Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2011 | Page 79

GARDENING

Toby Beasley is head gardener at Osborne House,
and as such is responsible for maintaining around 50 acres
of gardens and 100 acres of woodland in its grounds.
Toby has kindly agreed to write a
guest column in Island Life, and
begins the series with an insight into
what autumn holds for him and his
staff.
Toby writes:
Autumn is probably the busiest time
for us in the garden at Osborne. We
try to keep the summer bedding on the
terraces looking as good as possible,
but by mid-October its full steam
ahead to change it for the spring
bedding.
While this is going on we also have
all the other usual autumnal jobs; leaf
raking, cutting down the herbaceous
plants and trying to give the lawns
a scarify and feed before the cold
weather really sets in as well as all the
routine tasks such as weeding. So when
we see a chance to try and get ahead of
the game we grasp it with both hands.
Recently we have been mulching
many of the shrub borders with our
own compost. All of our garden waste
goes through our compost yard where
we produce compost, leaf mould and
woodchips and everything we produce
goes back onto the garden. As you
would expect the compost heaps we

have are huge.
We can have up to 80 tonnes
decomposing and maturing before it
is ready to go back on the garden but
in principle it’s exactly the same as a
compost heap you might have in the
corner of a domestic garden. We turn
our heaps once a month which helps
to physically break down the plant
waste but this also aerates the heap
which enables the temperatures within
the heap to rise to around 70°C,
importantly, hot enough to kill weed
seeds.
Despite the good growing conditions
we experienced in the second half
of summer with plenty of mild and
damp weather, we seemed to keep up
with the workload very well. The grass
stayed green so needed lots of cutting
and the weeds grew in the borders but
we seemed to keep up with it all.
We also managed to do some much
needed pruning and the adde