16 Tips to PREPARE Your Garden for Winter

Hello and a very warm welcome back to the Garden. I realize I've been making some videos too long, so today is about preparing for

winter

, but let's try to make it fun. I have 16

tips

, but I'm going to limit it to 30 seconds on a timer on my phone for each tip, so let's see how it goes. I was about to do 30 minutes. I probably wouldn't have even noticed. The first tip is to plant garlic. I like to make sure all of my garlic is planted before Christmas rather than after. I have always felt personally in this climate that garlic planted in January, February and March never seems to do as well as garlic planted before Christmas, we added garlic here earlier this year, now is where kale is and I love it .

There are many ways you can enjoy it. There is wet green garlic, green garlic and standard garlic, but that's it, try to find it better. Oh, I hate this because it's my ringtone and no. like people call me Space Bell, if there's a lot of cold weather coming up or you have particularly cold

winter

s, you can transplant mature plants from

your

outside

garden

into a polytunnel because it will be a much more favorable growing environment. I did it last time. Last year I made a video on how to move things like kale and chard, etc. I'm going to move this lettuce.

It worked so well that you basically have a jungle in

your

polytunnel all winter long. Many of these different

tips

have individual videos, so If you want to learn more, check out the video description to see if there are any beds that have started to stop, just stop cleaning and emptying them here. I'm going to put everything in the compost bin here and leave all the roots. Composting the soil is very important, but we will talk about that very soon. The other thing is also if you can try to do a small Weeding Blitz to a final Weeding Blitz before and just gather as much material and clean up. as much space as possible next, this is probably one of the most important tips in the entire video: just collect as many leaves as possible.

It's kind of a shock to me all the time how quickly leaves can disappear, but they are. It's a great carbon resource for us to compost or make leaf mold, so go out and get as many leaves as you can, that should be your main focus. It's also a really good time, a good opportunity to do a final cut of your lawn if you have one because all this grass is great green material. Now, something really smart you can do is dump all the leaves you collect onto your lawn and go over it with a lawnmower.

You'll get a nice Divide 50 50 sort of greens and browns and you'll effectively be creating an instant compost mix. Composting is very important as we all know, so mix up those leaves and grass and make compost if you have beds that are really lacking or no facilities at all. It was done very well, it is a good time to direct the green beans because it has been very hot, they are a little advanced, but sewing them now allows them to develop and protect the soil during the winter and fix nitrogen and then in the spring, before to flower, you cut them at the base and it's just a great mulch, a great green manure cover crop to protect and improve the health of your beds, ready for next year.

The next step is to do a tool and a seed audit, so you want to estimate how many seeds you have left at the end of the year, maybe there are some packets that are only half sewn. This will really help you when it comes to placing your seed order in a timely manner, also in terms of the tools you want. To ensure that all of your tools continue to work, you should also ensure that all sharp cutting tools have a good sharpening. This means that when spring comes next year, you will be ready and won't miss anything crucial.

To make it more difficult, if you are near the sea, you may want to consider mulching your beds with seaweed in late fall and winter. Seaweed is so full of minerals now that if you're a little worried about the salts, you can skip them. The rain washes away excess salt, but it really won't be a big problem. This is something I'm going to try a lot this year, I think because it's such a rich resource for me that it makes absolutely sense to put it in. algae on the bed and see what happens in the next growing season in terms of mulch use, now is the ideal time to cover your beds with about three centimeters or an inch of mulch on the surface.

This is our subscription route and it has turned out very well. In terms of creating a beautiful mulch compost, what I'm also going to do with some of the beds is probably, you know, a layer of cardboard until February just to keep it a little nice and warm and protected, but go. Find out a lot about ads: feed the soil during the winter and be ready for spring. If you have a poly trough or greenhouse, one of the best things you can do is plant it with as many things as possible to maintain good soil structure.

We all know that the plants also feed the soil by pumping root exudates for example, but the other thing is to also keep the beds watered, it is very easy to forget to water them a little and suddenly they dry out to dust and become a a Sahara desert. here, so keep your bed covered and planted also if you have a lot of green tomatoes, one of the best things you can do is make a green tomato chutney. If you're looking for a recipe, there's one in the video description on our blog. farmer and chef on the topic of cover growing, it is a very good idea to wash the cover both inside and out at least once a season, if you can only do it once, ideally it is in February, so that you can let in the most However, in the new season, if you are growing things that you should be growing during the winter, washing them down a little now in November is a really easy way to add a lot more light to help maximize plant growth in the other side so you can get more fresh food during the winter, yes, if you grow soft roots that need pruning during the fall and winter, for example, these are black cones and also currants, one of the things you may want to do is Dedicate a flower bed in your

garden

or part of a flower bed.

Being a propagation space these are very easy to propagate from hardwood cuttings which means you then get plants which you can trade for other plants at plant swaps or you can also sell them just to raise a bit of money to maybe cover the seed bill, for example. If you grow a lot of containers or grow in pots, you may want to know what you do with the spent compost afterwards. There are two options: you can give it a quick weed and then use it to cover one of your beds, for example. or you can just stick it in your compost bin, mix it up a bit and then it will go back into the cycle, regenerate a bit with Biology Etc and then you can use it again next. year or the following year, in addition to the seeds and tools audit, you also want to do an infrastructure audit, take a look at all your beds, your pots, your irrigation, your infrastructure, your boundaries, for example, the fence, the doors, see how they are maintained because some holes may have appeared, some things may need to be replaced again.

Winter is the perfect time. You have time to replace and start fixing things. When spring comes, you won't want to worry about having to go back. Get your water infrastructure in order and look at all the infrastructure you might be thinking about expanding your garden. It's also the perfect time to do it if you're looking to create new flower beds, for example, or new growing areas, or plant some. apple trees, do it now if you are looking for something really clever for your garden, these vehicle garden beds that are available in my Hughes garden.com store will fit the bill so I have no idea how that went.

I know if you liked this type of format in the comments, maybe it's something we use a little more, but with a lot of those tips there are dedicated videos, as I mentioned before in the video description, now you have time to watch them. all of that and speaking of time, it is so vital that during the season we are efficient in the way we approach gardening and the video I created last week that is linked here called The Art of Nutrient Harvesting is about my approach to the five stages of delving into how to make it as efficient and effective as possible and re-examining what plants really are and their relationship to nutrients.