The New Year In Your Garden

January is a quiet month in the garden. It is cold and frosty for us and for the birds, so it’s a good time to look after wildlife. Besides putting out food, bird baths can freeze, which deprives the birds of a much-needed source of water. Shrubs with berries are important for the birds, but by this time of year, often the birds have eaten all the berries. This means a regular top up of the bird feeders is

essential to the survival of many birds through the winter months.   

January gardening is best done in doors in the warm. On bad 

weather days, of which there are always plenty in January, its armchair gardening time with the seed 

catalogues planning for the spring.

In winter, it is important to protect lawns because it’s true that 

walking on the frost frozen grass 

really damages the lawn. When frozen, the blades of grass become brittle, and do not yield to pressure. When trodden on in frosty

 conditions, the blades of grass will snap and break.

Winter bedding needs dead heading just the same as summer bedding to prolong flowering. If anything, it can be more important with winter bedding which tends to struggle against the weather to flower.

Dead head viola, pansey & cyclamen and they will reward with more flowers.

Many perennials can be cut back to clear off dead top growth and tidy up the borders, if you are a tidy garden person. Equally perennials can be left unpruned until the spring, it’s a matter of gardening preference. 

Many roses will have shed their leaves. If you had black spot during the previous summer, it is worth sweeping up and collecting any fallen rose leaves and disposing of them to reduce the spread of

disease.