Garden Checklist: 10 Tasks to Give Your Garden a Head Start in January

Winter has arrived along with the cold weather, but don’t get those winter blues because spring is just around the corner! So what can we do to protect our plants and to get ready to get growing?
In this week’s episode Ben shares some handy tips you can use to get the most from your garden by protecting it and preparing it to grow grow grow!

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Yes it’s wet, yes it’s windy and it’s blooming cold too, but do you know what? The days  are already starting to get longer and I am positively luxuriating in  the extra 10 minutes of day length   we already have on the darkest day of the year. I will take what I can get.

Make the most of precious daylight by  cracking on with my top jobs for the month, including some clever ideas to put yourself in  pole position for the coming growing season. Let’s jump straight in by coaxing along an extra  early harvest of this wonderfully warming winner, rhubarb.

You can see a few of the  pleasingly plump buds down here and we can encourage these into early growth by covering them over to exclude  light in a process called ‘forcing’. And it’s called ‘forcing’ because we’re just forcing plants into early growth.

I’ve cleared away all the old leaves  and the odd weed that was here and there’s this lovely blanket of  well- rotted garden compost which   should help feed the plant as it stirs into life. Now you can buy special rhubarb forcers  which look really rather stunning.

Alas I don’t have such gardening  bling so I’m just going to opt for a black container like this with no holes  in, that should fully exclude the light. And then to help trap warmth  and speed things along I’m going to cover the outside of our  container with this bubble plastic here.

You could use for example  straw secured in place somehow and then just obviously whatever you’re applying, do tie it securely into place  so it doesn’t blow away. This will keep things nice and cozy. Now it’s just a question of waiting for those  lovely elongated pale stems to come along,

Which depending on the progress of your  winter, should happen within about 2 months. Now you’ll find these stems are  much more tender and even sweeter   than traditionally harvested rhubarb stems. Just the job for a warming crumble. Please only force well established rhubarb crowns,  

Which will have the energy behind them  to cope with this kind of treatment. And I would suggest only doing this once every few   years to give the plant a chance  to recover between being forced. I would say that’s a good reason to  grow more than one plant of rhubarb. Potatoes.

Is there a more versatile vegetable? I ask you. Of course there isn’t. Whether you rave about roasties,  go mad for mash or fancy your fries there’s a spud for that. Get on and order them now while  there’s still plenty of choice.

I like to grow a mix of both early  season and main crop potatoes which gives me the best of both worlds. Lovely fresh new potatoes for salads and then  chunky spuds for storing well into winter. Now when you’re choosing your potatoes be  sure to read the variety description very  

Carefully to check it not only matches what  you’re after but also displays attributes such as scab resistance or resistance to blight. Once you get hold of your seed potatoes  get them out of their packaging and we’re going to place them somewhere  bright but frost free to chit,

Which just means to produce little sprouts. Now you want short sturdy sprouts like these. That will get your potatoes off to a really  flying start, those spring planted potatoes. Now you can pop them into anything  that helps to keep them upright and you want the end with the most little eyes,  

That’s these kind of little  dimples here facing upwards. Seed potatoes only need to be chitted  about 6 weeks ahead of planting, so you may find delaying chitting them  until next month is actually preferable. And don’t forget if you haven’t got  a frost free greenhouse, I don’t,  

Then they will happily chit on  a bright window sill indoors. Planning makes perfect, or something like that. Do you know what you will be growing next season? When it comes to planning there  are lots of things to consider:

Crop rotation, so the same crop families aren’t  in the same piece of ground season after season, Sunshine requirements; prioritizing the  sunniest spots for the warm season crops and of course making the  most of the space you have by mapping out when crops will be in  the ground and when and where spaces  

Will appear as the growing season progresses, so you can make the most of  every square inch of ground. Planning your garden is every bit as important  as say menu planning or financial planning and by doing so you can up your  chances of an embarrassment of riches.

Now if you’re not sure where to  start please do check out last   week’s video on garden planning,  which I will link to down below. It’s amazing how fast time can fly so ditch the dawdling and finish prepping  growing areas before it’s too late.

Now is a great time to start up new growing areas, assuming you’re not under feet of snow of course,  in which case wait a few weeks till you’re not. Now the beds around me here  were started a few winters ago.

I simply dug the raised beds into  the slope to give a level surface and then lined both the beds and  the surrounding paths with cardboard to suppress and eventually kill  off the lawn and weeds beneath. The paths then got a topping of wood chips  while the beds were filled with rougher  

Organic material and then finished  off with lovely well rotted compost. Now of course you don’t  need to grow in raised beds. You can just grow in beds in the ground. Or if your garden is on a gentle slope you might  like to consider terracing your growing areas.

Whatever you do, get on and  get these beds ready now so things have a chance to settle down ready  for sowing and planting in a few months. The acidity or alkalinity of our soil,   its pH, plays a big part in the  success of what we can grow.

Now most vegetables like it  neutral to ever so slightly acidic, but there’s one family of plants that  really can’t abide it too acidic… …Brassicas. That’s cabbage family plants that include the  likes of kale, broccoli, cauliflower and so on. They really can’t abide it too  acidic and they need a pH of  

Really 6 and a half or above to mildly alkaline. Now they will grow in more acidic  soils but they really won’t thrive and will be more open to  diseases like say club root. If you’re going to plant pH-picky plants then it’s   worth doing a pH test beforehand  and adjusting your soil to suit.

