the garden in february
February started glorious, and turned soggy. Even as I revelled in the spring, I knew it wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. But we plugged on regardless because whilst it feels like you have all the time in the world, March will soon be upon us, and you will wish you’d washed your pots and ordered your compost in February.
The day that I wrote this (10th Feb) is a biodynamically unfavourable day, which means I should touch neither fruit nor flower nor root nor leaf. So what does that leave? It leaves raking up leaves and twigs from the hoggin paths, finishing the woven fence, and washing the greenhouse.
Sunday is, joy of joys, a flower day. And I am going big guns on the seed sowing. Ok, maybe not big guns because the secret to lasting happiness is successional sowing (little and often) but I am going to delight in every moment.
For the earth:
compost
I make incredible compost in the summer months. All that green and an obsession with getting enough woodchip in means that I get great, rich, fast compost. In the winter months, with no weeds and no grass clippings, the heap is a cool one, and a slow one. This doesn’t mean you have just forget about it though; a turn about now will do it the world of good in terms of getting air in and giving you a chance to assess. Too dry, add a little water. Cold, wet, and claggy, add some scrunched up cardboard or shredded paper.
Leaf mould
If you put leaf mould into compost bags in the autumn as I did, it is worth sprinkling them with a little water just to keep the decomposition going. If you have mains tap water and no rainwater, leave it to stand for 24 hours (you don’t want to kill all your lovely microbes) and use a watering can with a fine rose. You are aiming for even dampness, not soggy patches.
MULCH
A recent convert to the miracle that is mulching, I have engaged with it with zeal. Mulching means covering your soil with a protective layer. If you can bear such a painful metaphor, soil exposed to the air is like a body without skin, and it will cover itself as quickly as possibly to prevent damage and erosion something we know as weeds. If you want soil in good heart (and fewer weeds), never dig it, and get something on top of it asap.
In the long term, I hope that my mulching needs will be minimal because of of my soil will be covered by stable, quite dense, perennial planting. However, whilst the majority of my plants are in the ground, many are quite small still and, what with having to leave them with gaps for growing, there is a lot of blank space in between. A few options:
Rake up leaves from under deciduous trees and scatter them in a thickish layer over your beds
Buy in compost - the green waste ‘compost’ that you can get from the local tip really isn’t compost because it isn’t alive. It has been sterilised, for very good reason, because I for one am not signing up to import Himalayan balsam into my back garden. This means it does take some time to get innoculated with good microbes, something that happens quite naturally if you layer it over microbially rich, healthy soil. Basically, you mulch with it.
Use the compost you made. This does suggest that you made hay when the sun shone, or at least you stacked up all your green waste with a few browns when the garden was in full production. I did, but I am still not mulching with my precious black gold. Compost shrinks like you wouldn’t believe and it doesn’t go very far. I am using it for extra special plants, the last but one layer of the planned raised beds in the kitchen garden, and for innoculating biochar. The other reason I would never use my living compost as a mulch is that soil microbes tend to be killed by exposure to ultraviolet light (another reason not to dig) and carefully laying it all out as a top layer of mulch is the equivalent of putting my pale, February legs out in the midday Caribbean sun without sunscreen. You are carefully frazzling everything important.
Ok ok, so what do I use? Woodchip. Absolutely swear by it. Rots down, but does it slowly, so you don’t have to mulch all that often. Stays (mostly) where you put it and doesn’t blow around or wash away. Holds in moisture but lets the soil breathe. It is easy to get hold of, and relatively cheap. I pay a bit extra for mine from a local saw mill to just make sure that it isn’t too much conifer. Tree surgeons will often drop off loads for free but most of the work that they do seems to be leylandii and/or a lot of bark, so I do choose to go the extra mile. Absolutely worth it. And great for paths too, except in the muddiest of areas.
If you were particularly sharp-eyed, you’d have noticed I’d missed green manures. For good reason, they won’t germinate in February. I’ll talk about them a lot more in autumn though. I am even more in love with them than I am with woodchip.
For the birds
February can have cold days and warm days. In that order, they are not a problem. Trouble starts when an unseasonably mild spell is followed by a cold snap. We can’t control the weather but we can try and give the right support to keep birds going. Food, obviously, but also water. Clean feathers and tip top plumage is required to fight off the cold.
New arrivals, such as winter thrushes, will thrive on windfall fruit so don’t clear up too carefully. However, make sure you sweep up spilt peanuts and seeds if they have come out of the feeders. Cleanliness is next to godliness when it comes to this. Yes, rats.
Start to plan for the breeding season. In an ideal world, we would ensure that natural habitats would be protected and abundant. Trees, scrubby bushes and unmanicured hedges. However, this is not an ideal world and so putting up artificial (but tailored) nest boxes is the next best thing. The style of the nest boxes is determined by the habits of the individual birds. The RSPB can give you guidance but my best advice would be to avoid anything too ornamental. Oh, and out it somewhere high up out of reach of cats, and out of direct sunlight.
