Mulching - 15 minutes of green

February in the garden: prepare, plant and prune

5th February 2022 15th February 2024In the garden, Winter 0

February can be a frustrating month. I’m itching to clear away the winter debris but even here, in the South of England, heavy frosts and downpours (and even snow) are likely to prevent a major tidy-up for another month. My borders need their protective winter duvet of last year’s growth for just a little bit longer.

The Beast from the East in 2018 was a reminder to expect the unexpected in February

Yet, as the earliest signs of Spring begin to emerge, there are lots of things I can do to prepare my happy place for the gardening year ahead. Having been out of action for a little while, I’m excited. Here we go again!

Plan and prep

I love planning what flowers I want to surround myself with, what veg I want to eat and where it’s all going to grow.

It’s hard to imagine this…

Becoming this…

But last year it did!

The garden may not end up looking anything like the vision in my head right now, but it’s a lot of fun imagining what it could look like.

Get organized

On a more pragmatic note, it’s also worth being prepared for the frenzy of sowing and growing that is but a few weeks away. If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to check your seed packets and order in what you haven’t got, tidy your shed and wash your pots.

Organized seed packets — Check what seeds you’ve already got

You can also prepare your veg beds now by removing weeds and applying an organic mulch.

Vegetable bed mulched with garden compost — A well-mulched vegetable bed

Pruning

Many plants need to be pruned in winter when they are dormant. In my garden, this applies to the few roses that I have in pots and my apple and pear trees, and this year I’m going to have a go at some (hopefully) restorative winter pruning of honeysuckles that have become very woody.

Early sowings

February is also a good month to start sowing indoors. I’ll be getting tomatoes and aubergines started from seed this month, as well as the first of some successional sowings of lettuce, as I want to stop buying so much of it from the supermarket (it always comes wrapped in plastic!).

Indoor sowings — Last year’s indoor sowings of tomatoes, aubergines, chillis and lettuce

Bare-root planting

Winter is also the best time to plant bare-root trees and shrubs, so that they can get established before expending the energy they’ll need to produce leaves and flowers. Roses, fruit bushes and canes, hedging and dogwoods (Cornus) can all be started as bare-root plants. Last year I planted two bare-root climbing roses, which are now well established.

February checklist

It may all sound a bit daunting, but if you break it down into 15-minute tasks you’ll be surprised how much you can get done. I get a great sense of achievement from ticking things off a list, so I make a monthly checklist to help me stay on track. Take a look at my February checklist of gardening jobs, which can all be achieved 15 minutes at a time.

February-#15greenmins-checklist — February #15greenmins checklist: you can do anything for 15 minutes, including gardening!

Mega mulching

28th April 2020 28th April 2020In the garden, Spring 0

When the 900-litre bag of compost that I ordered online was first unloaded, I thought I might have miscalculated. How on earth (no pun intended), was I going to get through all of that?!

3 good reasons to mulch

Mulching (what a wonderful word!) is the best thing you can do for your garden.

Mulching reduces weeds (less weeding).
Mulching retains moisture (less watering).
Mulching improves the structure of your soil (healthier plants).

‘Black gold’

I have heavy clay soil, so I try to add as much organic material as I can throughout the year from my two compost bins, along with various shredded materials. But this year, with a bit more time on my hands than usual thanks to Lockdown, I decided to give my garden a treat and mulch on a much grander scale.

And so I found myself ordering a whole lot of compost mix called ‘black gold’, a blend of peat-free soil improver and well-rotted farmyard dung and animal bedding.

Premium mulch — *‘Black gold’: a premium blend of soil improver and well-rotted manure*

Wheelbarrows of mulch

Shifting all that compost was a bit of a daunting task, but I was soon pushing wheelbarrows heaped with organic goodness across my lawn and shovelling heaps of it onto my borders.

Mulching depth

The thickness of your mulch matters! It is better to pile 2–4 inches of mulch on a small area of soil around your plants than spread it thinly across a larger area. A thick mulch will prevent annual weeds from growing by cutting out the light.

Ideally, you should do all your weeding and plant dividing before you mulch, as the less it is disturbed the better. I’d managed the weeding part, but I fully expect to be dividing and moving various plants over the coming weeks, so it will have to put up with a bit of disturbance.

