![Sweet peas from home grown seed often show attractive variations in colour. Sweet peas from home grown seed often show attractive variations in colour.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/yLeFMnh28MAxupuQMFvs9Q/186df8c4-2563-4f23-b9ae-29416b02dbf3.jpg/r0_0_2048_1536_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Sweet peas setting seed are a good sign Christmas isn't far off.
Subscribe now for unlimited access to all our agricultural news
across the nation
or signup to continue reading
There's lots to do in the garden in December but collecting sweet pea pods is top of my list.
This year most of my sweet peas were self-sown and some had beautifully streaked and speckled flowers, which I hope will reappear next year.
I'm also saving the last of Bill's broad beans to sow next March, as the few remaining pods are turning brown, a sign that the beans are past their best.
Related reading:
Recent storms caused several of our dwarf fruit trees to become distinctly unsteady on their feet, leaning sideways with their roots showing.
The trees had put on a lot of growth and badly needed stabilising.
We started by giving each tree a bucket of compost, firming it down, watering it in and covering it with mulch.
We then hammered in iron star posts, two per tree, and tied them together in a figure of eight round the tree trunks. We did this using twist tie rubber coated wire ($5 for five metres, from garden centres).
This dark green wire is unobtrusive but strong and the rubber coating prevents it cutting into the bark.
The peach and nectarine trees were still suffering from leaf curl despite having been sprayed twice during late winter.
Symptoms are under-developed, curled, distorted leaves, pale green before turning brown or purple.
The cause is a fungus that attacks the leaf buds.
As the leaf emerges from the bud the fungus goes with it, hence the need to spray at budswell.
The distorted leaves eventually fall and new leaves emerge, so spraying with an all-purpose fungicide now should help the trees to recover during summer.
Leaf curl can cause shoot dieback and loss of crop and if uncontrolled, will weaken the tree until it dies.
The cool, wet spring and late advent of hot summer weather combined this year to encourage the fungus.
Now that the weather has finally warmed up, it's time to check that my pots are staying damp.
Even the best quality potting mix dries out in hot weather and water then runs off, rather than penetrating to the plant's roots where it's needed.
A soil wetting agent like Debco's SaturAid sprinkled on the soil surface solves the problem and you can use it on garden beds too.
Weeding is an ongoing chore in wet weather, though a thick mulch of lucerne hay is a huge help.
Watch out for tree weeds - maples and oaks are the worst offenders but can be easily remove when they are young.
Last summer when I ran out of compost space I piled the weeds up in empty spaces among shrubs and added a few cow pats to help them rot.
It was slow but it worked and I could then rake the compost straight onto the garden.
This was far easier than barrowing it from the compost heap so this year I'm repeating the process.
Final December task is to pot up my lavender cuttings, so they are ready to plant in March.
Subscribers have access to download our free app today from the App Store or Google Play