Humph's Happy Horti-cult: harvesting, preserving, mulching, leaf-gathering, bulb-dibbing, seed catalogue-surfing and hunkering down for winter

[Lexilicious]

Following on from the original March to August thread. For all - whether still gardening through the winter or planning to sweep the shed, hibernate, sharpen the tools and get started again in the spring.

Happy gardening again!

Oh! OH! I have TWO compost dalek-bins!!! What rapture!

I purloined them from my olds, while helping take some of 'my' stuff from their house today - is a big job, moving out of a detached house after 14 years, to live in a holiday cottage until your half-derelict farmhouse is finished being rebuilt!

But now I have to wait until next weekend to transfer the past 12 months' green waste from my wonky, homemade-out-of-a-pallet, lined-with-Amazon-boxes compost bin. Stupidly, I planted my onions/garlic/shallots right beside it, so will have to somehow dig out the half-done compost over the top of them. Will probably involve some sort of scaffold board resting on breeze blocks type of contraption.

Bought bulbs yesterday, too. Ten tulips for £2.50 at my local garden centre. Didn't get round to doing them in my last patio bulb pot - another quickie job for Saturday morning.

Parkers were doing free bulbs (50 daf/narcs, 25 tulips) if a small fortune was spent.

My delivery arrived and I have now planted 60 strawberries, 10 autumn raspberries and a couple more trees for my mini orchard.

Hello everyone. haven't been around for a while, this pesky work keeps getting in the way of gardening .

I have managed to move a lot of plants from the front garden into the back, ready for all the geraniums and alchemilla plants. I have definitely decided to use all the box to make a knot garden there eventually, so geraniums will be a good solution for the next few years until they are ready.

I am still cutting field marigolds from the wildflower meadow - so strange at the end of November.

Not much going on here either - did manage to get my tulip bulbs in yesterday though so that is finally all of them in. Minor celebration required; bulb planting has been a very extended job! There are, however, a fair few already coming up (can't remember what but I think some of the aliums) in the long bed - need to get a thick layer of some kind of mulch down around them to protect them and hope for the best I think.

Phew! Found you again. This thread fell off my active list.

I'm still too wheezy for any gardening but have great plans for next week. My box of -free-for-postage plants from GW magazine have arrived so I must pot them up.

Poor Maud - you have been so poorly . It has just gone on and on

You're very kind, Humphrey, but probably you just need to send me a kick up the bum, to stop me wallowing in self pity.

::coughs pathetically::

I have a toddler with tonsillitis and a total screaming squirming aversion to medicine of any sort. and possibly chicken pox on top.

I also have moved the contents of a compost bin and planted two 'Timperley Early' crowns there. There is a third which I planted in a recycling box too. Also put a clutch of primroses in the edge of the lawn at the base of the little fence that surrounds a pond.

More sympathy here for you Maud - DH ended up on anti-biotics with a chest infection too so definitely some nasties around at the moment.

We had the ride-on mower serviced this week - £400! It did need the steering sorted too mind as we could only go round the garden in one direction; but still - £400!!! Pointed out to DH that we probably could have paid someone to cut our lawn for us for that money!

Need to get out this weekend and pick up leaves again and weed the drive which has gone mad with various unwanted greenery and moss.

Oooh. The Bloke hankers after a ride-on lawnmower (which, of course, in a garden the size of ours would be laughable as it wouldn't even be able to turn round).

I had planned to do some gardening on Tuesday but now have an opportunity to go out. Dilemmas, dilemmas.

I have just made my most bizarre discovery yet of something dragged into the garden by the foxes - a woman's suede boot that is still so new that it has the price label on the sole. Who leaves their new boots outdoors for the foxes to steal?

::scratches head::

boot stealing foxes? bizarre indeed.

Still haven't planted about half the bulbs. Oh dear.

Ah, that mystery has been solved. The other boot is in a sack of rubbish that my naff less than houseproud neighbours have in their front garden.

How many bulbs left to plant?

about 400.

Are the boots your size? Are they nice?

Yikes

No

They're foul not to my liking, but I still don't understand why they should be in the rubbish rather than at the charity shop!

Humphrey - maybe not planting all your bulbs yet is a good thing. Even some of our naturalised ones are popping up now. I'm going to be watching everything with interest to see what happens when winter finally hits.

I'm liking the idea of the boot-stealing foxes

I'm toying with the idea of having a look on that website that was selling bulbs for £1 a pack ....

::insatiable::

The bulb idea is toying with me too (I'd like to claim it was the other way round but it's just not!)

Have really no space though. Unless I get my act together and dig up the front garden patch of grass and weeds, or use the hanging baskets which have forlorn remains of tumbling tomatoes in them.

Anybody doing any garden visiting at this time of year?

We planted all the white tulips in the new front borders - all 300. It was relatively easy as it had all been freshly dug over by someone else . Only the fritillaries and the sylvestris to go now.

Very chuffed with self - I dug up the front garden yesterday - well, about 1/3 of it. I had J.Artichokes growing there and now have a carrier bag-ful in the kitchen gently calling out "soooup, soooouuup!!" to me. I also got a load of off-cuts from decking and stuck them in upright to make a little herringbone border on the edge of the concrete path. Haven't got enough to do the other path so need a different solution there - possibly bricks similarly up on end at a 45 degree angle - a bit cottage gardeny.

By the time I complete the dig-over job and whack it with glypho to blast the perennial weeds it will be too late to plant anything I guess, although I could go and hoover up any bulbs left in the DIY superstores and just scatter them wildly, to be filled in with less haphazard arrangements of flowers in the spring (I was thinking a sort of height-ordered spiral of marigolds, calendula, stocks, lupin, sweet peas, kniphofia, echinacea).

What sq m area did you put 300 bulbs into, Humphrey? Or, how many per sq m, and is that on their own or in between other things like ground cover or low growing perennials?

You have been busy Lexi. A big garden at this time of years feels so virtuous.

DH thinks 250 bulbs (I exaggerated natch but I didn't mean to ) over about 12 - 15 square metres. ree sides of a square lawn, not quite a metre wide and four/five metres long. They are spaced quite far apart. Am planning to put all my aqueligia seedlings in, as well as lots of geraniums and alchemilla. Next year I will try to put a contrasting colour tulip in.

ooh ok so my front garden which is 4m wide by about 3m wall to house would be 12 sq m., 250 bulbs in that area is about 20 per sq.

Think I'll properly design this patch on paper over the winter... will try to raise things from seed cheaply and buy plants only if I can divide and conquer them.

now of course I'm ogling rather than working... but look at this gorgeous anemone!

Oh wow, I love flowers that are black or bordering on black.

I did go back to that bulb site but didn't buy anything only because what I wanted was out of stock.

crab apple walk planted. Hooray! I am so pleased. Can't wait for them to grow now - it should start to look pretty in a few years.