Preparing Your Autumn Garden in Australia
Well, it’s March 1st, which means autumn has finally arrived in our gardens.
In mild climates, autumn is one of the loveliest times to be a gardener. You don’t have to prepare for a real hibernation; the worst that lies ahead is a bit of rainy gloom, but nothing that you - or your chillies, if they’re under a nice warm blanket of mulch - can’t handle. Instead, you get to relish the still mornings, the trees’ russet leaves and the easing of our blistering summer heat.
Autumn is the season to sow seeds for your spring flowers, plant your spring bulbs (more on that next week!), do light pruning, tidy spent summer growth, improve your soil and generally get back to the business of enjoying your garden without turning into a sweaty, filthy, sunburned creature. Basically, there’s heaps to do and it’s LOVELY out there!
Here’s how to prepare your garden for autumn (and beyond):
1. Tidy up spring & summer growth
Now is a great time to tidy the garden and prepare it for your winter crops. My garden always gets totally away from me in summer. Everything grows at double speed and the weather is so hot I usually end up letting it get wild and rambling while I’m avoiding the heat. I also let it continue to grow untamed because this allows for plants finish flowering and set seeds.
This is another beautiful phase of the summer garden that you miss if you rip everything out prematurely. Fennel plants in particular look majestically skeletal once they’ve dried and formed seed heads (as do poppies and blue sea holly).
Native birds love to visit and eat the seeds too. It would be such a shame to miss out on all of this, so I let the summer garden do its thing and run wild. Then, once autumn rolls around, I’ll start to tidy up all that rampant growth. I collect the seeds from annuals that have finished flowering, pull the spent plants out of the garden beds and give hardy perennials a light prune.
Once you’ve finished pulling and pruning your plants, I HIGHLY recommend mulching or composting them. Try to avoid simply throwing them away in your green waste bin. Those plants have been feeding off the soil all summer and a lot of that good stuff they’ve extracted from the soil is now stored inside the plant. Throwing away the plant without returning it to the garden means you lose all of this goodness.
If you have a mulcher, fantastic! Mulch everything (aside from couch grass, highly invasive plants and plants that may have fungal diseases - throw these into your general waste) and return it to your garden beds to feed the soil over winter.
If you don’t have a mulcher, no stress, put your spent plants and prunings in a compost bin instead or simply chop them up into finer pieces and add them as a coarse layer of mulch on top of your regular mulch; it will decompose more slowly but will all still return to the soil eventually.
The wild late-summer garden
2. Give the soil a boost
Speaking of all things soil, autumn is the perfect time to give your garden a boost after everything its been through over summer. Summer is tough on our soils in Western Australia; the sun blasts everything that isn’t protected by thick mulch, often killing microorganisms in the soil. Soil in coastal areas like Perth is always trying to return to its sandy, limestone roots. So it’s a bit of a constant battle that (happily) does get easier over time, but still requires a little attention.
Once I’ve pulled out my spent summer plants, I check how sandy the soil is (if it won’t stick together at all when wet, or if the water simply pools on the surface without running off, I know it’s very sandy).
To combat this, I add in clay and animal manure (in generous quantities) then I put a thick layer of lupin mulch on top and make sure everything is well watered. I prefer to add lupin mulch in autumn than in winter, as it can attract a lot of slaters once the cool weather and rain arrives, and in large numbers these tiny little exoskeletal elephants cane eat a whole crop of seedlings before they get going (in winter I’ll add animal manure and sometimes clay but not thick or moisture-retentive mulches).
3. Feed citrus trees & roses
As well as improving the garden soil generally, it’s a good idea to REALLY improve the soil surrounding the heaviest feeding plants - things like roses and citrus, as well as winter veggies like broccoli, cabbage, cauliflowers, beetroots, parsley and a bunch of other annuals that bear large fruit (carrots, garlic, leeks and onions vegetables tend not to require as much food).
As a rule, it’s safest to use manures from herbivores (cow, sheep, horse, chicken) on your edible plants, as they are less at risk of containing harmful pathogens. Pig manure that is not properly treated can contain bacteria and other pathogens that can be harmful to humans if ingested or inhaled. That said, I use a combination of pig manure and compost over our whole garden, but I make sure to buy it companies that let the manure rot down and age for 12-18 months. Commercial manure producers usually let their manures ‘hot compost’ (i.e., break down at high temperatures), which kills most pathogens and makes the manure safer to use.
If you want to tailor your manure to make sure your plants are getting what they like best, try using a bucket of chicken manure on each citrus tree once the fruit is about the size of your fingernail (chicken manure is high in nitrogen and phosphorous which heavy feeders like citrus trees love, but if you add it while they’re still in flower it can cause them to drop their flowers). Roses, on the other hand, can get overwhelmed by large quantities of chicken manure (it’s too acidic for them), so it’s better to give them some cow or sheep manure (or a blended manure). Give them a good feed at the start of autumn and again in spring and the start of summer and they should bloom well.
If you want to play it safe and keep things simple, your best bet is just to just use a blended animal manure that has been ‘well rotted’ or ‘hot composted’. You can chuck that sh*t on everything!
4. Collect seeds from summer plants
Now is finally time time to tear out the spent summer annuals and collect their seeds! Things like basil & fennel will set seed in late summer and autumn, so as you notice them drying off you can go and grab the seeds! To be honest, though, I’m lazy with seed collecting. I generally prefer to just smush all the seed heads in my hands over the garden beds, letting them fall onto the ground in the expectation that they’ll sort themselves out by spring (they pretty much always do!).
