16 Tips to PREPARE Your Garden for Winter

Hello and a very warm welcome back to the garden. I realize I've been doing some videos a little bit too long. So today is about winter prep, but we're gonna try and keep it fun. I've got 16 tips, but I'm gonna limit 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 even have realized. First tip is to get your garlic planted. I like to make sure that all of my garlic is planted before Christmas rather than after. I've always felt personally in this climate that garlic kind of planted in January, February, March never seems to do as well as garlic planted before Christmas. We had garlic here earlier this year. Now it's where the kale is and I just absolutely love it. There's so many ways which you can enjoy it. There's wet garlic, green garlic, as well as your standard garlic, but that's it. Trying to find a better, oh, I hate this because it's my ringtone and I don't like people phoning me. Space bell. If you've got loads of cold weather coming or you have particularly cold winters, you can actually transplant mature plants from your outside garden into a polytunnel because it's gonna be a far more favorable growing environment. I did it last year, did a video all about it, moving things like kale and chard, et cetera. I'm gonna be moving this lettuce. It worked so well. You basically have a jungle in your polytunnel all through winter. Off timer, a lot of these different tips have individual videos, so if you wanna find out more, check the video description. For any beds that have started to grind to a halt, just start clearing them and making them empty. Here I'm just gonna put everything on the compost bin here and leave all of the roots in the ground. Making compost is so important, but we'll come onto that very soon. The other thing as well is if you can, try and do a bit of a weeding blitz, do a final weeding blitz before and just gather as much material and clear up as much space as possible. Next up, this is probably one of the most important tips of the whole video, is to just collect as many leaves as you possibly can. It's kind of a shock to me all the time how quickly leaves can disappear, but they're a great carbon resource for us to compost or to make leaf mold from. So get out there and just get as many leaves as you can. That should be your main focus. It's also really a good time, good opportunity to do a final cut of your lawn, if you have one, because all of this grass is a great green material. Now, a real clever thing that you can do is pour all of the leaves that you collect over your lawn and run it over with a lawnmower. You're gonna get a nice kind of 50-50 split of greens and browns, and effectively, you're creating an instant compost mix. Compost is so important, as we all know, so mix those leaves and grass to make compost. If you've got any beds that are really lacking fertility or haven't performed that well, there's a great time to direct sow field beans. These field beans, because it's been so warm, these are a little bit too advanced, but sowing them now allows them to develop and kind of protect the soil over winter and to fix nitrogen, and then in spring, before they flower, you cut them at the base. And it's just a great green manure cover crop to protect and improve the health of your beds ready for next year. Next up is to conduct a tool and a seed audit. So you wanna work out how many seeds you've got left at the end of the year. Maybe there's some packets that are only half sown. This is gonna really help you when it comes to doing your seed order nice and early. Also, in terms of tools, you wanna make sure that all of your tools are still working. You also wanna make sure any sharp cutting tools to give them a nice sharpen. This means when it hits spring next year, you're good to go. You're not missing anything crucial that's gonna hinder your process. If you're close to the sea, you may wanna consider mulching your beds with seaweed over late autumn and winter. Seaweed is so full of minerals. Now, if you're a bit worried about salt, you can leave it out, let the rain take off any excess salt, but really it's not gonna be much of an issue. This is something I'm gonna be very much testing over this year. I think because it's such an abundant resource for me, that it absolutely makes sense to put seaweed over the beds and just see what happens next growing season. On the subject of mulching, now is the ideal time to mulch your beds with around three centimeters or an inch of compost over the surface. This is our compost pathway, and it's just turned out so well in terms of creating a beautiful mulching compost. What I'm also gonna be doing with some of the beds is probably putting over a layer of cardboard just up until February, just to keep it kind of a little bit nice and warm and protected. But go out, mulch your beds, feed the soil over winter, ready for spring. If you have a polytunnel or a greenhouse, one of the best things that you can do is plant it up with as many things as possible to keep a nice soil structure. We all know that the plants also feed the soil by pumping out root exudates, for example. But the other thing is to also keep your beds watered. It is so easy to forget a bit, to water them, and then suddenly they dry to a dust and it becomes a Sahara desert in here. So keep your beds watered, they're undercover and planted. Also, if you have loads 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 down in the video description on our blog, Farmer and Chef. On the theme of undercover growing, it's a really good idea to wash the cover, both the inside and outside, at least once a season. If you can only do it once, ideally it's in February, just so you can let as much light levels in for the new season. However, if you're growing things, which you should be, over winter, giving it a little wash now in November is a really simple way to add a lot more light to help maximize the growth of the plants on the other side, so you can get more fresh food over winter. If you grow soft roots that need pruning over autumn and winter, for example, these are blackcurrants and also gooseberries, one of the things that you might wanna do is dedicate a bed in your garden or part of a bed to be a propagation space. These are so easy to propagate from hardwood cuttings, which means you then get plants that you can swap for other plants at plant swaps, or you could also sell just to raise a bit of money to perhaps cover the seed bill, for example. If you do a load of container growing or growing in pots, you might wanna know what do you do with the spent compost afterwards. There's two options. You can either, well, give this a quick weed and then use it to mulch one of your beds, for example, or you can just stick it onto your compost bin, mix it up a bit, and then it'll just enter the cycle again. It'll kind of get a bit regenerated, a bit with biology, et cetera, and then you will be able to use it again next year or the year after. As well as the seed and tool audit, you also wanna do a infrastructure audit. Have a look at all of your beds, your pots, your water and your infrastructure, your boundaries, for example, the fence, the gates. See how they're holding up because there might be some holes that have appeared. Some things might need replacing. Again, winter's the perfect time. You've got the time to replace and start fixing things. When you hit springtime, you don't wanna be worried about, say, having to re-sort out your water infrastructure. As well as looking at all of the infrastructure, you might be thinking about expanding your garden, and it's also the perfect time to do that. If you're looking to create new beds, for example, or new growing areas, or to plant some apple trees, do it now. If you're looking for something really smart, by the way, for your garden, these Vego Garden Beds, which are available from my shop, hughesgarden.com, will absolutely fit the bill. So I've no idea how that went. Let me know in the comments if you liked this kind of format. Maybe it's something we'd use a little bit more. But with a lot of those tips, there are dedicated videos, as I mentioned before, in the video description. You've got the time now to watch all of those. And talking about time, it's so vital that during the season we are efficient with how we approach gardening. And the video that I created last week, which is linked here, called The Art of Nutrient Harvesting, is all about my approach to the five stages of growing on how to make it as efficient and effective as possible, and re-looking at what actually are plants and their relation to nutrients.