Putting the beds to bed for winter

There is a version of November gardening that most of us were taught: clear everything, dig it all over, leave the soil rough for the frost to break down, and walk away feeling virtuous.

Almost all of that is wrong, and the digging is the worst part of it.

What your soil actually needs between now and March is to be covered, left alone, and fed from the top. What the garden needs is for some of the mess to stay exactly where it is. Here is what to do, and what to stop doing.

Should I dig my vegetable beds over in winter?

No. This is the single piece of traditional advice most worth abandoning.

The reasoning behind it was that frost breaks down the clods and improves the structure. It does, a bit. But look at what you paid for it. Digging destroys the crumb structure and the network of channels that worms and roots have spent the whole year building. It brings buried weed seed up into the top few centimetres, where light reaches it and it germinates - which is why a dug bed grows a carpet of weeds in March and an undug one does not. It shreds the fungal threads that feed plant roots. And it leaves the soil surface exposed and bare through the four wettest months of the British year, so the rain compacts it and washes the nutrients out.

Frost improves structure at the surface. Worms improve structure all the way down, and they work for free (RHS no-dig guide). Put the organic matter on top and let them take it down. You will get a better bed and you will not have spent a weekend with a spade.

The exception, and it is narrow: if the ground is genuinely compacted - a new plot where machinery has been, or a path you are converting into a bed - a single loosening with a fork, without turning the soil over, can be worth doing once. Once. Not annually.

What should I cover my beds with over winter?

Compost, if you have it. A green manure, if you sowed one in time. Cardboard, if you have neither. But cover them.

Compost is the best answer: 5cm on the surface, spread and left. You do not fork it in. The worms take it down over the winter and by March the bed is loose, dark and ready to sow into. It is also the single thing that most improves a soil year on year (RHS mulching guide).

Leaf mould is free and nearly as good. Bag up your autumn leaves, or spread them straight onto the beds and let the worms deal with them.

Green manures - field beans and grazing rye are the two that will still germinate this late. They hold onto nitrogen that would otherwise wash straight out of a bare bed over the winter, they cover the soil, and they are cut down and left on the surface in spring. Sow before the middle of the month; after that the soil is usually too cold even for rye.

Cardboard if you have nothing else. Not as good as compost - it feeds nothing - but it keeps the rain off, stops the weeds and rots down. Better than bare soil by a wide margin.

The one rule that covers all of them: never leave a bed naked over a British winter. Bare soil loses nutrients, slumps, caps over, and grows weeds anyway.

What should I clear away, and what should I leave?

Clear the diseased. Leave almost everything else.

Clear:

• Blighted tomato and potato foliage. This is the one thing you must remove. Blight overwinters on infected material, and it does not reliably die in a home compost heap. Bin it or burn it - do not compost it.

• Anything with white rot, club root or a rust. Same logic. Off the plot.

• Slug hotels - the soggy pile of old leaves and rotting courgette right next to the bed you are going to sow in spring.

Leave:

• Bean and pea roots. Cut the tops off at ground level and leave the roots in the soil - they hold nitrogen that the next crop will use.

• Healthy crop debris. Chop it and leave it on the surface as a mulch, or put it on the compost heap. It is food, not rubbish.

• Seedheads and hollow stems. Teasels, fennel, sunflower heads, the dead stems of last year's perennials. Birds feed on the seed all winter and insects overwinter in the hollow stems. Cutting everything down in November is tidy and it is bad for the garden.

• A pile of leaves in a corner. Hedgehogs, frogs and slow-worms all need somewhere to be, and the frogs and slow-worms are the reason your slug problem next summer is manageable.

The instinct to make a plot look tidy in November is worth resisting. A garden that has been scoured bare has also been stripped of everything that eats your pests.

What still needs doing in November?

Four jobs, and they are worth more than a weekend of digging.

1. Get the last of the garlic and broad beans in. Aquadulce Claudia sown now crops in May, ahead of the blackfly (RHS broad bean guide). Garlic will still root if it goes in early in the month; after that, start it in modules.

2. Plant bare-root fruit. November is the best month of the year for it. Trees, raspberry canes, currants, gooseberries - all cheaper bare-root and all establish better than container plants.

3. Cover the beds. Compost, leaf mould, green manure or cardboard. This is the job that pays you back in March.

4. Empty and turn the compost heap. The finished stuff at the bottom goes onto the beds. The unfinished stuff goes back in and gets a winter to carry on.

What is still growing out there in November?

More than you think, if you sowed in late summer.

Leeks, parsnips, kale, Brussels sprouts, chard, winter cabbage, swede and celeriac are all standing and will feed you through to spring. Parsnips and sprouts are genuinely better after a frost, because the plant converts starch to sugar as an antifreeze.

Corn salad, land cress, winter lettuce and mizuna sown in September should be croppable now and will keep going through the cold. Under a cloche they will barely notice the winter at all.

Garlic and overwintering onions are in the ground doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, which is nothing visible.

The plot is not asleep. It is just working somewhere you cannot see it.

The whole of November, in four lines

• Do not dig. Nothing you gain is worth what you lose.

• Cover every bed. Compost is best, cardboard will do, bare is unacceptable.

• Clear only what is diseased. Leave the seedheads, leave the leaf pile, leave the bean roots.

• Plant garlic, broad beans and bare-root fruit while there is still time.

Do those four and the soil in March will be looser, darker and more weed-free than anything a spade could have given you - and you will have spent the winter indoors.