Author Archives: Gaby Heagerty

IT’S GETTING COLDER

After a relatively mild start to Autumn it is easy to get caught out by the first frost of the season. When it is not practical to lift and move tender plants to shelter, wrapping them up is the best form of protection.

To wrap your plants there are several methods you can use:

Wrap plant pots with bubble wrap, this keeps the soil and most importantly the roots warm.
Cover your tender plants with horticultural fleece. You can buy fleece jackets to pop over plants (we sell them in the garden centre) or you can create wigwams with bamboo canes and then wrap fleece around it (we sell fleece by the running metre in our garden centre shop). Tree ferns can be protected by packing the trunk in fleece and protecting the crown with a packing of straw. Ensure the area around your tree ferns are well mulched to protect the roots from frost.
If you are not sure how tender your garden plants are then please call our plant team to ask or we recommend the RHS plant finder.

AUTUMN POND CARE

Now is a great time to ensure your pond stays in tip top condition whether it is an ornamental fish pond or wildlife pond.

If you have a fish pond, now is the time to clean any filters or pumps. It is also important to remove any rotting leaves from the water as they can give off noxious chemicals as they decay. Remove any leaves and unwanted debris that have fallen into your pond using a fine net.

It’s also a good time to review the plants around your pond and cut back any overhanging branches. Consider thinning or cutting plants back to allow your pond to get plenty of winter sunlight .

Don’t forget to start feeding your fish wheatgerm fish food pellets once the temperature gets below 10 degrees. If your fish stop feeding, resume once the temperature rises again.

Finally cut off and remove fading leaves and flowers from your accessible aquatic plants to prevent them from decomposing – this will also encourage regrowth next year.

We Are Dog Friendly

We are a dog friendly garden centre. We welcome dogs of all sizes and all breeds as long as they bring their well-behaved owner on a lead!

We recognise that for many of our customers, their faithful friend is a member of the family! Which is why customers are welcome to bring their dogs into the garden centre. So that everyone can enjoy their visit to us, we ask that you keep your dog on a lead and under control at all times, do not leave dogs unattended and please be respectful of others who may not feel the same way about dogs as you do.

Dogs are also welcome in our cafe. Good dogs may also be offered a treat when they go to our shop tills.

The only thing that we ask is that any accident must be picked up and disposed of correctly by owners.

Sow Green Manure This Autumn

If you have a vegetable plot or allotment it’s highly likely that now we are in mid autumn, some of your plot has become bare (fallow) as your summer crops have finished. Rather than leave the soil fallow until spring, we highly recommend sowing green manure seed.

Grown to benefit the soil, green manure can improve soil structure, increase soil fertility and help suppress weed growth. In addition they can disrupt pests and disease life cycles. The type of green manure you need to sow now is winter crop varieties. These winter crops prevent nutrients in your soil, especially nitrogen, from being leached away by winter rains. After a winter crop the soil has been broken down so it will be easier to use in the spring.

How to sow and grow green manure

Sow outdoors by thinly scattering the seed over finely raked soil, which has already been watered. Before the green manure flowers and sets seed, turn it into your soil by lifting it up, turning it over and then digging it into the soil. If a longer period of ground cover is required, then flowering of the green manure can be delayed by cutting plants back (by about a third) when flowers begin to form.

We recommend a Winter Rye or an Autumn/Winter Green Manure Mix which usually consist of Crimson Clover, Broad Leaf Clover, Westerwolds Rye Grass and White Tilney Mustard.

Image accreditation: Krzysztof Golik (2021), Trifolium incarnatum (Crimson Clover) on WikiCommons. Last accessed on 19th October 2022. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trifolium_incarnatum_in_Aveyron_(8).jpg