Create a winter wonderland in your garden

17:11:20 11th November 2009

Although the traditional date for harvesting the summer´s vegetables has passed, winter is not a time to lock up sheds and ignore the garden, the Daily Telegraph reports today (November 11th).

Kitchen gardens can continue to boost the look of your outdoors during the winter, with purple kale and blue cabbages adding to the mix of hues during the year´s colder months.

As well as looking good in the garden, kale can be eaten and can be made into soups or incorporated into salads.

Painting structures like sheds and summerhouses different colours can also help add colour to gardens at this time of year, with a wide range of different shades available which gardeners can choose to blend in with a shed´s surroundings.

The newspaper also makes a number of suggestions for ´companion planting´ to keep gardens looking beautiful. Nasturiums, with their large and intensely bright flowers, fit in well alongside cabbage plants, but not beans.

Last week, vegetable gardeners were warned that the tomato fungus botrytis can be detected earliest by a distinctive odour rather than tell tale visual signs on plants.