Making the Most of a Mild Autumn

By Rachel Budd, Horticulturist at IRD Duhallow

I think I might have been living on a different planet to everyone else this year. Every conversation about the weather has made me realise that some people have had very different experiences to mine this summer. After an admittedly disastrous spring and early summer the weather has been great. Okay we haven’t had any prolonged heatwaves, and the sun is something we might just have read about in books or seen on TV, but it has been dry and mild since midsummer, the temperatures are still high for the time of year and the soil conditions have yet to really start to show the effects of the recent rain.

So we need to take advantage of this period of grace, and get as far ahead as we can in our preparations for the next growing season. Springs in recent years have been notoriously unpredictable. Either too cold and wet, with low soil temperatures and real delays to the start of the growing season like this spring, or with unexpectedly hot temperatures early on followed by persistently cold and wet weather, like 2023.

The soil at present is perfect for harvesting vegetable crops and for tidying up for winter. Clear as many weeds and roots as you can while the conditions allow and cover the beds for the winter. Thick black plastic has always been the best cover for beds, and if looked after well and put away for the summer can last for years. Trying to reduce our dependency on plastic though leads to experimenting with other covers. Anything that excludes the light will prevent weeds from growing over the winter and will allow you, in the spring, to just pull back your cover and plant out your crops with no further work. Beware of bark mulch and wood chip; combined with cardboard these can make a great winter cover if applied heavily enough, however wood takes a long time to break down and robs nitrogen from the soil to aid this process. This can lead to starvation of your crops in early spring when they are first planted out. Straw is a good alternative, but it would probably be easier and cheaper to get spun gold these days, or you can utilise the leaves coming down of the trees for free. Fallen leaves, collected from driveways, pavements, lawns etc, (not woodland!) make a fantastic winter cover for beds. They must be wet and applied thickly enough to suppress weed growth, and I would definitely take the opportunity of the good autumn conditions this year to dig out perennial weeds such as dandelion and dock first.

If you have a greenhouse or tunnel, another way you can get a head start on spring is to start off seedlings of cabbage, broccoli, salads, beetroot, spinach and onions etc now to plant out in the tunnel in February or outside from March. These plants will be much bigger and stronger than spring sown seedlings, and so will cope more easily with difficult conditions.