Fall Into The Season: Tips For Your Garden This Autumn

As the days grow shorter and the air turns crisp and sharp, it’s time to start thinking about preparing your garden for the autumn and winter seasons. Autumn is a crucial time for gardeners, as it sets the scene for a thriving garden in the year to come. By dedicating and taking the time to properly care for your outdoor space, you can ensure that your plants and landscaping are well-equipped to withstand the harsher months that lie ahead.

Clearing Fallen Leaves

A common and often magical sight in autumn is a carpet of fallen leaves wherever you go. The bright colours of fallen leaves and the crunching underfoot are a staple of the season but can cause issues for your garden if left unattended. While they may be a breathtaking sight, they can cause damage to your lawn, often suffocating it and becoming a breeding ground for pests, which is why they need to be carefully managed during this season. To help clear them, use a rake or leaf blower to gather the leaves into piles. Once collected, these leaves can be turned into compost for later use or immediately used as mulch for your flower beds based on your requirements.

Mulching

Mulching is another important autumn gardening task, as it protects your plants and soil during the colder months. Mulching can insulate and protect plant roots from frost in the winter and excessive heat in the summer, providing extra increased nutritional content of soil and helping to maintain the quality of soil texture. Our Caledonian Horticulture range of mulches improves your soil and saves on watering and weeding over time, with the added benefit of giving your borders a fresh and neat appearance. Your soil will retain water come spring and summer, and mulching will protect the roots of your plants in winter.

Prepare Your Lawn

When autumn arrives, your lawn could be looking a little worse for wear after the summer sun, but this is the perfect time to get back to basics. The ground is still warm enough to stimulate some new growth ready for next year, so don’t put those garden tools away just yet. Thoroughly scarify your lawn to get rid of moss and dead grass that can stop the lawn from soaking up moisture and fertiliser. If you can spot it, there are lots of weeds. You can treat them using a lawn-specific weed killer that won’t damage the grass. Once you’ve scarified your lawn, it’s a good idea to aerate it. This helps vital nutrients get down into the roots of your grass; it’ll also improve drainage for those soon-to-come rainy days.

Save Your Soil

When you have fertile, well-cared-for soil, it needs little more preparation than digging a hole that the plant will sit in, whereas compacted soil needs digging over and breaking up with a fork to aerate it first. For trees and large woody plants, dig a square hole three times the width but the same depth as the pot, and if the soil is sticky clay, puncture the sides of the hole with a fork. Loosen the base of the hole, but do not add organic matter. It will rot down and cause the plant to sink; instead, keep the organic matter for a surface mulch once you’ve finished.

Create Wildlife Habitats

Fall gardens can provide critical food and shelter for wildlife, including birds, beneficial insects, and pollinators. Leave some seed heads and hollow stems in the garden to offer food and shelter for wildlife. Create brush piles or leave small logs for critters to hibernate under. Provide bird feeders with seeds to help migrating and overwintering birds, especially as natural food sources dwindle.

Uprooting Weeds

One of the first things you can do is to clear the weeds. These pesky and undesirable plants can become a bigger problem if you allow them to grow in the winter months. Go ahead and dig them up now and ensure you remove the weed from it’s roots. You’ll serve your plants well by removing invasive species like bindweeds. These can wreak havoc by colonising berry patches and ruining a garden. When you uproot them, separate the weeds from your garden because they can remain viable and spread their seeds. It’s best to either throw them away, or put elsewhere and let flower, to serve as a viable food source for bees and other wildlife before the winter frost hits. After uprooting, you should replace it with a native species to help the soil. If uprooting is too tricky, you can spray with a homemade pesticide or an approved pesticide to treat the weeds.

Take Out Dead Plants

After uprooting weeds, another tidy-up task you can do is to remove the dead plants. Some can stay because their rotting adds nutrients to the soil. However, other crops may show signs of disease or pests and fungi have overwhelmed them. If any plants begin to show illness, you should take them out. About 19,000 plant diseases derive form fungal organisms but can also come from bacteria. Some signs of a fungal infection may include leaf or stem rust and powdery mildew. If you have berries, watch out for a birds-eye spot. Plants affected by bacterial diseases typically have a crown gall, fruit spots and canckers.

Clean Up Garden Beds

If you are like many of our home gardening customers, you’ve slacked off a bit on gardening tasks as the season winds down—taking less time for weeding and watering and more time for harvesting, cooking, and preserving. But as soon as your garden’s output slows for the season, it is time to get back to tending to weeds, pulling up wooden stakes and string, and gathering other clutter that can accumulate over time in a garden plot. As your plants bolt and wither, pull them out and carry them to compost or gather them in to dry or collect seeds. If you experienced any blight or mildew problems with a plant during the growing season do not dispose of them in your compost—those stalks or vines should be burned or thrown out to avoid spreading blight the following spring. Gather and compost any fallen, rotting fruit or vegetables. Pull up the weeds that may have taken advantage of your harvest-season distraction and pull out any stakes, cages, or string that may have supported your peas, beans, tomatoes, and vines. Give those beds a good clean!

Take Notes From This Year & Plan For The Next

An important thing to do for next year is to start to plan ahead. Take a moment to write down the highs and lows of this year’s growing season. What seeds did well, and which seeds disappointed you? If you plan on rotating crops, where should next year’s plantings go? Did you wish you had planted more of one thing and less of another? Is there some new plants you’d like to have a go at growing? Something you’d like to add to your garden and spice it up? Are there any new tricks or techniques you would like to try? Is there a different compost you’d like to try? We happen to know a few! These notes can be invaluable when you begin purchasing seeds and other supplies for next year’s garden and ensure that you have an even better year than the one before!