Homeschool Gardening Club - What To Do This September

It looks like we are going to get another lovely month in the garden before the weather turns wet and cold. The start of autumn for real is a month of change as the temperature begins to dip giving us misty mornings and cooler nights. Plantswill react to this change and begin to harden up for the winter months.

I have been busy over the weekends. 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, stir fired veg, mixed roasted vegetables portioned off for meals and fruit for my porridge in the morning.

Some of our Orchard Training Cookery Club have been learning what to do with mushrooms and has a soup off on Saturday. They made an East European Mushroom and Barley Soup, a soup from a recipe book inspired by the book: The Hobbit and a Luxury Mushroom Soup. All three soups were very tasty.

I 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.

One of our trees has reached the end of its useful life and needed to be taken down and the pond will eventually end up in this area.

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

Here are some jobs for you to think about in your gardens.

• We are looking at feeding the birds again to help them through the winter. look at the sunflowers and leave some heads on for the birds.

• Keep the birds water topped up and clean between topping ups.

• we will be taking down the nest boxes and giving them a clean. Make sure you are in the lesson before you do this at home.

• We will start tiding up but will remember to leave some areas scruffy and we will leave som seed heads for the birds.

Garden Pocket Money Jobs

• Offer to help with the shading on greenhouses with netting on sunny days but take it off the glass on dull days to let in as much light as possible

• Offer to top up ponds with water if the level has dropped through a warm, dry spells.

• We have been learning about cutting perennials back. Ask before you do it to make sure you don't upset anyone.