Must do by the end of January!
Sorry, can’t stop. Must dash. Don’t you realise it’s nearly the END OF JANUARY!!! And I still haven’t finished planting the garlic! Let alone pruned the apple trees or mulched the veg beds or…
Yep, I’m well on the road to my annual all-out late winter panic.
The trouble with the colder months of the year is that you know you won’t be doing a lot of gardening as nothing is growing, so you make lots of ambitious plans about redesigning the second terrace and putting in the zig-zag raised beds in the veg garden at last even though you know either one of those two jobs will take you at least two months of hard graft.
Then the rain comes down… and down… and down… and you’re lucky if you can still see the terrace let alone re-landscape it. You spend at least half your allotted winter-projects time scowling out of the window and counting how many days you’ve lost to the weather so far.
Some jobs I’ve had to write off: there comes a point where you just have to accept that you’re not going to manage to grow winter salads in the greenhouse this year when you’re still in the middle of changing over the soil in the borders and it’s mid-December.
But all is not lost, this is still time to squeeze in those jobs you should have wrapped up by the end of winter. As long as you do everything at around twice normal speed, get a head torch so you can carry on gardening after 5pm, give up eating, talking to your husband or sleeping when it gets really bad, these are the winter jobs it’s still not too late to finish:
- Planting garlic: garlic cloves need up to two months at 10°C or lower in order to split into bulbs, so your chances of growing good garlic diminish with every day you delay sowing past the end of December. Do it in the next day or so, though, and you’ve got a fighting chance.
- Planting fruit trees: there’s a good argument for letting container-grown fruit trees sit out the winter still in their pots. As long as you have them planted by very early spring (February) they’ll spend their time growing instead of sitting in winter wet rotting their roots.
- Planting bare-root fruit: there can be some real bargains in the bare-root fruit department in late January, as long as you don’t mind having less choice. Same applies as for fruit trees: plant them by early February and they’ll establish straight away.
- Pruning fruit trees and bushes: apples, pears, blackcurrants, raspberries: all need some TLC while they’re dormant and won’t notice a snip or two. Get your skates on if you haven’t done it by end of January: they start waking up from mid-February.
- Planting tulips: not, strictly speaking, my department. All I know is every year I intend to plant them in November: every year I still have some left in January. However, I recently read about an experiment which got flowers (albeit late) from tulips planted in February: so there is still hope.
- Mulching: I usually reckon on having my veg beds thickly mulched before winter sets in, to keep the frost off, rain in, weeds out. You know the drill. But since I’ve been building my veg garden, the mulching has fallen by the wayside this year. No matter: as long as you get it done before it’s planted, it’ll still do the job.
- Stocking up on seed trays, pots, compost and seeds: there won’t be a moment to do this next month as you’re cracking open the first seed packets, and you don’t want to reach out for a pot (or your favourite varieties of carrot/beetroot/lettuce delete as necessary) and find it’s not there.
