My wife Annie and I were out for our morning walk one day last week (without dog who now thinks the crisp mornings are not to his liking) when we stumbled upon some thoughtful soul, who had spent the weekend dividing their irises and had selected some strong rhizomes surplus to their needs and placed them at their front gate neatly in a plastic shopping bag for keen passers by to help themselves to. Least I hope they did, because they are now in our miniature orchard, planted on the sunny side.

The late season roses are struggling with aphids at present due to low numbers of the usual insect predators, so just squirt them off with a jet of water if they get a little too concentrated, because the aphids are a tasty meal for some hungry birds, in a season when their insect diet suffers, with the colder night.

With all the leaf litter about as autumn moves in, there is always the debate about ‘what is best to compost?’ Deciduous trees win in the composting stakes in my book and oak and plane trees are my preferred. If you want to mix hard leaf eucalypts and acacias though it’s best to line them up in a windrow on your driveway or on the council’s verge and run a lawn mower over them to break them up or they take far too long to decompose.

Locate your winter compost heap or Gedy bin in a more sunny aspect than where you had it all summer. That way the activity is more robust. It also helps to speed up the composting process by making sure you have some animal waste in the heap, especially if large quantities of leaves are used. Use horse manure or stable straw in preference to sheep as the former is laced with high nitrogen urine whereas fallen leaves are high in cellulose but low in nitrogen.

A readily available source of nitrogen often overlooked in the compost heap is human hair from your hairdresser or barber. It’s protein of course (CHON) and breaks down pretty quickly too. Leather shavings are also a good nitrogen source but the local cobbler is not the rich source of supply that he once was, due to the proliferation of synthetic soles these days.

If your container grown small cyclamen are starting to flower, make sure you keep them fed with a fortnightly watering of a water-soluble fertilizer, since that keeps the succession of flowers coming until at least Christmas. As for the large florists strains they seem more winter season with their blooms, but even they respond to winter-feeding.

The late season roses are struggling with aphids at present due to low numbers of the usual insect predators, so just squirt them off with a jet of water if they get a little too concentrated, because the aphids are a tasty meal for some hungry birds, in a season when their insect diet suffers, with the colder night.

If your tomatoes are on their last legs and not ripening up to a red or even a pink blush, rip the whole vine up and hang them in your garden shed. You’ll find some with ripen and some stay green. The green ones make ideal chutney or if you are into Cajun cooking, fried green tomatoes make the ideal side dish for black-eyed beans and hash browns with that slab of fried leg ham. Great hang-over fodder…. So I’m told.

With all the leaf litter about as autumn moves in, there is always the debate about ‘what is best to compost?’ Deciduous trees win in the composting stakes in my book and oak and plane trees are my preferred. If you want to mix hard leaf eucalypts and acacias though it’s best to line them up in a windrow on your driveway or on the council’s verge and run a lawn mower over them to break them up or they take far too long to decompose.

If your container grown small cyclamen are starting to flower, make sure you keep them fed with a fortnightly watering of a water-soluble fertilizer, since that keeps the succession of flowers coming until at least Christmas. As for the large florists strains they seem more winter season with their blooms, but even they respond to winter-feeding.

The late season roses are struggling with aphids at present due to low numbers of the usual insect predators, so just squirt them off with a jet of water if they get a little too concentrated, because the aphids are a tasty meal for some hungry birds, in a season when their insect diet suffers, with the colder night.

If you are looking to provide some colour in a hanging basket in a cold spot over winter spring in the hills, when most gardeners give up, try a punnet of trailing mixed Lobelias ‘String of Pearls’ and maybe some ‘Gilham’s white’ primulas for contrast. Morning sun aspect if you can spare it is best.

Local olive leaves and small stems got covered in black olive scale this summer and they still carry it, so if you are serious about control, spray with PestOil immediately after you get your crop off. That leaves a thin coating of synthetic oil on the stems that prevent further spread of the pests. Follow up with another PestOil spray after flowering in spring, then another in early summer before the fruit starts to swell.

If you think your trees are too tall to treat for scale or white flies, think again. There’s a new snap-fit sprayer on the market that can be calibrated to extract the sprays used to control these pests in the same manner as the spray and lawn feed products on the market. The one exception though is that they can be calibrated accurately so that the mix coming out at pressure is controlled to that concentration recommended on the label. I’ve sprayed 8 metres into an olive canopy, so cover yourself well! Available at local hardware stores (I got mine at Bunnings).

If you have drifts of bulbs in shaded aspects you might as well prolong the agony and dig them up now to relocate into a sunnier aspect. They still won’t flower this year, because this year’s flower was formed last spring, but next spring they will be sensational, so it’s worth the effort.