February in the garden: prepare, plant and prune

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…

Pretidy winter garden
February 2022

Becoming this…

June flower border 2021
June 2021

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.

Apple-tree-pruning
Prune apple trees in winter while they are dormant

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!

Time for a spring clean

It’s that time of year when everything starts to change. We’ve certainly seen a bit of everything from the weather, including glorious sunshine and blue skies, cold frosty mornings and, currently, a double-barrelled storm of torrential rain and fierce winds. It’s a wonder our plants have any idea what to do, but our gardens march on regardless.

Mine started timidly flicking colour onto the canvas last week, unorganized bursts of random energy in an otherwise Jackson Pollock-esque tangle of winter debris.

Messy spring garden
Splashes of colour hidden among winter debris

Time for a tidy up

It spurred me into some much-needed spring cleaning, and over the past week I have gradually chopped and weeded away most of the vestiges of winter. After all, what is the point of planting spring bulbs if you fail to show off their cheery loveliness when they emerge.

Spring cleaned border
The same border after a thorough spring clean

Armed with a trowel and a pair of secateurs, I have worked my way around the main borders. Weeds in one bucket, anything shreddable in another.

Before and after

It has made such a difference – to the garden and my mood – as I now feel (despite the return of some gloomy weather) that Spring has finally arrived on my patch. Here are my before and afters.

Before and after garden border - weeding and chopping 01
Before and after garden border - weeding and chopping 02
Before and after garden border - weeding and chopping 03
Before and after garden border - weeding and chopping 04

When it comes to spring cleaning the house or the garden, I know where I’d rather be! There is nothing more satisfying. Happy spring gardening everyone.

Preparing raised vegetable beds in 2 easy steps

I don’t have a huge garden but, despite my passion for perennials, I have made room to grow a few vegetables. After all, there is nothing more satisfying than eating your own produce.

Vegetables in raised beds and pots
The vegetable patch

I have two raised vegetable beds, each about 1.2m x 1.2m, and the rest I grow in grow bags, pots and sacks. This means I can tend to my veggies without ever having to walk on the soil, which reduces the amount of digging I have to do (anything for an easy life!).

Growing veggies in raised beds, pots and sacks
Vegetable growing in raised beds, pots and sacks

Two-step veg bed preparation

To prepare the beds for this year’s veggies I have done two things:

  1. Removed the weeds
  2. Added organic matter

Remove weeds

The raised beds had got a bit weedy over the last couple of months.

Weedy raised bed

So, I removed the weeds manually with my trusty trowel – in two 15-minute sessions – making sure to remove all the roots.

I left the fennel and foxgloves that had seeded in there, as I never say no to free plants that can be put somewhere else in the garden.

Weeded vegetable bed

Add an organic mulch

I then spread a couple of buckets of garden compost over the top, a great mulch that will suppress any more weeds from coming through. It should break down under the inevitable blanket of frost and/or snow that will arrive over the next few weeks, and the worms will work their magic, putting nutrients back into the bed and improving the soil structure.

Vegetable bed mulched with garden compost
Well-mulched vegetable beds

Now I just have to wait for the temperatures to improve.

In the meantime, I am sorting my seeds and making plans in the hope of a bumper harvest of my own produce later in the year.

Vegetable harvest

Mega mulching

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?!

900-litre bag of mulch
900-litre bag of mulch

3 good reasons to mulch

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

  1. Mulching reduces weeds (less weeding).
  2. Mulching retains moisture (less watering).
  3. 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.

A wheelbarrow full of mulch
A wheelbarrow full of mulch

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.

Border weeded and mulched
Border weeded and mulched – tick!

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