What a wet start to the year: Torrential rain, flooding… The last thing to be worrying about is the garden. Keep off the soil, keep off the lawn, and let the land drain out a little before you go wandering about on it.
If, and it’s a big “If” in the UK, you do happen to have a dry garden, there are a few things to be doing out there. I’ll keep using Mr. Hellyer as a reference, as it makes an interesting comparisons to modern mind-sets as to those of the 1930’s.
So, what are we at?
- Keep digging are soil when you can.
- Fruit trees can still be pruned.
- Carry on forcing rhubarb and pot daffodils that you set up last October-November.
- It’s a good time to take root cuttings from Oriental Poppies, Verbascum, Phlox and Gaillardias. Pot them into small pots, then put them in a frost-free greenhouse.
- Start small salad leaves under glass.
Once, and maybe if you have an orchard, you would be spraying your trees with tar oil to kill any over-wintering insect pests and their eggs. The only down-side of this is it also kills all the useful, over-wintering insects and their eggs…
What else to do?
- Start looking through your seed catalogue. Order what you want to grow; especially seed potatoes. But don’t plant them yet!
- If you have bush roses in pots, you could put some into a greenhouse to bring them on and have an early display.
- If you fancy your chances at competition growing competition onions, start them off now in a frost-free green house, on a bed of sandy soil till the shoots are showing.
- If you have a hot bed, you could start early variety carrots. A hot-bed is a basically a trench filled with rotting manure then covered with soil. The manure will warm the soil for growth.
If you have a frost-free greenhouse, you could start:
- Sweet peas
- Begonias
- Early tomatoes
We don’t want the greenhouse too warm, else the plants will bolt and with the short days they will not be able to support their own weight.
There are some other things to do this month, but I will post those next week…