Home School Garden Club - October

It looks like we are going to get an autumnal month in the garden before the winter weather arrives. We may only be in the first week of October, however some parts of the UK have had a months worth of rain already. Over the weekend my own garden received 18cm of rain. The start of autumn for real is a month of change as the temperature begins to dip giving us misty mornings and cooler nights. Just like us the plants will also react to the drop in temeptrue and begin to harden up for their witner.

We have been busy. This weekend, we cleared the garden shed out and put in new shelving, which was a nice job to do and get done as the rain poured down outside. The compost bins have been sieved and 10 whole buckets of compost were spread around the garden. We lost count of stage beetle grubs in the bins.

The vegetable plot is still giving up the last of the summer crops while autumn fruits including apples, pears and Autumn raspberries are ripening fast. The harvesting has continued each day and the freezer is filling with lovely lunchtime soups, just in time for the BIG SOUP SHARE happening in the Orchard Training Cookery Club. I am also stocking up on stir fired veg and mixed roasted vegetables portioned for meals and fruit for my porridge in the morning

We have been looking at our bee commitment and planting bulbs to bring the flowering period forward for the bees in spring and looking for more flowering plants to extend the flowering period longer into summer and into autumn. It has been fun looking at the catalogues.

Thanks to one of our learners I now have a stack of pallets which we are disassembling in order to repair the sides of the raised growing beds.

In an upcoming session we will start to feed the birds and make fat balls - a very messy job but fun!

We will be also take down nest boxes and clean them with disinfectant before drying and putting them back up. We won't be too tidy with tiding up so give the wild life some space over winter.