Basic Garden Calendar

Tips for Winter Gardening

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Wintry conditions often confine the gardener indoors, but life in the garden goes on and there is still plenty for the gardener to be cracking on with. Frost is an excellent soil conditioner, particularly of clay soils. The clods and lumps expand as the process of freezing forces the particles of soil apart. When the thaw arrives, they break down into smaller, crumbly lumps. A little later these lumps can be easily broken down further with a rake, forming a fine surface ideal for sowing and planting. Before frosts arrive, take advantage of the mild weather to dig, rotavate and turn over the soil.

What To Do
Get digging! Digging aids aeration and drainage of the ground. Organic materials materials will be added. Insect grubs become exposed to birds and weather which gets rid of many problem pests. Digging improves the rooting space for plants by breaking up the soil. You can finish of the surface to give a fresh and pleasant look.
Digging is the way to prepare vacant ground as well as areas regularly used. If it does happen to be vacant ground that you are preparing, remove all perennial weeds as you are turning over the soil. Use a cultivator, fork or just your hands.
Light, easily worked soils probably only need turning over one spit deep. However, heavy and clay soils are much better for a double-digging. Ensure you break up the second spit as well as the first. Digging heavy soils is hard work, so try and do it piecemeal, rather than in one prolonged bout. You will find heavy soils easier to dig over if you use a flat-tined digging fork or a spring-loaded spade.
If it is a vacant plot which you have dug over and reduced to a crumbly consistency, far less digging will be required in future years. (That said, whenever you have the opportunity because a plot falls fallow, dig it over anyway. Most plots need properly digging over every 5 to 10 years.) Once a plot has been dug over, in subsequent years you need merely to mulch the top of the ground with organic materials like well-rotted manure, garden compost and leaf-mold. As a general rule of thumb, make the mulch covering about 4 inches thick.
Mulching has three general purposes. It restricts the growth of weeds, helps the soil to retain its moisture and provide nutrients to the ground beneath. Be aware, though: creating mulch and spreading it is time consuming, which is why you seldom see it in an average garden.
In dry weather, apply good soil conditioners like horticultural gypsum or calcified seaweed in a granular form. Leave to settle for 4 to 7 days and then dig it in.
When the weather is rainy, do not even bother to dig clay soils. After the compression applied by the rain, clay dries out as hard as stone. It will be quite impossible to dig and rake it to a crumbly texture.
If lawns are brittle with frost, do not walk on them. Doing so damages the grass’s leaves.
Decide on what you are intending to plant out later in the season and buy seeds according to your choices. Find conifers, shrubs and evergreen trees you want to plant out in early spring.
Overhaul and service your tools and power machinery. Get gas engines de-carbonized and tuned. Have mowers, trimmers, strimmers and other cutting tools sharpened. Test electric motors and examine all cables for faults.
If wooden handles of spades, forks, trowels and the like have become rough to the touch, sandpaper them and then finish with steel wool for a smooth finish, then rub them with linseed oil or a silicone wax polish for protection.
Restore steel blades to their former glory by wetting and wiping them with a rust removing application, then oil them with machine oil.
Treat all your garden woodwork with a preservative harmless to plant and animal life. Think about what is most necessary to do and what is most accessible at this time of year when plant life has died down. Try not to use creosote; it is toxic to plants.
In late winter through to early spring, take into account the effects of latitude, sites, the condition of your soil at the time, length and intensity of light and, in particular, air and groung temperatures. These will all affect what you can and cannot do during these months.
Finish off all your deep digging or trenching of vacant soil. Break up the topsoil thoroughly will with a fork and leave it in clumps for frosts to break up naturally.
Utilize damp and completely rotted materials for organic manuring. These may be farmyard manures, compost, leaf-mold, forestry bark or weathered sawdust. The more decomposed they are, the easier they will be to work into your soil. If you use manure which is not well rotted, the rate of fertility will be reduced. (Un-rotted manure needs the lengthy process of bacteria working on it to release the nitrogen needed by plants.)
Heavy and clay soils should be dressed with something like calcified seaweed a few days in advance of cultivating.
If the plot you are thinking about has not been turned over with organic manure in the last two weeks, now is the time to start applying lime. Lime is essential for certain plants and crops. Most garden plants thrive on a soil which is slightly acid or neutral, (Neutral pH is 7.0), so only lime soil for specific requirements; too much lime can be as harmful to plants as too little. Lime improves the structure of heavy and clay soils by encouraging bigger pore spaces. This promotes aeration and drainage. Lime also supplies calcium which is a nutrient element crucial to the growth of plant life. However, its most important function is to neutralize the acidity of soil. In so doing, mineral elements are made available as nutrients to your plants. Before you lime, establish the acid-alkaline balance of the soil based on the pH scale. This is a measurement of the hydrogen ion concentration, responsible for acidity, in a solution of the soil. On the pH scale, the figure 7.0 represents a neutral state. Higher numbers indicate alkalinity and lower number acidity, in geometrical progression. Thus, a soil of pH5.0 is ten times more acidic than one of pH6.0. To check for the balance of the soil you are considering, test it using a proprietary soil-testing kit which uses a colorimetric indicator solution. Take samples from various parts of the plot or border to a depth of about 6 inches (10cm). You will be provided with a chart with the kit. It shows you how to use the color results to obtain the pH scale reading. Most garden plants will thrive in soils of pH6.4 to pH6.8. There is no need to lime soil exceeding a value of pH6.4. Many shrubs, trees, flowering plants, lawn grasses, crops like cucumbers, marrows, potatoes and tomatoes, and fruits such as raspberries, strawberries and blackberries have a preference for quite acidic soils. Members of the Heath, or Ericaceae, family need a very acidic soil and hate lime.