Winter Gardening

There are lots of methods to help your garden cope with the coldest temperatures, so here’s a timely checklist for preparing your garden for winter:

• Move potted tropical plants and other warmth lovers into more protected spots – perhaps onto a verandah or porch. If cold-sensitive plants are growing in the garden or are too heavy to move, cover them with a frost blanket and remove the next morning.

• Reduce watering of potted plants. They require much less water when the weather’s cooler. Take the chill off tap water by mixing in a small amount of hot water. It shouldn’t feel warm – just slightly tepid to the touch. This means it won’t shock the roots so much.

• Protect small seedlings on frosty nights by creating cloches out of plastic soft drink bottles that have been cut in half.

• Keep garden soil moist, as moist soil absorbs and stores heat better during the day. Dry soil can exacerbate frost damage.

• Don’t prune off any frost-damaged foliage until the risk of frost has passed, as it can encourage vulnerable shoots of new growth. Also, the damaged foliage can help protect healthy growth underneath.

• Prepare planting holes for new roses and fruit trees by digging compost, well-aged manure and Yates Dynamic Lifter Organic Plant Food into the soil.

• Cover sensitive plants with frost or shade cloth. You can construct a temporary cloth cloche with a frame to hold the cloth up, to make a protective tent over your plants. Make sure that the cloth reaches to the ground around all the edges. Bricks or pavers are a handy way to weigh down the edges of the cloth on the ground. Make sure the cloth isn't directly touching your plants, there needs to be space between them.

• If the soil has any drainage problems, winter is the season when they’ll expose themselves. Use a garden fork to push vertical holes into heavy soils. Create surface drains to carry away excess moisture. Apply gypsum to clay where possible. Gypsum has a miraculous effect on most clay soils; it binds particles together, allowing air to get into the spaces between the particles and helping excess water to drain away.

• Deep layers of mulch on the soil can keep it cold and damp right through winter. It can be a good idea to remove some of the thickness of mulch, so that the sun can penetrate to warm up the soil.

• Fortunately, in our climate, winter doesn’t have to be bereft of colour. You can choose plenty of suitable varieties for planting now. Polyanthus, for example, are some of the prettiest winter-flowering plants. They bloom in a wide range of colours – blues, pinks, yellows, cream and white – often with a contrasting central eye. They’ll grow in light shade or full sun and, if the following summer doesn’t get too hot, they’ll produce an encore performance next year.

• Feed plants with high-potash Yates Thrive Natural Fish & Seaweed+ Plant Food Concentrate to build up their strength before winter.