Autumn is rapidly approaching, so it’s time to get your garden in order! Most fruit and vegetable produce is now ready for harvesting, and you’ll want to prep your garden for the colder months ahead too.
Using Millboard’s simple checklist, you’ll be able to get yourself sorted so that you can relax and enjoy your garden through the months ahead.
Flowers
Separate and replant any congested clumps of perennials, and keep your potted plants flowering by deadheading and feeding them regularly.
You could also fill any emerging gaps in your planting with late-flowering perennials to add colour to the later months of the year, and to continue feeding pollinating insects into autumn.
Thinking ahead to next year, it’s a good idea to sow your borders and bedding with spring flowering wallflowers, pansies, forget-me-nots and daffodils. You could even get your hardy summer annuals in at this stage, ready for next summer’s display.
Fruit and vegetables
Many of your plants will be ripe at this time of year, including raspberries, blackberries, onions, apples, beans, tomatoes and courgettes. If you are not sure if your edibles are ripe, check out this guide from Gardeners World.
You’ll also want to dig up what’s left of your potato crop this month. If you leave it any later, the slugs are likely to make short work of your efforts!
You might also want to check over your gourds for pests, and cover those and your leafy veg with bird-proof netting to protect them until later in the year.
General maintenance
With the temperatures rapidly dropping, now is the time to bring any houseplants that you moved outside over the summer back indoors.
This is also a great time for a bit of garden maintenance, so clean out your cold frames, greenhouses and polytunnels to create nice clear workspaces for your Autumn activities.
If you’ve got timber installations around your garden, you’ll need to clean, sand and treat them, to protect them from the oncoming winter. But if you’ve got Millboard decking and cladding, simply give your surfaces a wipe over with a damp cloth.
And that’s it!
Enjoy your late-summer gardening, and don’t forget to leave some nice snacks out for the birds and other furred and feathered garden visitors. As the nights get colder, they’ll appreciate the extra calories.
Until next time.
