6 thrifty tips for autumn kitchen gardens

Rising food prices have recently prompted many people to start growing their own fruit, vegetables and herbs.

If you’re hoping for a bumper crop on a budget in the next few months, try these easy tips to help get your kitchen garden ready.

1. Prepare the soil

Productive plants need well-fed soil. The cheapest thing to do to ensure success next year is to give the soil a good dig this autumn and add home made compost or leaf mould. The worms will then do the rest of the hard work for you. Once the first frosts come the cold will also help to break down the soil further, with no need for extra digging.

If you don’t have home made soil improvers to hand you can buy in some compost – some local councils have their own reasonably-priced compost schemes, or you can buy some from a garden centre.

2. Try sowing some ‘green manure’

If buying compost is too expensive, you could sow some green manure seeds instead. These are the seeds of plants that enrich the ground by adding nitrogen, fibre and other organic matter. Common examples include field beans, clover and grazing rye.

There’s more information on the BBC gardening website.

They’re a very easy and cost-effective way of improving the soil and preventing nutrients leaching away from bare patches of ground, and they also help to keep weeds down. All you have to do in the spring is dig the green manure plants back into the soil about three or four weeks before you’re ready to start planting out your edible crops.

3. Start next year’s soil improvers now

When the leaves start to fall you can make next year’s soil enricher for free as you tidy up your garden. Sweep them all up and use them to make leaf mould by placing them in a black refuse sack, pushing them down a little and making a few pinholes in the side of the bag. Then just loosely tie the bag closed and leave it in a quiet place for 12 months for the mould to form.

Now’s also a good time to think about starting to make your own compost, if you don’t do this already. It breaks down more slowly in the cooler months, but the process still works. Garden Organic has plenty of cheap or free ideas for getting started.

4. Beat the cold

If you’re already growing your own food and an overnight frost is forecast, remember to bring this year’s potted sun-loving and tender plants indoors. Many sweet pepper and chilli plants will surprise you by re-flowering and producing a whole new set of fruits if they’re happy on an indoor windowsill, prolonging their growing season.

5. Encourage friendly wildlife

Autumn is the perfect time to build a bee hotel or bug sanctuary to help friendly insects hibernate happily over the winter. These can be created for nothing with garden or allotment waste such as straw, pinecones and twigs.

This handy guide from Gardeners’ World shows you an easy way to make one.

Come the spring your garden should come alive with pollinators such as bees, and natural pest controllers like ladybirds that feed on harmful aphids. This will increase crop yields and reduce the need for pesticides and other chemicals.

6. Scrub up

It’s also the season to clean and disinfect greenhouses, coldframes and empty pots. While it may seem like a chore, it makes a big difference to the health of your plants in the spring. Ventilate greenhouses and coldframes too, to make sure they’re dry and to reduce the likelihood of mould and mildew building up.

Then all that’s left to do is come back indoors and start planning what you’re going to grow in next year’s kitchen garden!

{Photo: Sarah Horrigan}