* It is a good time to give the perennial herb garden some attention. Clumping herbs such as oregano, marjoram and mints benefit from being lifted and split up into smaller divisions for replanting. Cultivate the soil well and add compost because they like richer conditions. Mint is best kept somewhat confined to keep its wandering ways under control. You can plant it in a pot and bury the pot. Sage, rosemary and thyme are herbs which grow in dryer, harsher conditions. If your plants are looking woody, leggy and ugly, try taking some cuttings of firm recent growth. They root easily. Apparently rosemary will even put out roots in a glass of water on the kitchen window sill after a few days. If you have an area where it can naturalise, you can sow parsley by scattering the seed onto the ground.

* Keep an eye on the plant shops for fruit trees. One spin off of the current upsurge in interest is the large range of fruit trees now available. We even found a blood orange which we have not seen on offer before (gives the red orange juice often served in Italy which we initially mistook for added food colouring). Don’t delay if you want the biggest selection. All fruit trees like full sun, good drainage and generally all round good conditions including well cultivated, rich soils.

* You can be planting broad beans and winter spinach, both directly into the ground. Soaking the broad beans overnight will speed up germination.

* We are proudly still harvesting fresh corn here. Readers who followed our advice to continue sowing late crops may also still be harvesting cobs.

* If you have box hedges, give them the once over to thin the build up of dead leaves and debris caught in the middle. The fastest way to do this is to blast it all out with a leaf blower or compressed air but you can do it by beating the hedge and raking up the debris. The reason you are doing this is to try and hold the dreaded buxus blight at bay. More air movement and a looser structure slightly reduces the chances of the fungus getting established. If you wish to tempt fate by continuing to plant box hedges, you can direct stick large cuttings into position now. You can use rooting hormone on the cuttings but it is not necessary. However our previous advice stands: buxus blight is here to stay. Look at alternatives for hedging in the longer term.

* We wished we had realised earlier (many years earlier) that green tomatoes are so edible. There is nothing of the poisonous green potato about them and nor do they have to be a special variety to eat them green. The Victory Gardens programme on Sky showed a useful recipe. Slice larger green tomatoes in half and place face down in a single layer. Sprinkle with a dash of olive oil and a dash of ouzo (now we know what we should have done with the souvenir bottles of that drink brought back from Greece) and bake for half an hour until softish. Puree feta cheese with the drained liquid from the tomatoes and make a bed of it in an oven dish. Place the cooked tomatoes on top of the feta, season well and pop under the grill. Serve sprinkled with chopped fresh herbs. Yum.

· Queen’s Birthday Weekend is always rose weekend at garden centres for some unfathomable reason. This means that most will have their largest range in stock now. Most roses will have been dug very recently from the open ground and given a trim back of sorts. When planting, trim any damaged roots and plant into well cultivated soil with plenty of humus. Follow up at some stage soon with a proper prune of the bits of the plant above the ground. Most roses don’t ever develop big root systems so they need good growing conditions. Full sun and plenty of air movement helps to reduce disease later.

· There is a great deal of mystique and strongly held opinion about the when and how of rose pruning which we will attempt to decode on these pages this winter. However, the bottom line appears to be that you can do your rose pruning any time from now through until August. The signal to the rose to spring back into growth in early spring is related to temperature, not time of pruning so cutting back now does not trick the plant into flowering earlier. Be very careful of skin wounds (think potential cellulitis) because roses harbour some nasty bacteria and fungi. Don’t try and compost or chip rose prunings. All you do is spread their diseases and they don’t rot down at all easily. They need to be burned or put out to landfill. We think that is what our wheelie bin is for at this time of year.

· If you have saucers sitting underneath any outdoor container plants, remove them. You don’t want the pots sitting in a small reservoir all winter. It can be fatal for the plants.

· Reduce watering house plants to once a week or less. Over winter, most only need watering when they start to look a little floppy. Move any really frost tender plants away from window sills to protect them cold.

· Last week’s bad weather saw an unexpectedly early frost here. We can see a little damage to vireya rhododendrons, it took out the African marigolds and Mark has hastily constructed his winter shelter for his prized banana plants as well as moving the choicest tender plants into our sun porch. Batten down the hatches if you have frost tender material which needs winter protection because there will be more frosts to come.

· It is time to be preparing for planting garlic. No matter whether you still spray your lawn with hormone based applications, defiantly eat pork without knowing its provenance and drive an SUV, you should not be buying imported Chinese garlic. It is destroying our local garlic industry; it is inferior in flavour; it should never be grown because it apparently carries virus. Buy New Zealand grown garlic or better still, grow your own. Ask at your supermarket to ensure that you have local garlic or if you want to be certain of virus-free cloves for growing, buy them from a reputable garden centre.

· Shallots can also be planted now and these, like garlic, are grown from cloves or segments.

· Don’t delay on getting strawberries in. If you had a patch last spring, you will probably find runners which can be cut off and planted in fresh ground. Strawberry beds crop best if started anew every two years.

Quote of the week is from early Alan Titchmarsh (inimitable gardener and media personality and currently the unlikely High Sheriff of the Isle of Wight): “Avant-gardeners do not have lawns; they have grass. But not much. The ‘bowling green’ lawn is a feature that belongs in front of council houses where it is surrounded by borders of lobelia, alyssum, French marigolds and salvias with standard fuchsias used as ‘dot plants’. The avant-gardener’s grass is intermingled with daisies, plantains, buttercups, … dandelions and plenty of moss (usually at least 50% of the total coverage). This is a state of affairs to be encouraged.”

