As we come to the end of the gardening year, there are some tasks to carry out to make things easier in the Spring.

It’s that time when the deciduous trees and shrubs start to shed their leaves and clearing them from your lawn and beds will help in a number of ways. Leaving leaves on your lawn will prevent the sun getting to the grass, and once they get wet and start to collect, they will form a nasty slimy mess that will stifle the lawn and create large muddy bald patches.  If you can, get into a regime of clearing as many as you can every couple of days.

By this time of year most of your bulbs, daffodils, hyacinth and crocus should have been planted, but keep the tulips for later. If planted too early, there is a danger of ‘tulip fire’, this is a fungal disease which produces unsightly brown spots and nasty looking twisted leaves. To avoid this happening, plant late in the year, even as late as Christmas .  You want the frost to get to the ground before you plant your tulip bulbs, to kill any spores that are already in your soil. Another tip is to plant deep, much deeper than you would daffodils, 10 inches down if you can.

Hopefully, you will be rewarded with swathes of colour in March, April and May.

We find snowdrops ‘in the green’ are a much better bet than bulbs. ‘In the green’ means you get new snowdrops that are already growing and are in a sturdy clump. They are available in the new year, and will flower for you in the first year, and then naturalise and give you swathes of white for years to come. We will have the common single ‘Galanthus Nivalis’ and the double ‘Flore Pleno’, but the season for snowdrops in the green is relatively short, so keep an eye out for our sign at the gate !

One of the first tasks of the new vegetable gardening season will be choosing your seed potatoes and onion sets for next year. Seed Potatoes will be available just after Christmas, so do a little research to see which varieties may work best for you. We will have around 20 varieties – something for everyone.

Well, that’s 2018 for you. It was a challenging one. First we had the Beast of The East, then the hottest summer that many of us can remember.

It’s also been a sad year for us here, as we lost our Jack Russell,  Edith. She was very popular with many of our customers, a very special little dog .

See you soon,

Simon, Alison and all at Askett Nurseries .