Mulch your borders — *Add 2–4 inches of mulch to your borders and try to leave it undisturbed to fully reap the benefits*

The end result

Within 2 days I had emptied the bag, spreading all that organic loveliness, across the borders and raised beds in my front and back gardens. In fact, I still had two borders to do when I ran out, so they will be treated to my homemade compost instead.

The borders are looking so much better for it, and I know the plants will benefit.

It turned out to be a pretty good workout too. Bonus!

Chop, shred, mulch!

6th April 2017 6th April 2017In the garden, Spring 0

It’s good to leave the ‘skeletons’ of some herbaceous plants standing over winter. The natural scaffolding and seed heads of Sedum spectabile (ice plant), Eryngium (sea holly) and ornamental grasses help to protect the tender crowns from the sharpest frosts, provide a cosy home for insects and add general winter interest to the garden.

The seed heads of Sedum spectabile provided great winter interest in the garden

But now that things are warming up, it’s time to remove last year’s debris and let fresh green leafiness take free reign once more.

Get chopping (or pulling)

If you haven’t done so already, don’t delay, get chopping! Secateurs work best for most herbaceous perennials. Cut as close to the crown as you can, cutting at an angle to prevent water collecting inside and rotting the crown, or cut just above any fresh new growth.

In fact, at this time of year, you’ll be able to simply pull some of the hollow dead stems out from the base of the plant without cutting at all.

The joy of shredding

Remove any diseased material, but don’t throw the rest. It’s fabulous organic material that can be put back to use around the garden.

After three 15-minute sessions I had a huge bag of shreddable material

Ideally, shred it. Most domestic shredders will cope with woody stems less than 3–4 cm (1¼-1½ inches) in diameter. I shredded the above bagful of woody material last weekend. The shredder made a hell of a racket (for which I profusely apologise to my neighbours), but within 15 minutes I had reduced one large bag of winter debris to a bucketful of useful chippings; wonderful ‘brown’ material for the compost bin, or a fabulous mulch for the borders.

15 minutes of shredding produced a bucketful of compostable organic material

If you don’t have a shredder, then simply cut up what you can into bitesize pieces. It all helps!

I add all my ‘shreddings’ to the compost bin. Alongside all the kitchen waste, it makes great compost.

A barrowful of homemade compost – great for spring mulching

Marvellous mulch

Which brings me to the last of this trio of spring jobs: ‘tis the season to get mulching! According to Monty Don (my husband has been hearing that phrase a lot lately):, mulching is “probably the best single investment of time and money that anyone could put into their garden”* for 3 reasons:

1. Mulching reduces weeds.

2. Mulching retains moisture.

3. Mulching improves the structure of your soil.

Oh, and it makes the garden look tidier too! What’s not to like about mulch? (I love the word ‘mulch’!)

To be honest, until this year my mulching has been rather sporadic, mainly because I only have 2 smallish compost bins and have never produced enough material to get around all the borders. But this year, I went the whole hog and ordered 900 litres of soil conditioner, which I’m currently spreading around my garden with wild abandon.

A mulched border – weed free, water retentive, and the earthworms will be happy too

My garden has been giving me so much pleasure for so many years that I felt like it deserved a treat (and there was a special offer on at B&Q), especially as I have heavy clay soil that needs all the help it can get.

Try to do as much work in your borders as you can before you mulch (weeding, dividing perennials etc.) so that you disturb them as little as possible afterwards. Then pile the mulch on the soil surface and around the bases of your plants to about 2 inches thick, taking care not to smother the crowns. The earthworms will do the rest.

Pile the mulch around your herbaceous plants, up to 2 inches think and up to the bases

Pile the mulch around your herbaceous plants, up to 2 inches thick and up to the bases

Finding the time

It sounds a lot of work, but 15 minutes of cutting, shredding or mulching at a time and you’ll soon have it done. And when you’re sitting back with a glass of wine in the evening sunshine (hmm, we can but hope!), you’ll be glad you did it, 15 minutes of green at a time.

After all that mulching, find the time to enjoy your spring garden

Let me know whether you mulch your garden, and what with.

*https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/mar/05/gardens

Tag: Mulching