Mzzz B's November Garden Blog

The hard frost this week has certainly heralded the onset of winter! What with the darker evenings and the cold, gardening may seem to be the last thing on your mind. However, there is much to do in the garden. It was interesting to see what managed to come through last years hard winter, oftenplants will manage a very hard winter as opposed to a very wet one.

• If you have tender perennials in the garden such as salvias, pelargoniums, fuschias etc, this is the time to think about how they might survive over winter. Most tender perennials need to be lifted and brought into a cool greenhouse which is frost free, but there are some things in the garden that may be too large to move. In which case wrapping with horticultural fleece, straw, or cloches should do the trick. But don't keep this on in mild times as it may stimulate rotting.

• Collect fallen leaves and make leaf mould which you can easily do in large compost bags with holes punched in them, if you don't have a leaf bin.

• You can take roots cutting now of phlox, anemones and other suitable herbaceous perennials.

• Ventilate the greenhouse on frost free days to keep grey mould at bay, and clear away dead or mouldy leaves.

• You can still plant trees and shrubs either container grown, or bare root.

• Having planted your daffodils last month, this is the time to plant tulips, it seems that this is to prevent the fungal disease called tulip fire which can strike if planted too early. I have just been on a study day, where the suggestion was that instead of buying bulbs from a catalogue and planting them in your garden, test out whether in fact they live up to their catalogue image by growing a few in pots this year and deciding from the results whether they would look good enough in your garden. I have certainly made the mistake of buying some very pretty pink tulips that when they flowered, were far too big and orangey pink rather than the pure pink I was hoping for. The pots can be planted up quite closely with bulbs almost touching, and aim to really fill a pot to have a good display. They will look lovely beside your door! It seems that some tulips have been bred to be very short-lived and they have lost the ability to reproduce via little bulbils, so when you take your bulbs out of their pots after flowering, check to see whether they have stayed the same size or decreased in size, or even split into four. In this case they will not be worth planting again as there is little likelihood of their flowering. You will then know whether they would be good for the garden and be a reasonably perennial bulb. Also buy from a good source, I once bought some yellow tulips from a wholesaler, only to discover on flowering, half of them were red, not good in my yellow and white border!

• Now is the time to plant forced bulbs such as paperwhite narcissus or hyacinths for Christmas, grow indoors in somewhere with good light.

• Don't overwater your houseplants, they need less water at this time of year.

• In the veg garden, time to start winter pruning apple and pear trees. Cover parsley with a cloche for winter picking. and try sowing coriander and dill in seed trays under cover for picking as baby leaves. Cover late beetroot and carrots with cardboard or straw to make them easier to harvest if the ground freezes. You can still plant garlic, I find that it does well if once the green shoots come through you provide it with some protection against severe weather such as a cloche.

And enjoy those frosty mornings with the clear blue skies and sunshine, it makes up for all those grey days!

Photo: pot planted up with winter violas and Bowles yellow grass under planted with daffodils for a bit of sunshine!