February Gardening Tips

• Pots and borders
• Trees and shrubs
• Bulbs

• Greenhouse
• The Indoor garden
• Home grown food

• Lawns, hedges, paths & drives
• Bits and pieces
• Soils, mulching, weed control, etc

• Re-pot perennials and shrubs that are growing in pots. Use a good compost and add Osmocote slow release fertiliser to the mix. This will feed the plants for most of the year. If you can't move up a pot size, remove the top couple of inches of compost [and the bottom couple too if you can] and replace it with fresh.


• Remove battered blooms from pampas grass and cut back leaves to 30 to 45 cm. This is much safer than setting fire to it!


• Sow Geraniums, fibrous rooted Begonias, Antirrhinum, Lobelia, Petunias and Impatiens. Make sure you use fresh compost and clean water!


• Sow sweet peas in long tube pots or Rootrainers.


• Buy pots of pre-germinated bedding plants to take home and grow on in cell packs. These can even be grown on the windowsill for a while.

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• Trees that have lost their leaves can be pruned now. Cut out dead, diseased and damaged wood. Thin out over crowded areas but avoid removing too much in one year. It is better to spread heavy pruning over several years and limit the amount of wood you remove at any one time to no more than a third of the total.


• Check that climbers are securely tied to their supports and check that old ties are not constricting older thicker stems. It is a good time to take a look at tree ties and loosen them a little so that they are not beginning to garrotte swelling trunks. Prevent them slipping down both the tree and the stake by nailing the tie to the stake.


• Prune Clematis this month. Those that flower after mid summer should be cut back hard [they only flower on newly grown shoots] but those that flower before should be more lightly pruned to about 75cm. The smaller flowered and species Clematis generally only need pruning to confine them to the space you have for them


• Put plenty of well rotted manure around your roses. Give them a liberal dressing of Toprose fertiliser as well


• Plant new roses and fruit trees now. It is the traditional time to plant and they will be partly established when spring arrives.


• Cut last year's new wood on Wisteria shoots back now to 3-4 inches.


• Drench Delphiniums, Gypsophila, Hostas, Lupins, Clematis and other slug and snail prone plants with Slug Clear liquid. Lots of slugs live in the soil and this will sort them out!

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• Harden off forced Hyacinth bulbs [acclimatise them] after they have finished flowering. Then plant them out in the garden where they will thrive and flower for many years to come.


• Pot up Lily, Nerine and other summer flowering bulbs ready to slot into gaps in the border after the risk of frost is over.


• Pot up Lily bulbs to flower in pots on the doorstep or terrace. Re-pot those that have been in the same pot for more than two years.


• Buy Spring flowering bulbs 'in the green' they will establish well now particularly Snowdrops and Bluebells

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• Re-pot your houseplants, if they need it, into a pot one size larger using good multi-purpose compost.


• Use mosspoles to support taller plants.

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• Sow early lettuce seed under protection. Plant out later for really early crops. Tom Thumb is a good tasty variety to grow now.


• Prepare runner bean trench [sweet peas too]. Dig a trench a full spade depth and dig plenty of well rotted compost or manure into the bottom. We sell a variety of suitable composts and manures


• If your apples suffered from bitter pit [corky dead patches just under the skin], a generous mulch now will help to minimise the risk of it occurring again. Adding Calcium will help too.


• Sow Mung Beans for healthy delicious oriental and stir-fry cooking. No garden needed as these shoots can be grown on a tray covered with damp cotton wool on a windowsill. The shoots will be ready to eat after just 6-9days, so sow a little every week to get a regular supply.


• Sow early peas and broad beans.


• Sow early carrots, parsnips and onions.


• Finish planting garlic and asparagus.


• Top dress rhubarb and spring cabbage with sulphate of ammonia.


• Avoid compressing wet soil when planting and sowing by working off planks to spread your weight.


• Spray peaches, apricots and nectarines against Peach Leaf Curl disease and cherries against Bacterial Canker. Use Dithane 945 for both.


• Attach a sheet of polythene to act as a curtain to help protect wall-trained specimens against infection and to improve the fruit set.


• Apply Sulphate of potash to fruit to encourage good fruit growth. If your fruit trees are growing amongst grass, apply Sulphate of Ammonia too.

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• As long as the ground is not very wet and the grass is not frozen there is no reason why you should not continue to mow the lawn.


• Trim lawn edges with a sharp edging iron. Insert plastic or metal edging strips as support. Its' amazing what a difference neat lawn edges makes to the look of a garden!


• New hedges can still be planted now, especially those we sell as bareroot plants like beech, hawthorn, laurel and our British native mix.

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• Before the usual spring rush, paint fences and sheds and get other general maintenance jobs done. If plants are trained onto fences to be painted make certain that the paint you use is plant safe.


• Check variegated plants for shoots that have reverted to all green. Remove these by trimming them back to the point where the leaves are uniformly variegated.


• National Nest Box Week (14-21 February) Click here for more details from the British Trust for Ornithology Hang a nest box up in your garden to help birds breed successfully.

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• Love them or hate them, Celandines can take over your garden and are very hard to control! Now is the time to get rid of them if you need to. They are actively growing already and are susceptible to a spray of Roundup now. This is a non selective weedkiller that is inactivated when it touches the soil but don't spray it on anything you want to keep.


• Add organic matter to heavy soils to improve the structure.
  

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