Gardening Articles

In the winter your garden need protection from severe frosts. Snow is beautiful and also helpful as long as is not too heavy. The coldframe plants will also be more protected if you decide to insulate your coldframe over the winter. The pond also need  protection during icy weather. So there is still plenty of work to do in the winter garden.

Snow and wet
A carpet of snow will give some sort of protection to the garden plants by insulating the ground from penetrating frosts. It will also bring a undeniable beauty to the garden. But heavy snow is no longer welcome as it can cause damage to certain plants. If it accumulates on top of hedges and conifers, it may weigh them down and push them out of shape. You can brush or shake the snow off or prevent it building up in the first place by trimming your hedge in late summer so that they do not have a flat top and by wrapping up conifers with fine-mesh netting or garden twine.

In the winter garden there are two main killers: extreme cold and wet. Late autumn is the right moment to start protecting your garden plants by putting up barriers, insulating roots, wrapping top-growth and keeping off the rain or snow.

Protection against cold
Borderline-hardy plants, such as many climbers and wall shrubs will need protection during the coldest weather. Not all of them need the same kind of protection against extreme cold: some will just need their vulnerable top-growth wrapped in an insulating blanket of straw held in place with fine-mesh netting, while others will need to have their roots protected too.

Many shrubs and evergreen climbers that are being grown in a colder climate than their place of origin can be treated like herbaceous plants, meaning that their top-growth is killed off by frost at the end of each growing season but their roots will remain alive underground and will produce new shoots in the following spring. The best way to protect their roots is to cover them with a 15 cm deep mulch of bark chippings, compost, collected leaves or even hedge trimmings. Keep this insulation layer in place by covering it with netting and pegging it down at the edges.

Growth, development, flowering, fading and seeding are all fascinating stages in a plant's life cycle. Choosing plants that die gracefully and produce long-lasting seedheads adds yet another dimension to the garden.

As well as encouraging drifts of pods and seedheads  to decorate the garden in autumn, try cutting some seadheads just before the seeds mature, for use in dried-flower arangements.

Saving seed from your own garden is an economical and excellent method of building up numbers of species to create drifts. When collecting from some annuals and biennials, like some types of poppy, be ready to rogue out undesirable plants before their pollen influences the rest of the plants. Collect pods and capsules into paper bags, date and label them with the name of the plant. Keep like that in a dry and dark place until there is time to clean the seed from it's husks and pods.

Store in paper envelopes in a cool, dry place until it's time to sow them.

Late spring is a good moment to start thinking of planting up a hanging basket. Hanging baskets are an effective way to display trailing or bedding plants and to bring a splash of color to the house walls, door ways and porches. They are easy to plant up, but being surrounded by air on all sides they tend to dry out quickly, so a little attention is needed regularly.

For a best display of your hanging basket you should use taller plants in the center for height and trailing plants around them to cover the basket.

Before starting the planting, prepare a light, free-draining compost mixture with perlite and peat-free compost and for best results add some slow-release fertilizer. Place the basket on a large pot so that is centered and level. Place the fiber liner inside the basket and adjust it to fit the basket. Press the liner down firmly against the bottom and sides of the basket.