Maximise your potential

Trays of seedlings, jewel-bright tomatoes, peppers and chillies and a store of curing pumpkins: a greenhouse is so often synonymous with spring and summer productivity that it’s easy to overlook its potential for use all year round. With some care and thought, however, this valuable garden asset can earn its keep right through late autumn and into winter.

Making the most of your greenhouse at this time of year begins with tidying up. This work is often left until the first days of spring, but getting everything spruced up now will put you on the front foot when work in the garden picks up. Then think about what will thrive in this protective, even heated, suntrap: it’s the perfect place for cuttings of tender perennials, biennials sown earlier this year, seedlings of hardy annuals, winter salad crops and even a special ornamental collection or two.

Tidy Up

An essential task for late autumn or early winter, while it’s still comfortable to be outside and even to get a bit wet, is to clean your greenhouse from top to bottom. It’s surprising how much detritus will have accumulated over spring and summer, and the confined space of a greenhouse can also harbour fungi and parasitic insects, making this the ideal time to take action.

Throw out spent plants, including, perhaps, the seedlings that didn’t ever make it into the garden. Remove empty grow-bags if you used them and add the contents to the compost heap, or keep some aside to re-use. Spent compost makes a good mulch and, when sieved to remove the larger pieces, it’s an adequate medium for sowing seeds next year; seeds already contain all the nutrients they need to germinate, so the fact that their growing medium is somewhat depleted won’t matter as much.

Inspect dried capillary matting to see if it can