Your Garden Needs Sorting Before Winter, Not After
We’re coming up on that window in autumn where your garden needs tending but the light just isn’t really there in the evenings and your weekends feel too full to really tackle it. It’s before the first frost, and the ground isn’t turning heavy, but it won’t be long. This window is perfect for getting the winter garden clearance and general maintenance sorted. Miss it and you’re at risk of not just a scruffy looking garden for a few months, but setting back next year’s spring before it’s sprung.
Leaf Raking
Leaving leaves on the lawn leads to a thick wet layer that blocks light and traps damp against the grass. This is how lawns develop fungal problems, and by spring you’re seeing yellow, thinned and bald patched.
Slugs and leatherjacks (crane fly larvae) like the same conditions, and both types of pest will happily move from a rotting leaf to a grass root – and any nearby borders
Hedge Pruning
Leaving your hedges unpruned puts you at a similar risk. Any dead or diseased wood that’s still attached once winter arrives gives any fungal pathogens somewhere to hibernate, and rapidly spread once the weather improves. For particularly dense hedges, uncut growth retains moisture near stems in a way that well shaped hedging doesn’t.
Box caterpillars will lurk in unmanaged hedges and foliage, so any left along over autumn can also spell a potential pest problem the following spring.
Garden Clearance Doesn’t Mean Barren
Garden clearance doesn’t necessarily mean stripping your garden bare. Strategically putting leaf litter in borders or under any shrubs is good for overwintering insects and ground-feeding birds. We’ll also be the first to say that a garden that doesn’t look Kew Garden Awards ready is also not the end of the world.
The difference is very much between choosing to close down the garden the same way you would a bar at the end of a shift, ready for the next one, or leaving it as it is, and guaranteeing yourself fruit flies and sticky surfaces.
A well handled bit of winter garden clearance means that next year’s garden looks after itself. A lawn that goes into winter clear and aerated comes back thicker and greener- and that’s more important than ever for its hardiness as our summers get hotter.
A hedge that’s had its dead wood and pests dealt with in autumn means it can put its energy into shape and growth rather than recovery.
The work you do, or don’t do, in October and November is largely what determines whether a garden looks tired or well-kept come May.
Leaf it to the Experts
A garden that’s been put to bed by people who know what they’re looking at, rather than left to a weekend of good intentions, is one less thing to think about over winter. Whether you’ve got no time yourself or you simply want the peace of mind knowing that it’s been done, and done properly, give us a call.
Our teams are LANTRA-trained, which means the pruning, clearing and treatment work follows the same standards whether it’s a hedge, a lawn, or a border bed, and it’s carried out with an eye for what each plant actually needs going into the colder months rather than a blanket cut-clear-cross-your-fingers.
We’ve been doing this work across London gardens for over thirty years, and the reassurance that comes with that experience, knowing the job’s been assessed properly and done once, correctly, matters as much to most of our clients as the tidy result itself. It’s part of why so many gardens we look after come back to us year after year.
If your garden could do with a proper pre-winter clearance, or you’d like to talk about booking some regular maintenance visits, get in touch today.