If your soil is very acidic then you can  raise the pH or make it more alkaline by simply sprinkling on garden  lime or ground limestone which is basically just calcium carbonate, kind of like taking an indigestion  tablet for an acid burned tummy. Now weigh out what you need for the area

And put it in a container and then  sprinkle it on a nice still day and then rake it all in. And actually wood ash, and I mean good  pure wood ash without any impurities, is also slightly alkaline so it’s something  else you could use to raise your soil’s pH.

Getting this all in place now will give it a few   months to work its way into the  soil, ready for planting time. Will it snow or won’t it snow? I hope so, I love tobogganing and  it brings out the inner child of me. And while snow does keep us away from the garden,

It’s not all bad. It helps insulate  plants from the worst of the cold and it gives us a chance to rest  up before the growing season. Our plans are quite literally put on ice. But snow is heavy. Shake off heavy snow from  snap-prone trees and shrubs

Or to stop it pushing down  and splaying apart bushes. Some greenhouses or cold frames and even tunnels may be at risk of very heavy snow,   so just carefully brush or scrape it off  to stop it collapsing any structures.

And if you do have lots and lots of  snow then avoid piling it on top of   vulnerable plants that might  be buried for weeks on end. Getting ready for the new growing season also  means cleaning and sharpening your tools, including your always-at-your-side  pruners or secateurs. Where would we be without them hey?

Now these guys are in a pretty sorry state so let’s try and bring them back to life. Bring them back into shape by loosening   and then sort of scrubbing off any  ingrained sap or rust in this case.

And you can do that with a kind of scouring  pad or wire wool, something like that. Sometimes you might find that kind  of really ingrained sap comes off   a bit easier with a little squirt  of oil just to loosen it off first.

Then once you’re done just give it  a good kind of wipe clean like that and then just kind of leave  it open like this for it to   completely dry before we move on to our next part. Now if you’ve got removable parts like this this  you can actually completely dismantle your pruners

And then kind of work on them  like that for a more thorough job, but I think we’ve done all right with this. And now to sharpen the cutting blade only,  using this wet stone here  I’ve had soaking in the water.

And I’m going to pass it at the same angle  as the cutting blade, moving it away from me to get us our nice sharp angle back. And then to finish it off just flip it over to the   flat side and just run it along the  back like that to remove any burs.

Now if it’s very loose you can then get your old   screwdriver or whatever and  tighten up any loose parts. This isn’t too bad but what it is missing  is the old spring in the middle here,   so I’m going to order myself  a new part and drop that in.

Meanwhile I’m just going to  give the central moving parts   here a little bit of an oil just to  kind of keep them nice and loose. There we are, job done. And these are looking so much better and a lot  sharper too and look much freer moving too. Job done.

And what better way to put our good-as-new  pruners to use than a spot of fruit pruning,   specifically bushes such as  currants and gooseberries. Now when pruning any of these fruits  we want to cut out the 3 ‘D’s, that’s branches that are obviously  Dead, badly Diseased or badly Damaged,

Plus any branches that are crossing other  branches or just generally getting in the way. We want to encourage a good open branch work and that will encourage good air  flow and ensure there are fewer   diseases and that fruits ripen a little better. The black currants in this bed are 3 years old now

And a few are due a very light prune. Now a great way to encourage fresh,  vigorous and crucially, productive growth is to prune out up to 1/3 of the oldest stems and you can usually tell which are  oldest by the darker color of them.

Now this is still pretty young  and healthy but it’s rubbing   here so I’m going to take out this stem here just to kind of keep it open like that. There we go. And taking it right down to  the ground and then this will encourage  

More shoots to push up from down below to keep  everything really kind of keen and healthy. And here are my somewhat  overcrowded gooseberry bushes. Now the first job is to remove these low hanging   sagging branches so they’re  not touching the ground. When these guys are overloaded  with fruit they kind of drag  

Down and it’ll just keep everything neat and tidy. Some of these, incidentally,  are producing a few roots, so I might cut these up and  pot them up to propagate them. And now I’m just going to cut away a few of the   central branches just to  kind of open it out a bit.

There, I think that looks  much better doesn’t it, Rosie? Do you have a gaping hole in  your greenhouse like this? Or is your cold frame a bit like this? Or maybe you have damaged walls,  broken fences or poorly fitting gates. Get on and fix them now while you still have time.

Tighten up screws, replace broken windows and   get everything in good shape  and functional once again. Now repairs made in winter will  stand you in good stead for spring so you can make the most of all of  these invaluable gardening assets.

If you didn’t get a chance to sow hardy peas  or fava or broad beans earlier in the autumn,   later this month is another opportunity to do so. Now sowing these vegetable garden favorites is  always a little bit of a gamble in the autumn.

If you get a really mild spell they can  grow kind of tall and gangly like this. These are the result of a  very mild end to the autumn. Now this is fine but any really really  hard frost they’re probably likely to   go blackened and kind of languish and then fail.

So now is a good chance to sow again. Sow beans into large size plug trays  and peas can go into plug trays as well or you can sow them into  lengths of guttering like this. Now these guys have been soaking overnight  to give them a bit of a head start

And we’ll be looking at more ways of  priming your seeds in a later video. So I’m just going to pop them over  the surface of the potting mix here not too precisely but trying to aim for  about 1 to 2 in or sort of 3 to 5 cm apart

And then once these are covered  over they’ll grow on in here and then I will plant them out simply by sliding   them out of here from one end into  a waiting trench, nice and easy. If you you’d like more ideas  of what to be sowing now,  

And believe it or not there is a  surprising amount to be sowing, then do pop on over to this video next. Happy gardening and I’ll catch you next time.