Love Your Garden This February!

February may be a month when people share their love, but it’s also the best time to get back into your garden to plan and prepare for the coming growing season.  A simple way of spreading love in the garden is to make sure you give your plants and shrubs some much needed mulching with compost or manure, along with a quick trim in the form of seasonal pruning to get them ready for the start of spring.

A February feel good moment for gardeners growing their own veg is definitely chitting potatoes …signposting warmer weather and longer days are on the way.  Potatoes are grown from specially prepared ‘seed potatoes’ (small tubers), usually planted in spring. With early varieties, the seed potatoes can be chitted (or encouraged to sprout) before planting, to get them off to a good start and produce an earlier crop. You can grow potatoes in a small bed, large container or grow bag and they have wonderful spreading leaves and pretty purple or white flowers that appear before harvesting.

Braving the cold, February flowers such as snowdrops, irises, cyclamen and hellebores bring much needed colour and excitement to the garden along with the first tree blossoms.  Both Blackthorn and Cherry Plum can be seen this month.  Blackthorn trees have clouds of snow-white flowers in early spring. They’re best known for their rich, inky, dark fruits used to make sloe gin.  Spiny and densely branched, mature trees can grow to a height of around 6–7m and live for up to 100 years. Cherry Plum is an ancestor of the domestic plum and one of the first trees to blossom in the UK, with singular white petal flowers. It’s a broadleaf deciduous tree and can grow to 8m.

A garden favourite that has a delicate ‘blossom’ in the spring and early summer but only grows to around 1m tall is the evergreen, perennial shrub Rosemary Rosmarinus officinalis.  Loved by pollinators attracted to its small blue or white flowers, Rosemary requires minimal pruning and attention.  It is hardy enough to survive the winter months and can live for up to twenty years.  It’s also a versatile culinary herb and used as a herbal infusion.  Rosemary tea contains compounds shown to have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial effects and can help reduce anxiety and boost mood.

 

There are definite signs of the approaching spring, with bulbs appearing and wildlife waking up and here are top tips for the month from the RHS:

• Prepare vegetable seed beds and sow some vegetables under cover
• Chit potatoes
• Net fruit and vegetable crops to keep the birds off
• Prune winter-flowering shrubs that have finished flowering
• Divide bulbs such as snowdrops
• Lily bulbs can be planted in pots
• Prune Wisteria, Buddleia and Hydrangea
• Renovate overgrown hedges with pruning
• Clear up weedy beds before mulching
• At end of month, start cutting back deciduous ornamental grasses to allow new growth to come through

 

And finally …

“There is always in February some one day, at least, when one smells the yet distant, but surely coming, summer.”  Gertrude Jekyll