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[Sara]

GYO has teamed up with Thompson & Morgan to offer a £10 seed voucher to every forum member who has a gardening tip published in our next Subs' Club newsletter.

We'd like to hear your advice on protecting edibles from frost and snow plus any suggestions on preparing a plot for spring.

[pigletwillie]

Spread a thick mulch of compost, manure or leafmould onto your beds now and allow the worms to take it into the soil overwinter, ready for spring.

Use canes and fleece to protect tender plants or if possible bring them into a tunnel or greenhouse.

Tubers such as dahlias if not lifted can be protected by covering with 6" straw and covering that with a layer of compost or manure.

Cover empty beds with black plastic or membrane which will stop nutrients leaching out and also warm up the soil ready for spring.

Lift rootcrops and store in an old fashioned clamp or in damp sand in a box in your shed.

[Alice]

Some people grow in containers and should take advantage of the possibility of moving them about.
Choose the south aspect which will give maximum sunshine and a good few degrees of difference in temperature. Place the container against a wall if possible. That way heat taken in by the wall during the day is given back out at night - like a storage heater.
Cold air falls, so the higher you can get your containers the more advantage you will get. There can be as much as 4 degrees of difference between ground level and window cill height (which weather forecasts are based on. That's why you can have a ground frost when the air temperature is 4 degrees.) So I put the containers up as high as I can get them - on a table, jacked up on a few bricks or whatever. And off course you can buy or make little fleece tents to go over containers - the heavy duty stuff will protect against 7 degrees of frost with one layer and it's not expensive.
Anyway that's how I do it and get salad through the winter and spring crops off to flying start.

[vegnut]

If you have an empty unheated greenhouse, then why not sow some winter gem lettuce. It'll give you some nice crisp little gem's for late winter. Or sow them thicker and cut them off smaller, wonderful baby leaf gems a bit earlier. Yum

[coreopsis]

When I was a kid they used to tie up young fruit trees with the straw to protect them from frost(and hungry rabbits as well).I don't know if they still do it.

[Snadger]

I don't like seeing greenhouses or polytunnels sitting empty during the winter when plants are struggling against adversity outdoors!

So why not grow at least some of your outdoor winter veg indoors?

I'm trying this as an experiment this year and so far it's looking good!

My greenhouse is looking fuller now than it was in the summer. The difference between growth patterns indoors and outdoors is also notable!

If nothing else I will have a succession of potted vegetables indoors which will mature earlier than those outdoors and because they are in a controlled environment they should be cleaner and less prone to pests and diseases!

Harvest outdoor crops as required and apply a thick mulch of farm yard manure or straw and plant another dissimilar crop through the mulch straight away! This will keep the soil in good heart, and if you've plannned accordingly you will always have plants available and ALWAYS have something growing in a given area.
Come Spring, weeds will be suppressed by the mulch, pests will find it harder to get to the crop,the soil will be full of fauna busily incorporating the mulch into the surface layer, drainage will be improved,the crop will have a supply of micro nutrients to feed off and the mulch will be contributing to the long term benefit of the soil structure.

[BarleySugar]

The polystyrene sheets and blocks that come as packing materials are very good insulators. If you have plants such as dormant fuschias or dahlia tubers to get through the winter, use the blocks or sheets to make a container, or line a box with them. Then put the plants inside, packed with slightly damp compost. Make sure you have removed all dead leaves. Cover with another sheet of polystyrene and put in an unheated garage or greenhouse. For added protection, use bubble wrap packaging material as well. Check occasionally that all is well, and remove any moldy plant material. In spring check for new growth and bring out the plants as soon as they start to shoot.

[Sara]

Thanks for all the great tips. Please keep them coming!

[vicky]

Try to get areas that need to be dug done in time for the frost to help break up the clods - esp if you garden on clay. I put compost down around feb as apparently nutrients can wash out if it's laying too long. The asparagus and rhubarb get a big bucket load of compost too.
Dig a bean trench now and you can start filling it with kitchen compost ready for next year.
Enjoy the seed catalogues....

[Birdie Wife]

If you have a coldframe, you can use it for overwintering hardy seedlings like broad bean (Aquadulce Claudia) and sweet peas sown in toilet roll tubes or root trainers, ready for earlier crops and flowers in the spring. If you don't have a coldframe, make one! They are really useful.

[Birdie Wife]

Snow is actually a really good insulator, preventing frost getting into the soil and lifting newly-sown onion sets, and is also a pretty good slow release nitrogenous fertiliser. In fact, the late spring snow is often called "poor mans fertiliser" because it gives a boost of nutrients to overwintering crops at just the right time of the year.

[Two_Sheds]

Preparing for spring:
I like to sow/plant Limnanthes as a green manure for over-wintering. Having a ground cover reduces soil erosion etc.
When I need the space for my veg, I just cut it (it's got shallow roots) and toss it in the compost heap.

In spring its flowers provide early food for bees and hoverflies. Plant it under your broad beans, and hopefully the larvae of those hoverflies will eat the bean blackfly.

[poozie]

I'll be starting off my bean trenches again. They worked brilliantly last year. I dig a trench were I want my beans to go and layer rotted contents from my compost bin plus vegetable kitchen waste and ripped up cardboard and paper to help retain moisture. Each layer I cover with soil. In the spring I have a wonderful rich soil which my beans love. Great for pumpkins ans squashes too.

[SarzWix]

I live in a very wet area of the UK (North West), so after planting my autumn garlic I usually cover the whole bed with cloche hoops and a perforated plastic cover, pegged down and also weighted with bricks so it doesn't blow off. This stops the cloves from rotting in wet soil, but still allows some water to get through, and air to circulate.

[A Life Less Simple]

If you're planting out garlic or other young plants/seedlings try building up walls of earth around them to protect them from winds and frosts until they get going.