I don’t have an actual gardening entry today. I’ve been working on a project at the screen rather than outside. Most of it has had nothing at all to do with gardens (life does include other things!) but there is one update to report.

Last night I updated our page from which you can buy garden magazine subscriptions. At present it covers UK magazines only, although many of them can be delivered internationally. We have, however, started on a parallel page of garden mags in the USA and it should go live shortly.

Don’t forget that a magazine subscription is an excellent gift. It doesn’t only express your friendship and affection once; it continues to repeat its message month after month, or in some cases week after week. Think now to whom you might like to send a year-long gift, and head over to the magazines page on our bookselling site. There are some very attractive discounts available.

Best wishes,

- David -

I see it’s a week since I wrote on this blog. I haven’t been too well, and have scarcely been out of the door for days. Then today, just as I was feeling a bit better a drain blocked and I had to go out into the yard to do something about it. Well, enough about that! The point is that it got me out of the house, and I took a quick look at the hosta border.

There’s virtually nothing left of it now, and we’ll see no more of it until the spring, but being out there reminded me of the photographs I took a few months back and never uploaded to any of my web pages.

In recent years I’ve become quite a fan of hostas. There’s such a variety of them. Here’s one photo from my garden, but for more click here for my new hosta article.

Enjoy the autumn gardening. It’s a bit wet and gloomy here, but work done now will stand in good stead for next year.

- David -

It’s Monday evening. With my responsibilities as a church elder and lay preacher I can’t say that the typical Sunday is anything like a “day of rest”, so when at all possible I take Monday off to relax. It’s one of the advantages of being self-employed, although today I’m not sure that “relaxation” is quite the word.

Looking out of the window this morning I realised that although I’d cleared the leaves off the lawn a week ago it was again more than ankle deep in places. The leaf blower is out of action so out from the garden shed came the lawn mower. I set the blades as high as they’d go, as I didn’t want to cut the grass again at this time of year, and started to “hoover” up the leaves down the long grassy avenue of trees which runs to the road from the main body of our garden along the full length of the fence dividing us from our neighbour, the village churchyard. We have trees on both sides, ours to the right and the churchyard trees to the left, and so an enormous volume of leaves.

I’d scarcely started when “chug, chug … chug ….. chug” and the motor stopped. Out of petrol! After a cup of coffee I thought, “No, I don’t feel like going for petrol; I’ll do it the old way; I’ll sweep the leaves.” Hard work, yes! But I suppose it will have done me good to use muscle instead of brain for a while.

The other, longer-term benefit of this strenuous activity will be seen in about a year’s time when I can use the mulch from the composted leaves. I decided that I needed a bigger place to compost the leaves this year, so back to the garden shed for the reel of wire netting which has been sitting there for a year or two waiting for some constructive use, and now I’ve got an eight foot long leaf mould “bin” with netting walls and three quarters full of leaves, with more still to fall. It really doesn’t make sense to waste the leaves and lose all the lovely leaf mould that should now be produced over the coming year.

More on leaf mould at www.gardening-notes.com/articles/ .

Tags: compost, leaf mold, leaf mould, leaves, mulch

As I sit at my desk typing I can look out of the window at my vegetable plot, its raised beds and greenhouse - at the moment with a brown blizzard of leaves falling in the breeze from the horse-chestnuts . The part that I want to mention specially now is, however, just out of sight unless I lean to my left and look out at an angle. It’s the cold frame. I built it two years ago using 8-foot lengths of 6″x1″ timber and two old glazed window frames for the lid. It has served me well.

One shortcoming, though, has been its lack of insulation … until this past weekend. I managed to lay my hands on several 8ft x 4ft slabs of 2-inch thick polystyrene foam, cut in half into 4ft x 4ft pieces for ease of transport in the back of the car. They were intended originally to go in the greenhouse as internal winter walls, but there was some spare.

Cutting it to the right dimensions was quite an easy task. My old Swiss army knife came in useful once again along with a 3-metre steel rule. A cut about an inch deep across a slab, followed by a sharp snapping motion, gave clean straight edges and the sheets fit nicely between the 3″x3″ uprights of the frame.

Of course, the transparent top is not double or triple glazed, so some additional insulation was needed there, and a double layer of transparent bubble wrap worked wonders. I fixed it to the under sides of the two window frames using a staple gun and a technique I’ve used previously with good results - cutting 6-inch plastic plant labels into shorter pieces and using them as “washers”, stapling through the plastic strip into the bubble film and the wooden frame (see above); this avoids the problem of the metal staples cutting right through the thin polythene and allowing it to float free.

So, I’ve now got a freshly insulated frame, and into it very shortly will go a lot of the potted plants which are hardy enough to survive our typical English-Midlands winter under cover but not fully out of doors.

For more on preparing the garden for winter see www.gardening-notes.com/articles/autumn.html

For many months now we have had a general “Brunlea-Blog” which carries news of the various web sites in the Brunlea-Web family. As we launched www.gardening-notes.com, however, it became apparent that we really needed an area in which we could focus on gardening issues, and invite comment. Here it is. I hope you enjoy it.