Happy New Year to you all! I don’t know about you, but when it comes to my January gardening jobs I’m often a bit stuck.
Part of my problem is that I don’t cut back the dead growth at this time of year, prefering to leave it for the birds and insects. After all, many plants have seeds that provide a really valuable source of winter food for birds. Furthermore, old stems can provide a home for things like aphids and spiders which birds in the cold winter months will want to snack on.
All this nature-loving means I don’t have a lot of tidying to do in the garden at the moment. (Well that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!)
There’s also a limit to the planting I can do – with the ground so hard. There’s no grass to cut, no leaves to rake up and I can only spend so much time examining the bulbs which are coming up. That said, I do spend a lot of time staring at them, as I find emerging bulbs one of the most exciting and uplifting things in the world! All that promise of blooms to come is so wonderful. It’s all I can do to stop counting them (seriously, one year I caught myself counting the bulbs coming up!!)
However, having sat down and thought about it, there are actually lots of other jobs, other than day-dreaming about bulbs which we can be doing in January. Here are the main ones I’ll be tackling over the next week or so.
Hellebores
- I love hellebores, especially the white ones which feature heavily in my semi-shady woodland style border. Extending my collony of them is a priority. I’m mainly going to do this by buying plants in flower, so I can choose the prettiest blooms and ensure they’re the pure white variety I want. I particularly like the variety Christmas Carol.
2. You can also build your number of hellebores through their seedlings, though if they cross pollinate you can end up with some murky coloured flowers; I’ve noticed that some of my Christmas Carol are becoming a bit pinky – although they’re in a completely separate bed I think they must be cross pollinating with wilder hellebores elsewhere in my garden. So this month I’m going to remove any unwanted hellebores seedlings. Leaving a few strong ones which I’ll gently reposition to places where they’re wanted – and keep my fingers crossed that the colours work out. If they grow up murky I’ll pull them out.
3. I’m also cutting off any hellebore foliage which is marked with black blotches, to limit the spread of leaf spot disease. If you’re not careful hellebores can look like just a mass of leaves. So at the same time I also cut off the unnecessary ones which are hiding the blooms.
Roses
4. I’m planting this month a bare root rose. It’s a rose called Kew Gardens. Looking at it, it ticks a lot of boxes. This rose produces small, single white flowers which are held in very large heads – a bit like a hydrangea. These flowers are produced almost continuously from early summer into autumn. What’s more it is mid-sized, lots of people use it for hedging but it is also perfect for a large container. It’s thornless, very healthy and grows well in semi-shady conditions. Added to all this insects and birds love it!
I’m going to plant up this lovely rose in a big container. I’ll keep it in a corner of my patio – or possibly down the drive at the front of my house (a badly neglected bit of my garden).
5. January gardening jobs can also include pruning climbing roses (not ramblers). I have three climbing roses: a yellow one, Graham Thomas which my kids bought me for a present, the white rose Mme Alfred Carriere and the gorgeous pink climber Zephirine Drouhin, which grows over the front of my house in amongst a Wisteria. By biggest sister Sara gave me that rose, and although it is very prone to black spot, it’s a stunner and smells delicious.
I’m no expert when it comes to pruning roses, so I’ll take a good look at this demo from dear old Monty Don before embarking on this one of my January gardening jobs.
Cuttings
6. Now is a good time to take root cuttings of fleshy-rooted perennials such as oriental poppies, acanthus and verbascums.
I’m definitely going to have a go at this. I have an oriental poppy called Coral Reef which I planted in my sunny bed which runs around my patio. Annoyingly, although I put in about 5 of these poppies when I planted up this border around 5 years ago, only one of them has thrived. It’s so disappointing as it is an absolute stunner of a poppy, with pale coral papery blooms with a black splash on each petal. These blooms top the strong, tall stems from late May to midsummer.
While those who want their poppies bright red may not like it, I love it. It’s soft, romantic, gorgeous! A real swathe of them in the bed would look brilliant. So I want more! Rather than buying in more plants, I’m going to try to take root cuttings. I’ll let you know how I get on!
7. Once the frost has gone, your January gardening jobs can also include taking hardwood cuttings from deciduous shrubs (the ones that lose their leaves), such as forsythia, philadelphus (lovely mock orange), cornus, buddleia and viburnum.
Seeds
8. One of this year’s January gardening jobs will be sowing seeds of plants such as cornflowers, geraniums, dahlias, iceland poppies and ammi. Sowing them now will deliver some early flowers. I haven’t done this in the past – (I’m never that organised) – but will give it a go now. My first seeds will be Iceland Poppies. I have a lovely pot of them and would love more.
I will plant the seeds in trays and keep them on a windowsill – as I don’t have a greenhouse.
Nature
9. A little while ago I blogged about how to look after the birds in your garden. You can read that blog here. Now is definitely a time to keep your efforts up. Mr F-W gave me a wonderful bird bath from Christmas. It’s an old mortar – I love it. The birds haven’t quite got used to it yet, however, I’m hopeful they will. In the meantime, I’m trying to remember to top it up with fresh water every day and of course, with our cold nights, I’m melting the ice which forms on it each morning.
10. I’m also going to put up an additional bird box in the little copse at the bottom of our garden, in good time before the nesting season begins. We get lots of Jackdaws there. Some people don’t like them but I love them. They’re such funny noisey old things. They look like a bunch of teenagers hanging out at the bottom of the garden!
There are many other things I could add to this list, but frankly this feels like quite enough to be getting on with. So I’d better crack on…happy New Gardening Year folks!! See you next week x
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