If you have the space, place a bulk-order for manure and leave it to rot down over the winter. If you have a choice, use horse manure for heavy soils, cow for lighter conditions.
Take a good long look at your beds. If you’ve been adding plenty of compost and manure you are making soil. The levels will creep up and you might want to re-appraise the way the garden is organised.
Still time to clean out the greenhouse and disinfect your tools with a horticultural disinfectant and give your greenhouse heaters a good cleaning to make sure they’re working. If you live near an agricultural merchants then ‘udder wash’ is by far the cheapest way to disinfect your greenhouse or polytunnel.
Bring in your delicate plants at night, put them out if the weather is good during the day.
After the apple harvest, prune both these and pears.
Prune gooseberries, if you don’t have a problem with birds. If you do, then put this off until March otherwise they’ll steal all the buds. Take any crowded side-shoots down to two or three buds, leaving any which are in the right place at full length. When pruning remember the aim is to have an open centre in each bush, to make it easier to pick the fruit later in the year.
Pests
Net brassicas to protect them from pigeons, indeed all your appetising crops, salads, late carrots, onions.
Remove dead leaves from brassicas to keep infections down and firm-in sprouts with your heel to keep them firm.
If you had clubroot give the soil a heavy dressing of lime. (A big cupful to every square foot. Wear rubber gloves and eye protection) Then cover with a good four inches of compost if you can.
Cleanliness is next to…
If you can, stop walking on your soil. The human foot is responsible for moving more disease around the plot than any other means. Get yourself a few planks and walk only on these. And more than anything else, don’t go walking over everyone else’s plots – especially their compost.
Pick up your rubbish and burn it. If it has spent some time lying on the ground then it isn’t worth composting. Have a bonfire and use the ashes in compost, directly on the ground or mix with leaf mold. Make sure you check for hedgehogs when lighting fires or moving heaps of old material.
Opuntia make the largest group of cacti, and as such you can get great big ‘cowboy’ specimens and small ones for pots. Some are really hardy, others not so hardy.
I would suggest using cactus mix compost to grow them in, hardly watering at all in the winter, but giving them a really big drink and a feed in the Spring. Don’t over water in the Summer – just keep them from shriveling, and certainly don’t over feed – just once in the Spring is fine. You can use a general purpose houseplant fertiliser, but I use it half strength. A feed in the Summer is fine, but don’t worry too much if you forget.
They prefer full sun, a windowsill is fine, but keep it away from radiators. They are desert plants, but don’t particularly like to be cooked, especially in the winter.
Repot in the Spring and your opuntias will come on a treat. Most survive a winter in an unheated greenhouse with ease.
Christmas gift: Grow opuntias!
Stan Shebs