Sarah from Edible garden has shared her top tips for autumn fruit trees & vines with us. Mulching, plant ties, mowing under trees and frost protection – it’s all here.

• Mulch to conserve moisture. Check soil conditions to make sure trees are receiving adequate water. Water well and deep - drippers and soak hoses are ideal. Remember your shallow rooted citrus - if they don’t receive adequate water in summer/autumn, their fruit in winter will be pithy and dry. Seaweed foliar feeds or seaweed at the base helps. Mulching under feijoas will make fruit collection easier.
• Check your plant ties to ensure that they are still secure, but not overly tight. Scale insects cluster around ties, so replace if necessary. Check your plant stakes are secure.
• Mow under nut trees. Short grass allows easy collection of fallen nuts, especially if you’re hand raking to collect them. Dry nuts out of the sun for a month - an old inner sprung mattress base is ideal. Once dried, store in onion sacks away from rodents - hang from garage rafters if possible.
• Net or bag ripening grapes to ward off birds and wasps.
• Burn any prunings or leaf litter lying around under your fruit trees. This will avoid the spread of overwintering insects and diseases – especially trees that have suffered leaf curl and brown rot. Remove all mummified fruit as well. Passion vine hoppers have been a huge problem this summer - remove any branches that have eggs along with their stems.
• Think about frost protection for citrus, tamarillo and passion fruit. Either spray with liquid frost cloth or make straw bale houses around citrus, then secure frost cloth over the top.
• Place corrugated cardboard around trunks of pip fruit as a trap for pests, like codling moth. Then remove in winter and burn. Or make a sticky trap to stop larvae migrating up or down the trees – simply place a band of tinfoil around the tree trunk, and slather on something slick - grease, vaseline or a product like a tangle trap.
• Spray with winter mineral oil to protect plants like gooseberry and apples against mites - we recommend Enspray 99 an organic mineral oil.
• Spray pip and stone fruit with lime sulphur as a late autumn/pre-winter clean-up - to target mites, scale, aphids, leaf curl and fungi. Remember this can burn off the foliage, lichen pests and diseases, so only apply in cool months. Avoid using on apricots which are sulphur sensitive. NEVER mix with other products (especially copper) and allow two-four weeks before applying copper or spraying oil onto fruit trees.
• It’s your last chance for a post-harvest clean-up on brambles and raspberries. Prune out the spent canes, or mark with ties so you know which ones to remove in winter, and tie new season canes in place.