early February
And no, none of these include sowing seeds. But, oh joy of joys, they do involve setting foot outside. Most of my January jobs involve lighting the fire, finding my thickest socks and looking at seed catalogues and being thrown into acute paroxysms of unattractive envy by Arne Maynard’s kitchen garden. But yesterday, the air was sharp and the sun shone and I absolutely made the most of it. This is my jobs list for the next fortnight or so. Not all of them managed to fit into one short Saturday, but that’s life.
Go and peer at the soil
If I could give you one bit of advice about growing, it would to get to know your 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 sun bathing in July. I try and bring the spring sowings on early by growing them under glass and 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. (Thank you to Sara Venn for that reminder, soil likes to be covered and you will not be doing anyone any favours by disturbing it 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 and rogue lords and ladies 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.
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 though 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. Many of the bigger plants that are in the space destined for the community vegetable garden will be dug up at the beginning of March and moved to Ali Herbert’s garden in Nettlecombe, Dorset. 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.
Find your edges of melting
It is by no means the last frost date yet, but make the most of the ones we have. If you wake up to one of those bright, sparkly frosty mornings, put your wellies on over your pyjamas, take your phone and learn what it teaches you. The most obvious effect on melting is were the sun hits first. Take photos every ten minutes or so at the time when the sun is starting to climb in the sky and you will be able to record which get the sun first and which languish in the shade for a little longer. It isn’t just sunshine though. Frost pockets and cool spots are also about the movement of air, exposed places and dips. They aren’t always easy to predict from just looking at the landscape, but observing closely how, when and where the thaw travels across your garden will help you no end when it comes to placing plants. Oh, and where you should put your breakfast bench and your supper table. Unless you are very lucky indeed, these are unlikely to be the same place.
Remember, there are some very tender plants which are no so much damaged by frost, as by the action of a hard frost and a fast thaw. It might feel like the right thing to do to put more tender plants where they catch the first rays of the sun’s warmth, but you might need to protect frozen plants from being warmed too quickly, or place them where they can be thawed by the air warming up before the sun hits them.
Coppicing & supports
As I have been writing the planning chapter of the Gather growing course, I have thought more about structures and boundaries than I ever thought possible. With dramatic decisiveness, the whole hazel hedge along the south side of the field was coppiced to the ground. It involved a chainsaw and a lot of noise but it was disproportionately satisfying. The light flooded in and I was left with a range of shapes and sizes for tunnels, domes, teepees and pea sticks. You don’t have to go to this extreme but I would suggest thinking about it soon. Firstly because the plants that make the best plant supports (willow, hazel, cornus) are at the perfect time for coppicing or pollarding and they aren’t covered in leaves, which also helps. Secondly, if you wait until the summer when your plants are flopping all over the place and you are reactive rather than proactive, you will have a nightmare of a time trying to wrestle the plants into the supports, or by tying in already flopping plants, you break them at the base. Thirdly, the softness of the soil. I am a lazy gardener and I find persistence tricky. All of my arches and tunnels have fallen over because I do not give them enough of a foundation. The taller the structure, the more of the stick has to be below the ground. It is not an easy job to push a thick stick into clay soil, even if you have made a bit of a hole already. But you know what is even harder? Pushing a stick into baked, hard, dry soil after a hot spell at the end of May. Yes, that is the voice of experience talking.
I have left my hazel a year longer than I should have done and many of the stems resemble trunks, rather than the whippy, bendable material that one needs for true hazel domes. One of my guiding life principles is to make a feature out of my failures and so I will be building some rather robust looking structures this year. Lucky that Kristy Ramage is going to be doing the instructions for the exquisite rose domes as featured at Allt y Bela.
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 green 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.
A picture from Spring, just to remind us that it will, eventually, arrive.
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 enhance 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. This is the beautiful garden of Kraut Kopf in Germany.
The first chapter of the Gather course on growing will be launched by the middle of the month and will cover every thing you could ever possibly want to know about setting up a garden from growing flowers in a joyful sort of way. I cannot promise effortless.
Nothing worthwhile is ever effortless.