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Tips and jobs
Tips for May   Tips for June   Tips for July   Tips for August   Tips for September   Tips for October   Tips for November   Tips for December   Tips for January   Tips for February   Tips for March   Tips for April  

Tips and jobs

Make leafmould
Forget home-made compost and even stable manure: leafmould is the secret of organic success. It's a fantastic soil conditioner that's not too rich, so every plant in your garden will thrive in it. You'll need a container with plenty of ventilation – posts and chicken wire make great leafmould bins, or just use simple net bags or bin bags with holes punched in them. Fill with autumn leaves, and a year or two later it'll be crumbly black gold.

Plant garlic
The pungent cloves of garlic need a spell of frost to split and form those big, fat bulbs you'll be harvesting next July, so plant now for overwintering. Choose the largest cloves – the fatter the clove, the bigger the bulb – and plant them about 10cm apart with a good covering of soil.

Start a bean trench
Runner beans are seriously greedy – so keep them happy with their very own compost heap. Dig a trench about 30cm deep, line with newspaper to hold moisture and start filling with kitchen scraps. Cover each layer with soil to stop foxes digging it up, and leave to rot down before planting straight into it next April.

Top tips

Mulch root veg with straw to keep the ground underneath from freezing. Leeks and parsnips won't mind the cold – but you will when you're trying to hack them out of rock-hard frozen soil just before your Sunday roast.

Snip out the crowns of kale for your first harvest rather than picking individual leaves. You get all the tenderest baby leaves, and you'll encourage the plants to send up a second crop of shoots from the stem.

Move bonfires to a new place before setting light to them: if you've been building up a heap for a while, hedgehogs and toads will have moved in to hibernate, so shift it before you torch it to keep them safe.

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