Traditionally a quiet time in the garden, early in the New Year is a perfect time to step back and assess your garden and to fit in all those jobs you normally don’t have time to do.
Traditionally a quiet time in the garden, early in the New Year is a perfect time to step back and assess your garden and to fit in all those jobs you normally don’t have time to do.
A lot of people focus on house plants at this time of year, but Dobbies recommend also looking at your garden critically to gauge what worked and what didn’t.
Try thinking about when your plants flower, checking to see if you have a succession of flowerings, not just a burst in spring or in summer. Also, consider if all your plants are in the best place, if they didn’t fare to well, perhaps they would benefit from a sunnier or shadier spot or a damper location?
If you feel you could benefit from a fresh eye, why not take specialist advice? Amongst other things, Dobbies experts can help trouble shoot, advise on new plants to liven up your garden, plants that would work well in specific conditions and plants that bloom at specific times of year.
There’s also a number of jobs that are ideally suited to this time of year. It’s the perfect time to look through seed catalogues, planning your bedding and herbaceous plants.
Also, as most gardeners know, 90% of soil is preparation and, with the frost still lying, it’s a perfect opportunity to improve the condition of your soil via soil conditioner. Sold at all good garden centres, simply throw it on top of your garden soil and it will work its way down with the action of the frost.
It’s also the perfect chance to get hard landscaping tasks out of the way before the main growing season. Think about repairing or building trellises, pergolas and other climbing structures, walls and fences and even decking. As long as you wrap up warm and the ground isn’t frozen too solid for you to put posts in – it’s an ideal opportunity to devote time to tasks like this.
Other beneficial jobs include, cleaning and sterilising your pots and containers ready for potting up seedlings, getting rid of any fungal spores or diseases that may be lurking. You can start warming the soil for new plants by placing cloches over your ground, preventing frost from getting to it and making is usable earlier in the spring.
One way of balancing the bloom periods in your garden is to propagate a number of bedding plants and some herbaceous perennials indoors to produce earlier flowering in May or June instead of July or August time.
Don’t forget that you can also plant January potted bulbs just coming into flower, like Snowdrops and Eranthis, sometimes referred to as winter aconite. By February you can also plant crocuses and tulip varieties that are in bud.
Other top tips from Dobbies are to keep clearing out dead leaves, but don’t tidy up too much. An idea is to leave a small area a little untidy, creating an ideal habitat for animals and insects to winter in. Also, a great way to make sure fish ponds don’t freeze is to place a football into the pond and the best way to unfreeze it is to place a pan of boiling hot water onto the ice. This melts it slowly as smashing or breaking the ice will produce sound vibrations that can damage fish.
If you manage to do all this as the New Year unfolds you’ll certainly have worked off any extra Christmas pounds that are still lurking!
