OCTOBER UK

General

Greenhouse

  • Remove shading wash from the greenhouse if applied in the spring.
     
  • Take cuttings of carnations, fuchsias, herbs and many shrubs and perennials to root in the greenhouse.
     
  • Propagate pelargoniums
     
  • Propagate Houseplants

Vegetables

  • Continue sowing vegetables for spring - cabbages (spring and red), cauliflowers, corn sald, endive, lettuce, (cos and butterhead), onions, radishes, spinach and turnips..
     
  • Plant out spring cabbages.
     
  • Earth up celery and leeks.
     
  • Sow green manures: winter tares, mustard, field beans and phacelia.
     
  • Sow parsley and chervil for use in late winter and early spring.
     
  • Divide and replant large clumps of perennial herbs.
     
  • Harvest vegetables as they ripen. (It's especially important to harvest courgettes and beans while they are young and tender)
     
  • Cut culinary herbs and dry or freeze to use later in the year.
     

Fruit

  • Harvest your crop of tomatoes.
     
  • Pick soft fruit and prune after picking.
     
  • Prune espalier and cordon-grown apple and pear trees.
     
  • Cut out fruited raspberry, blackberry and hybrid canes. Use their leaves to make leafmould unless they have leaf disease, in which case destroy them.
     
  • Look out for caterpillars on fruit. Pick off any with leaf miner larvae or mildew on and be on the alert for slugworm damage. Set pheremone traps.
     
  • Take nets off fruit trees and bushes after picking, so birds can peck off any pests.
     
  • Prune raspberry canes at ground level after picking the last fruit.
     
  • Harvest apples and pears and store. They can be prone to pests and diseases. Remove fallen leaves and dropped fruit to prevent disease.
     
  • Examine apple and pear trees for signs of canker and prune out.
     
     
  • Net grapes to prevent birds and wasps eating the fruit.
     
  • Pick apples and pears as they ripen and store the excess.
     
  • Apply or renew greasebands on the trunks of apple and pear trees.
     
  • Remove and destroy any mummified fruit, edpecially plums.

Flowers

  • Plant out spring-flowering biennials, including forget-me-nots, and wallflowers, in their flowering positions to give them time to establish before winter.
     
  • Sow hardy annuals to be overwintered outdoors and in the greenhouse.
     
  • Deadhead roses to encourage repeat flowering unless the roses are being grown for the colour and profusion of their hips.
     
  • Cover summer bedding with several layers of horticultural fleece if frost is forecast to prolong the display a little longer.
     
  • Lift tender perennials such as argyrannthemums, fuchsias and pelargoniums befor the first frost to be overwintered under cover.
     
  • Deadhead regularly to encourage more flowers unless you want seeds or hips to form.
     
  • Prune deciduous autumn-flowering shrubs over three years old as they finish flowering.

Ponds

  • Tidy the pond by deadheading marginal aquatic plants and removing excess growth from submerged oxygenating plants.
     
  • Top up garden pools to replace water lost through evaporation.
     
  • Ensure the surface of ponds are kept clean by removing floating weeds and any slime algae.
     
  • Clean out the pond if necessary.
     
  • If present scoop out and collect mats of tiny-leaved duck weed and twirl hair-like blanket weed from the surface with a stick or garden cane.
     
  • Put them in a heap on the edge of the pond overnight so any aquatic creatures can crawl back into the water. The next day add the heap to the compost heap.
     
  • Put new aquatic plants in the pond either in the soil at the bottom or using special aquatic baskets.
     
  • Oxygenate the pond with plants like Mash marigolds and Callitriche.

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