Many of last month's tips still apply:
Keep feeding the birds
Check your stores of fruit and veg for disease and pest damage
Check that brassica netting is secure and undamaged
Dig in organic matter (if conditions allow)
Plant bare rooted shrubs (but again, only if conditions allow)
Prune deciduous trees
Plan what you'll be growing where in the year to come
Start a garden diary
Even if you ignore every other tip I ever give, consider this one. Given that the difference between a good gardener and a bad one is a couple of weeks, get a diary (they'll be half price soon) and use it exclusively for garden notes. Make a note of what was planted when and then later on in the season record your results – flowering/ cropping times and success rates. (If you're really keen, you could go for the full phenological record, making a note of key occurrences in the life cycles of the flora and fauna of your local environment.) This time next year you'll have an invaluable resource documenting a year's worth of your experience.
Start collecting eggshell
Crushed eggshell has a number of uses in the veg garden:
To keep slugs and snails off your plants (albeit with varying degrees of success)
As a fertilizer to provide calcium and certain micro-nutrients, and also to increase the alkalinity of the soil
To clearly mark out the areas or rows in your beds where seeds have been sown, to remind you where seeds are for the days or weeks prior to their germination.
Have a baking dish in the bottom of the oven into which you put eggshells as and when they appear. The eggshells will dry and become more brittle whenever the oven is on, making it a fairly easy task to crush them into a coarse powder when you have collected enough.
Think potatoes
Seed potatoes become available in the shops this month, and the most popular varieties for your area will be flying off the shelf quickly. Do your research now so that, when they are in store, you know exactly what varieties you need.
Veg sowing indoors
Although you'll have no success sowing seeds outdoors in the depths of Winter, if you have access to a heated greenhouse or a cool conservatory, or even a bright windowsill in a cool room, then there are already a few things that can be sown this month:
Onions and leeks can be sown in modules – sow 5 or 6 seeds in each with a view to thinning out to 3 or 4 seedlings per module
Early Summer cabbages and cauliflowers
Peas sown now, with a little luck, could give you a crop as early as May.
Flower sowing indoors
Annual bedding plants, for summer-long colour in planters and flower beds, can be sown this month if you have access to a heated greenhouse, cool conservatory or cool, bright room. Examples include petunia, salvia, lobelia, busy lizzy and sweet peas
Clean pots
When the sowing season starts to gather pace in a month or two, you'll be wanting a ready supply of pots, trays, modules and tubs. Get ahead of the game now by cleaning last year's containers (ideally with a horticultural disinfectant such as“Armillatox” which is both bio-degradable and made from naturally occurring ingredients). It's a fairly wretched task, but you'll be pleased you did it come March. Also, start collecting the sort of useful containers that would otherwise find their way into the domestic waste – yoghurt cartons, plastic punnet, etc. Toilet roll tubes make excellent bio-degradable modules.
Artificial stratification
Something most keen growers will encounter at some point is the need to “stratify” the seeds of certain varieties of ornamental flowers. Stratification is the process of exposing seeds to a period of cold prior to germination to break their dormancy. Examples include aconite, alchemilla, some ornamental alliums, angelica, aquilegia, astrantia, bergenia, clematis, eryngium, geranium, lavender, lilly, lobelia and trillium. Also, a majority of shrub/tree seeds need extensive periods of chilling. Now is the time to act so that such seeds, which will require a period of chilling in the fridge for anything from 2 weeks to 2 months, are ready to germinate in the Spring. Specific instructions will be given on the seed packet, but the general rules are:
Prior to chilling, sow the seed in a tray of moist seed compost, seal in a clear plastic bag and leave at room temperature (15-20C) in light conditions for 3 days
Place the seed, still in the tray and plastic bag, in the fridge for the recommended time
Check the tray regularly and remove germinated seedlings out of the fridge and into the coldframe/greenhouse/etc
Make sure the compost remains moist but not saturated throughout the process
Protection of bulb shoots
The tips of many spring flowering bulbs - for example snowdrops, daffodils, bluebells, chionodoxa - will be breaking through the surface of the soil in the next few weeks. Where they have become naturalised, or planted as if they were, they will probably be growing in areas where they could be trampled . Mark out these areas with string, eggshell, a contrasting coloured mulch or some other method that will make the areas obvious.
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