A Boston fern that’s green and gorgeous when you bring it home won’t stay that way long unless you can meet its need for humidity.

Dry air is the biggest obstacle to growing ferns as houseplants. Many ferns will do fine in typical indoor temperatures and bright light, and some will survive even in low-light situations, but they won’t compromise on humidity. In dry air, the tips of the fronds will become dry and brown.

Using humidifiers to increase the moisture levels in one room or the whole house benefits not only ferns but also parched nasal passages, glued joints in furniture, and cats and people who walk on wool carpeting, but this tends to be the most expensive alternative to dry air. There’s an initial outlay for the equipment, the cost of the energy needed to operate it and, with room units, a certain amount of tending required to keep them functioning.

How successful attempts to humidify the air can be depends to some extent on the number and type of windows in a room or house and the presence of other cold surfaces that can take water out of the air as fast as a humidifier adds it.

A low-cost, low-tech approach is simply to put ferns in an area of the house where humidity levels are naturally higher, such as a bathroom or the kitchen.

Double-potting plants is another way to add moisture to the air around them. To do to this, set the plant pot inside another, larger container and fill the space between them with peat or vermiculite and add water as needed to keep it moist. Setting individual pots or groups of plants on a tray of wet gravel accomplishes the same thing -- creating a moist microclimate around plants.

Misting plants produces only a temporary increase in humidity. Even misting several times a day has little benefit, and keeping the foliage wet this way can even promote disease development.

If you can provide the necessary humidity, a number of ferns will thrive under home conditions. Popular ones for indoor gardening include the Boston, maidenhair, sword, bird’s-nest, feather, button and staghorn ferns. The staghorn fern can be grown either in soil in a pot or on osmunda fern roots fastened to a slab of wood hung on the wall; the others prefer a soil containing at least 50 percent organic matter that’s kept moist but not soaking wet. They need protection against temperatures below 50 degrees and do best near a sunny window where they can receive direct light in winter and indirect or filtered light in summer.

The brown spots that develop on the undersides of fern fronds are no cause for alarm -- these are sporangia, the structures that produce the spores by which ferns reproduce.

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Vegetable Garden

• Harvest of late summer veges: pumpkins, marrows, potatoes, onions. Store in a cool dry shed.
• Sow seeds of beetroot, broccoli, broad beans, cabbage, carrots,onions, radish, spinach, swedes and turnips.
• Transplant seedlings of broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage,couliflower, celery, leeks, lettuce, silverbeet and spinach.
• Earth up leeks.
• Protect young seedlings from slugs and snails with Butlers Slug Snail Pellets.
• Vacant areas of the vegetable garden should be sown with a green crop such as lupin or mustard for digging in later.
• Offset winter rain by planting vegetables in raised beds. Rhubarb crowns which have become over crowded will need to be dug up, divided and replanted into compost enriched soil.
• Plant potatoes in frost-free areas.
• Plant parsley and perennial herbs.

Fruit Trees

• Most tree fruits have been harvested with the exception of late fruiting apples.
• Start your winter clean-up programme by spraying all trees with Super Copper fungicide before pruning. Sharpen all pruning gear to make the job easier.

Flower Garden

• A busy month for tidying up old summer annuals and replacing with primulas, cinerarias, nemesia, iceland poppies, calendula, stock, pansies, violas, polyanthus, penstemon, snapdragon and hollyhock.
• Sow seeds of aquilegia, alyssum, calendula, cineraria, cornflower, dianthus, English daisy, godetia, linaria, livingstone daisy, lobelia, lupin, nemesia, snapdragon, statice, stock, sweetpea and viola.
• Continue planting spring bulbs.
• Dead head roses as autumn flower finish.
• Plant trees and shrubs. At planting time add a long term fertiliser such as Osmocote or Magamp.
  
• Prune shrubs that have finished flowering.
• Lift and divide crowded perennials.

Lawns

• This is the best month for sowing new lawns and refurbishing old ones with Butlers Lawn Seed.
• Control broadleaf weeds in lawns with Turfix.
• Apply Butlers Lawn Fertiliser to all existing lawns.
• Control weeds with Roundup G11.
• Mulch all trees, shrubs and roses with Results Organic Compost.