) you can buy these already started off (sprouEng) in lots of outlets.

Looking ahead to Spring bulbs

The range of Spring bulbs is huge, from dainty snowdrops to big and bright tulips. Pot up large pots with a range of bulbs, in the ‘lasagne style’, combine early, mid and late spring bloomers to give you flowers from February to May. Choose a well-drained container as this is important whenever you grow bulbs in pots, but it’s especially important when creaEng lasagne planEng. Bulbs can be packed in, but not touching, and I normally put the largest bulbs at the boSom and work up to the smallest, they all make it to the top! You can be really creaEve with bulb type and colours, subtle or bright, something to really look forward to in Spring 2021. Andrea Sinclair