TURNING WINTER INTO A VIRTUE

LATE BLOOMERS: Cape cowslips can add colour to drab days

Saturday October 24,2009

By Alan Titchmarsh

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ALL over the country certain people will be heaving a great sigh of relief as they shove the gardening tools in the shed one last time and bang the door shut.

British Summer Time officially ends at 2am tonight and for some folk that spells the close of the gardening season and the start of some long lie-ins at the weekend.

But not everyone is so pleased. Keen gardeners often feel bereft at the thought of those wintry months with nothing for green fingers to do. By February some of them are almost crawling up the walls.

The good news is winter is a great time for catching up on all those things you simply can’t fit in to the summer schedule because regular mowing, clipping, trimming and weeding take up all your time. Now that everything has stopped growing there’s a chance to spend time on more contemplative, forward-looking stuff.

If some parts of the garden are ripe for a mini-makeover four quiet months give you plenty of time for a redesign. The planning can all be done indoors when the weather’s too bad for anything else, then in mild spells you can get on with digging out foundations, laying paving and doing any brickwork (concrete sets best when the weather is cool – but don’t do it when a very wet or freezing spell is likely). There’s also time to assemble sheds, flat-pack arches or gazebos, put up fencing or trellis, dig a pond or make raised beds for growing vegetables.

W inter is also ideal for soil preparation. If you are creating a new lawn, kitchen garden or flower bed there is bags of time to get the ground cleared and dug over. You can also push ahead with planting. The dormant season – from now till mid-March – is the best time for planting deciduous trees, shrubs, roses and hedges. Indeed it’s the only time you can plant bare-root plants dug up from a nursery field. Even pot-grown shrubs from garden centres “take” so much better if they are put in when they aren’t in leaf. What’s more, you can often make big savings by planting now as garden centres often hold end-of-season sales to clear the decks in time for Christmas.

There are also lots of useful little jobs to fill odd moments – sorting out the shed and cleaning pots and seed trays ready for spring. When the weather is inclement you can spend time indoors profitably by ordering seeds and plants from catalogues. Outside, prepare for wintry weather by lagging the outdoor tap, replacing cracked panes of glass in the greenhouse and securing tree ties. Dull? Well, maybe but boy will you feel virtuous when these jobs are completed!

If you want something creative to do collect plants that do their stuff in winter. You might dabble in named varieties of snowdrops in pots, unusual winter flowering conservatory plants such as Lachenalia and Correa or exotic houseplants. Down the garden there are various winter-flowering shrubs to enjoy and winter containers to plant up.

So there’s no excuse for feeling bored, fed up or housebound. The winter “break” is a great opportunity to do the sort of gardening you can’t do the rest of the year. Make the most of it. It’ll soon be back to business as usual.