Although you might think that January is a quiet time in the garden and your uninspiring borders appear to contain nothing but dull brown twigs, you could be missing out on some of winter’s most stunning plants.
Winter gardens don’t have to be elaborate affairs – even a potful of pansies placed in front of a variegated evergreen can be as pretty as a picture. Look for a suitable sunny and sheltered spot in full view of your house and pack it with plants for winter interest.
Favourite winter shrubs include Lonicera fragrantissima, Hamamelis mollis and its x intermedia variety ‘Jelena’, and Mahonia ‘Charity’, which all earn their keep by pumping out perfumes to die for; and others such as Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’ and the red-twig dogwood, Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’, which have colourful naked stems that appear to leap out of borders like flames from a fire.
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To prepare the ground for planting, choose a day when the soil isn’t waterlogged or hardened by frost and dig in some well-rotted garden compost or manure, to improve the soil structure and increase its fertility, as well as its ability to retain moisture.
Hellebores will already be showing their faces in the shadiest patches of the garden, so make a trip to the garden centre now to pick up more of these seasonal plants that can be used to wake up your garden in a matter of minutes. If you already have hellebores growing in your garden, you may want to remove the old leaves to make the new blooms more visible as they emerge.
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If you’re a gardener with your wits about you, you’ll no doubt want to get a head start on planning and planting for a riot of colour this summer. You can raise plants from seed on a warm windowsill indoors – plants to sow now include begonias, snapdragons, bedding geraniums or pelargoniums, lobelias and climbing Cobaea, Thunbergia and Rhodochiton.
Make sowing easier by mixing the fine seed of lobelias with dry silver sand. Pricking out will also be easier if you sow the mixture in lines 13mm apart in a seed tray, so you can tease out small groups of seedlings to grow on in small pots.
You can also get started with vegetable growing: on a bright, cool windowsill, sow trays of lettuce, summer cabbage and cauliflowers, plus round varieties of carrots, spinach, salad onions and turnips. You can also sow leeks, onions, broad beans, spinach and hardy peas.
Now’s also the time to tidy trees and shrubs: using a pruning saw, remove any damaged or diseased wood. This will prevent rot setting in and diseases such as coral spot spreading from branches. If you decide to have a bonfire, ensure there aren’t any hedgehogs hibernating in the wood stack.
Spear & Jackson Spear & Jackson 4938PS Fixed Blade Pruning Saw, Silver, 39x7x1 cm
Build a green roof
Give your shed and outbuildings a green roof and you’ll create a home for wildlife. Perfect for cities, green roofs also help to clean air by absorbing pollution and help to cool down the heat generated by the concrete jungle.
Always make sure that your building can take the extra weight, then create a frame, fill it with soil and roll out some sedum matting – it’s as simple as that!
Experiment with potatoes
There’s a debate about whether ‘chitting’ makes any actual difference to potato yield. To test this for yourself, chit a batch of first earlies now by putting the seed potatoes in egg boxes in a cool, well-lit place and leaving them until shoots to appear.
Then make a comparison by planting the chitted potatoes next to a batch that you plant direct in the garden in late March. They should be ready to lift in June and July.
Last chance to…
… Prune wisteria, cutting back side-shoots to two or three buds.
… Force rhubarb by placing an upturned bin over the crown.
… Wash the greenhouse roof to remove dirt and grime and let in more light.