· Having always fancied a moat (note to selves: first get a castle), the news that some British MP claimed expenses for moat maintenance (3000 pounds sterling) had us chuckling. A quick net search yielded up the information that other moat owners were a little surprised at the idea of maintenance on a regular basis. Apparently moats are static bodies of water on a clay base and aside from a major clean out once a century or so which would cost at least 10 times that price, they are left to the fish and swans to maintain a balance. Leeds Castle just out of London has a splendid moat which was simply magical when seen with white swans floating on mirror clear waters on a dead calm and misty winter’s day.

· Gardeners with more modest ornamental ponds here may wish to reduce the amount of leaf litter that can accumulate in them, especially at this time of the year. Allowing vegetation to rot down in the water can increase the nutrient levels, reduce the oxygen and kill the fish. It can also lead to a growth in algae as temperatures rise. A butterfly net (used to be available cheaply in toy stores when our children were younger) can be a handy tool for scooping small ponds. Loose netting over the top can be a temporary measure to reduce leaf litter.

· As feijoa harvests finish, get in and do a clean up and light prune. Rake back any rotting fruit to around the plant so that it can act as a compost. Take out dead wood, thin or spindly growth, keep it reasonably open and give a light hair cut all over. Feijoas are wonderfully obliging plants, never needing spraying and tolerant of complete neglect but they will reward such efforts with a better crop and larger fruit next year.

· If you still like to spray your lawns, despite our frequent questioning of the practice, autumn is a safer time to use hormone sprays than spring. There are special lawn sprays that target certain weeds or sulphate of ammonia can be used on broad leafs. An old carving knife can equally be used to cut off broad leafed weeds just below the surface. The reason we advocate autumn spraying is because even the slightest drift of hormone spray (and most lawn sprays are hormone sprays) can cause major damage to new growth on neighbouring deciduous plants in spring. Every year, somebody asks us why they have distorted leaves, particularly on magnolias and it is invariably hormone spray drift.

· The dreary late autumn weather we are enduring at this time does rather sap the motivation. If you have Sky, tune in to the Living Channel at 5.00pm on Saturdays to catch Small Town Gardens. This programme packs in a remarkable amount of information and the latest series is very good, even for those of us who don’t have small town gardens. We have seen some really heavy weight English designers talking us through the process.

· In between showers, get that autumn copper spray onto citrus trees and stay on top of the rash of autumn weed seeds which are germinating. Getting a mulch onto garden beds should suppress more weeds and will help to condition soils. If you are of a romantic disposition, you can think of it as laying a blanket around your plants.

· While anthropomorphising plants, this week’s quote comes from Victoria Glendinning: “Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them.”

• The most important spray of the year for citrus trees is the autumn copper one. Without it, the fruit can be susceptible to rot even while hanging on the tree. Mandarins are the most vulnerable. While most of Taranaki can grow lemon trees, warmer coastal areas can equally grow mandarins, Tahitian limes, oranges, grapefruit and tangelos. To ensure good fruiting, look for grafted, named varieties (not seedlings) and pay accordingly. The key to self sufficiency in citrus (which we have, thanks to the previous generation of gardeners here) is to plant a range of different varieties. Our absolute stand-by is the orange Lue Gim Gong but we have no idea if this is still available commercially. If you see it, buy it. Washington Navel is another excellent choice for our conditions here, especially on trifoliata dwarfing rootstock.

• If you are fortunate enough to have an asparagus bed, make sure that it is cleaned up and weed free. Gently fork the surface over to stop it from getting too compacted but be careful not to damage the asparagus crowns which sit out of sight below the surface. Then cosset it under a blanket of mulch. Asparagus is a clumping perennial and it is a permanent fixture in the garden.

• Keep a watchful eye out for spring bulbs coming through and be vigilant with slug and snail control around these. Try circling the patches of foliage with a generous ring of bran if you want a more eco-friendly solution to poison. The bran does not kill them but after gorging themselves on it, the slugs and snails then tend to lie there in a comatose state waiting for the early birds to get them.

• A local garden centre was advertising the first of the lily bulbs last weekend so keep an eye out from here on for summer bulbs which will be coming into stock. Bulbs require some forward planning as opposed to impulse buying.

• If you have wrenched larger shrubs and trees for relocation, get onto moving them now even if deciduous ones have still to drop their leaves. Take as large a ball of roots as you can physically manage and prune back the top of the plant by about a third to reduce the shock. If you lack a digger or a suitable tractor with a bucket, the old fashioned approach is to lever the plant out onto a tarpaulin, piece of old carpet or similar and then drag it to the new location. This usually requires more than one person.

• The popular navel oranges have all descended from a chance mutation discovered at a Brazilian monastery around 1820. Because navel oranges do not ever set seed, they can not reproduce on their own. The world stock of navel oranges has, apparently, descended from cuttings and grafts of that original plant and are therefore all of the same original genetic stock. Propagation in the mega thousands has led to natural mutations and all the named selections. Navel oranges are delicious but have a shorter fruiting season and do not hold on the tree.