With nights mostly over 7C (the temperature under which plants generally stop growing) until the middle of the month.
As we mentioned in last month’s warm October post, many dahlias, repeating roses, and late flowering perennials are still doing something, and the stalwarts will squeeze out their last, valiant, undersized flowers in this warm start to November.
The cold hits in the middle of the month, so you have 2 weeks from today to get your Winter mode on.
November is the start of the bareroot planting season.
If you are planting soon, take this dry, warm start to the month as your golden opportunity to prepare your soil!
When the weather gets colder and rain makes the soil heavier, it will be a harder job all round. Early preparation is even more worthwhile on heavy clay.
Experienced clay soil gardeners know that clay is a sensitive creature, and it’s best to minimise walking on and working her when wet. When you need holes and trenches for planting trees and hedges this Winter, it’s best to do the digging this month when the soil is still crumbly, rather than wet and sticky later.
Leaves will be everywhere now, so many of you will be in practice joining the debate between cool, intelligent, successful, clean living Canadian Robert Pavlis, and country bumpkins with boring, ordinary old rocks in their gardens: represented by us here, yours truly.
Mr Pavlis reasonably argues that we should not mow-mulch our Autumn leaves to make them easier to dispose of around the garden, to which we shout in reply, “sorry, can’t hear you over the sound of this mowing, let me finishing mulching all these Autumn leaves: grab yourself a drink out the ice bucket”.
For what it’s worth, we also make five whole bags of leaf mould per year, stacked three years deep behind the shed, but we do receive just a teeny bit more than that every year falling on our garden.