This works just fine for the hardy plants that self propagate easily (things like fennel, mustard greens, rocket, tropical milkweed, parsley, tansy, even sometimes pansies, violas, poppies and stocks) and and it’s what I do most of the time, unless I want to be 100% sure that I’ll definitely get new plants from the seeds. In that case, I do the conscientious thing and harvest a few seeds to start in seed raising trays so I can be more confident they’ll germinate. If you want to be conscientious too (and to make sure you’re always growing the plants you love most), you can collect the seeds and place them in a dry envelope (don’t forget to label them), ready to sow again in spring.
Fennel seeds collected in late summer
5. Plant bulbs for late winter and spring
Bulbs take ages to grow! So they require a little planning ahead. There have been many years where I’ve missed getting bulbs in on time because I just wasn’t prepared to think about spring flowers when summer hadn’t even ended. Now, though, it’s something I love about bulbs; even when the grey and ghostly spectre of winter is looming you can be planning your spring garden!
I like to grow bulbs in pots where possible because otherwise I ALWAYS forget what I’ve planted and where. Growing bulbs in pots also means you can pop them somewhere out of the way after they’ve flowered (when they’re not looking so nice anymore), and when they’re beautiful and blooming you can move them to wherever you’ll see them the most.
Bulbs to plant now include: hyacinths, daffodils, Dutch irises, jonquils and freesias. Also, if you do decide to grow your bulbs in a pot, do like Monty Don and pack them in tight - in the past I’ve under filled the pots which leads to a less-than-impressive display of bulbs. They don’t mind being fairly crammed in, so pop them right next to each other in some good quality potting mix and wait for the spring colour explosion to arrive!
While you’re waiting you could also grow something small in the pot like violas or alyssum - they won’t crowd out the bulbs but will mean the pot doesn’t look empty while you wait.
P.S. If you’d like to have a beautiful, colourful, bulb-filled garden this spring, make sure to stay tuned for next week’s blog post which is all about growing spring bulbs.
6. Sow winter veggie seeds & spring flower seeds
Now’s also the time to sow seeds for your winter veggies and spring flowers. It might seem really early to be sowing seeds for spring flowers (and if you like, you can usually sow these seeds in spring as well), but the benefit of sowing flower seeds in autumn is that it gives the plant plenty of time to grow before spring arrives. This usually leads to a bigger plant and more blooms. If you’ve missed out on autumn sowing, don’t try to sow seeds during winter - often it’s too cold and the seeds may not germinate - instead, simply wait for the first warm spring days to arrive and get them in then.
If you’re wondering what seeds to sow now make sure to download your free autumn garden checklist at the top of this post! In it, I list the seeds I’ll be sowing and plants I’ll be buying to add to my garden this autumn.
Sow sweet peas in March and April
7. Rest and enjoy the garden
Last, and most importantly, don’t forget to take a break and simply enjoy your garden, too!
Our winters might often be mild and sunny, but we get our fair share of long cold nights and cloudy, rainy days as well. Days when the last thing you really feel like is sticking your hands in chilly, damp soil. As much as I might whinge about the summer heat, by the middle of July I am usually wishing desperately for springtime and warmth.
So, here’s a PSA to remember to enjoy this glorious, golden, still and shimmering weather while we have it. Everything in a garden is ephemeral; the flowers, the fruit, the insects, the seasons. Maybe the best lesson our gardens can teach us is to remember to enjoy them in the present, even while dreaming about what they may become in the future.
A blue salvia in the autumn garden
Two-tone chillies in the garden
What to plant this autumn
Edible plants to grow in autumn
If you think summer is the only good season to grow a veggie patch - think again!
In fact, vegetable gardening is much easier in autumn. Although your plants might grow a little more slowly in autumn, the pressure of keeping a garden alive in the summer heat is gone. You can take your time, you can let things grow at their own pace and you can enjoy a bounty of delicious homegrown autumn and winter foods.
If you’re new to veggie gardening and would like to try your hand at growing some food this year, autumn is the perfect time to get your garden beds ready for vegetables. Make sure to download your autumn checklist at the top of this post, so you can see what jobs you need to do to prepare your garden for autumn and winter veggies.
Once your beds are ready the only remaining question is: what should you plant? If you want to know what seeds are good to sow now for winter veggies, make sure to grab your copy of my autumn garden checklist at the top of this post!
Autumn flowers for the garden
Gardens that flower all year round are a total joy to behold. It takes a little more thought and planning to make sure you have flowers throughout autumn and into winter, but it can absolutely be done!
As March has already arrived, if you want autumn colour this year, I’d recommend going for seedlings rather than seeds (seeds will most likely take too long to germinate and should be planted in summer in preparation for autumn). And if you’d like to read up on how to get colour into your garden this winter, make sure to check out this blog post about growing a winter flower garden.
Seeds to sow now for spring colour:
As I mentioned, it pays to think a little way ahead in the garden. So (even if it feels premature) remember that now is the perfect time for you to start thinking about the spring flowers you’d like to have in your garden. Here are a few of my favourites:
Spring flower seeds to sow now:
Sweet peas
False Queen Anne’s lace (you can also sow seeds for Queen Anne’s lace - the two are very similar)
Carnations
Cornflowers
Delphiniums
To read the rest (and to keep your list of autumn garden jobs all in one place), make sure you’ve downloaded a copy of my Autumn Garden Checklist (up at the top of this post!)