Nature is Calling

Two cuts, six months apart, and they do different jobs. Which buddleja you have decides the timing, and getting that wrong costs a whole year of flower.

Deciding when to sow broad beans for overwintering in the UK is less about the date than about what your ground is doing. Here is how to read your own plot, and when a February sowing beats a November one.

One owner is broadly satisfied with this shredder and another is not, and they agree on one thing: it is a different machine once the material has dried. Leave green stalks and leaves a fortnight to dry, says the first. Wait for autumn, says the one who gave up on their bushes after 45 minutes.

It has turned orange and it is late September. Cut now and it may slump before the 31st; leave it and one frost can end it. Here is how to read the fruit, not the calendar.

A bare plum in February looks like the obvious moment to prune. It sits deep inside the nine months when a fresh cut is an open door to silver leaf. Here are the two safe windows, and the signs on the tree that decide which one is yours.

Order this cover once and it may be the best you have owned. Order the same listing again three years later and 26 of the last 100 UK buyers say what turns up is a thinner, shinier thing, and seven of them sent it straight back.

Seventy litres on the badge, a 60 x 35cm bed in the listing's own diagram. Here is what the MoverX folding wagon really swallows, and which buyers it leaves stranded in a field.

Autumn is not the month for the main rose prune. Here is the one cut worth making before the winter gales, which roses should not be touched now, and what waits until February.

Nobody buys a hori hori for the sheath, and then they spend their reviews arguing about it: cheap nylon that will not survive a working environment, says one buyer with 40-odd hours on the blade; worth having precisely because the tool is so sharp, says another. The blade starts a second argument, over the word Razorsharp.

Fill one of these to the brim with wet hedge cuttings and you will not be lifting it into a hatchback. That is the interesting part of Singwow's best-selling 500L sacks: the fabric copes better than the buyer's back does.

Mild, damp autumn nights keep UK slugs feeding on broad beans, sweet peas and winter salads long after summer ends. Here is how to protect autumn seedlings now and cut next spring's slug pressure at the same time.

Clouds of flies around your compost bin mean exposed scraps and a wet mix, not a lost cause. Five practical steps for UK gardeners: identify the fly, bury and cover, rebalance and turn, trap the adults, then fly-proof the setup for good.