For the flowers
Prune roses
Sometimes I do this in January, sometimes I am able to be patient. Or disorganised. However, Becca of The Garden Gate Flower Company, and the resident Gather rose expert, told me to wait until February. The thinking being that pruning triggers growth, and you really don’t want to do that when it is is very cold.
Clean your secateurs first, have a look at the shape of the plant, and aim for a goblet shape (as in, anything in the middle of the goblet and heading inwards towards the centre of the bush is cut away). Aim to remove about a third of the growth, although I find roses incredibly forgiving and have cut them right back and they’ve been fine.
I have one plant that has sent up one big sucker from the rootstock (roses are grafted) and I need to get that off before it drains all the energy away from the rose I actually want.
I am also putting a note in my diary for mid-March to start feeding the roses. They are getting on a bit now and I think I need to take their care a little more seriously.
go and peer at what is growing in the soil
If I could give you one bit of advice about growing, it would be to learn how to identify self-sown seedlings. Nature and serendipity are infinitely better gardeners than I am. I am consistently late with my autumn sowing of hardy annuals. I always forget biennials because I’d rather be sunbathing in July. I try and bring the spring sowings on early by growing them under glass but then my watering is patchy and progress is stunted. In contrast, the patch where the honesty was last year and has now been planted with garlic is thick with the most perfect, unblemished Lunaria seedlings. The peony bed has the most perfect carpet of Phacelia green manure which I did not plan at all.
I am not recommending you start weeding now. What I mean is going and have a look at it. You may find some treasures. My old squash patch, destined for sweet peas and eating beans, does have sticky burrs in it, but it also is dappled with hairy, light green plants that I know to be poppies. Poppies are tricky to germinate from a packet, but get a few going and you’ll have them forever. Poppies hate root disturbance so I won’t be moving them anywhere but there are other seedlings that I might just slip a trowel under and move them to where I want them.
Last chance for moving perennials
Although there are signs of growth at the base of many of the perennials, I know that there is more cold still to come. I have started to cut back and to label which ones I want to move, or move on. I have tried with Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’, I really have, but I just don’t like it. I do lots of just sort of standing around and being a bit overwhelmed by options and choices and wondering what on earth to do. I have been doing this long enough to know that this is just part of the process of redesigning, so I don’t panic. It is so easy to try and plan a garden from the kitchen table, but one does really have to go and stand in the middle of it for the real creative work to be done.
START PREPARING THE GREENHOUSE
My greenhouse leaks. Only on one side and only over a particular area but nevertheless, it means that my greenhouse is a little damper and a little greener than I would like. As I was rummaging around trying to find some loppers yesterday, I found a soggy bag of muscari that somehow got missed in the big bulb plant. There are pots with very dead tomato vines and a stubbornly living fig tree which my mother gave me because it has frustratingly been on the point of expiring for about five years now. There is some Ikea glassware that I know I don’t want but my sustainability conscience won’t allow me to just discard. There are old, cracked labels and more pots than you can comfortably imagine.
It needs a sweep out, an old compost bag filled with rubbish and a bucket putting under the leak and I will feel ready for anything.
The planting around the greenhouse was quite tall last year and I think this contributed to the damp inside it. Some of the panes have turned slightly green and will need a clean before the seedlings go in. Good light in the early stages of the season is one of the big reasons why a greenhouse trumps a windowsill every time (light coming from above, rather than the side, helps with the growth). I am going to have to get a bucket of hot water and give the whole thing a swab down.
Top tip: All the old school ‘experts’ say that Jeyes fluid or the like will assist with keeping the greenhouse clean. However, everything that drains off the greenhouse goes straight into my asparagus bed, so there is no chance I am doing that. After a sponge down with a bucket of hot not soapy water, I will mist with white vinegar and polish with the weekend’s edition of the Guardian.
LESS DREAMING, MORE PLANNING
If you are anything like me, you will have been dreaming about summer since last September. Now is the time to start moving from such fantasies and start making it happen. Having a look in your seed tin. What have you got and what do you need? Not just varieties, but have a look at the season. Is everything you have an early bloomer and you have nothing in September? Is it all flowers and no foliage? Where are the gaps in the borders that irritated you last year that you might need to get ahead of this year? Top marks if you kept photographic records throughout the season. My planning efforts are greatly enhanced by looking at people’s gardens from above. The actual layout and geography of a garden is rarely visible from the ground, even if you can feel it in your bones if it is a bit off. This winter’s snow has meant that the drones have been out in droves. Very very helpful indeed.
If you would like a copy of the Gather calendar which summarises all the year’s jobs on one useful sheet of paper that you can print out and stick on your fridge/diary/potting shed wall, just click on the button to download.