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Gardening
In Your Garden Monthly gardening ideas and tasks by Andrew Staib, Principal Designer of Glorious Gardens Gardening in Winter There’s lots to do in our gardens in Winter but we can go out with our welly boots in a leisurely way, knowing there’s not much that is urgent. You can really clean your greenhouse now, washing down the insides of the glass and opening up all of the doors and windows for the frosts to kill any insects. Old grow bags can be composted and tools sharpened. Vegetables Everlasting Spinach and Kale can still be harvested, as well as potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes dug up from the ground, or pots emptied, to reveal these golden delights. If you find any green tomatoes these can be made into green tomato chutney and figs into a green fig jam. Tender plants Exotic plants like Australian Tree Ferns and Bananas can be wrapped in cloche once you have removed the leaves to stop the frosty air penetrating the cells of these tropical plants. Also pots that might not be as frost hardy as they seem can be wrapped in bubble wrap and stowed away in sheds or in a sheltered part of the garden. If they have tender plants in them, they can be stored in a greenhouse but they will need some watering over the Winter months. Leaves You can keep tidying leaves and can create mounds of them in different corners of the garden to give hibernating hedgehogs and insects a place to sleep and be protected from birds. Leaves can be composted and it’s best that they have their own separate container as they break down in a different way from other garden and compost waste. By the Spring, depending on the softness of the leaf, they might even be ready for next Summer to put onto the beds. (Oak leaves take forever). Make sure that there are some containers lying about where fresh water can collect for wildlife. Also resist the urge to prune ivy until later in the Spring, as over the Winter it is a valuable food source for all sorts of creatures.
