Peter Dowdall: Get out in the garden and get planting this weekend. Your future self will thank you in spring

If those bags of bulbs are still sitting by the back door, don’t feel guilty. November is the perfect time. The soil is still soft, and the temperatures are cool enough. Bulbs are wonderfully forgiving, and there’s still time for them to settle in

Planting bulbs such as this Scilla siberica now will not only bring colour next spring but also a valuable food source for pollinators, writes Peter Dowdall. File picture

There's a certain comfort in planting bulbs in November. The rest of the garden might be fading fast, with damp leaves clinging to paths, temperatures dropping and daylight fading fast, but there’s something wonderfully hopeful about kneeling down to tuck little bulbs into the energy of the soil, knowing that they’ll lie there quietly all winter, doing absolutely nothing that we can see and then, come spring, they’ll burst into life as if by magic.

November is, in many ways, the perfect month for it. The soil is still soft enough to dig, the temperatures are cool enough now that they don’t begin to grow too early and most importantly, there’s still time for them to settle in before the worst of the winter sets in.