Getting ready for winter

Back on my own small plot again, and, inspired by Gardener's World on the telly on Friday, I've decided to do some work to get the garden ready for the winter. It seems a good time to do so with the clocks going back and the fact that the next few weekends might be pretty busy.

This year was the first year that I'd put dahlias in, and I was going to leave them in over the winter, but it seemed sensible to take 10 minutes to dig out the three I have and put them in the shed. The two in the border came up with pretty much the same size tuber as they had gone in with in the spring. The one in the pot on the patio, whose container I had lined with plastic to keep the moisture in had grown a lot though and had almost packed out the pot with new roots.

They are all now neatly packed up in the shed in some fresh compost, waiting to come out again when the weather is a little warmer. My plan is to take basal cuttings in the spring as described in the excellent Grow your own garden by Carol Klein which gives you all kind of ideas for how to propagate different plants and make new ones for free.

I also switched pots around, putting away those which had had tomatoes and the aforementioned dahlia and bringing to the fore (outside the back door) the 'winter pots' - those planted up with bulbs, a camelia and my big discovery of last winter - hellebores. More on these in a future post.