• Enthusiastic gardeners will be chitting their potatoes so they are ready to hit the ground running when planting time arrives. Chitting taties involves standing them on their ends in a single layer in a warmish place (sometimes the old fashioned airing cupboard). This encourages the shoots to start growing.
• Seeds of Florence fennel can be sown directly into the garden at this time. Thin the seedlings after they have germinated to about 12cm apart. As an all round versatile vegetable that is still not well known in this country, Florence fennel ranks deservedly high. It appears to be pretty well untroubled by pests and diseases, is equally delicious roasted like a parsnip, shredded and stirfried or eaten raw in a grated or finely sliced form. It has a good texture and a pleasant flavour which is not so strong as to be dominant. It has nowhere near the overwhelming aniseed flavour of wild fennel plants on the roadside.
• Most of the flowering annuals we grow in our gardens (the pansies, cornflowers, nemesias and the like) are hardy so you can start them from seed in the depths of winter. You won’t gain anything putting them into the garden this early because they won’t want to do much growing until the temperatures start to rise, but you will save yourself a substantial amount of money if you start your own plants from seed now, rather than buying potted colour or even punnets later in the season. Seed trays need to be kept out of reach of slugs which remain active all winter. Try the barbecue table.
• On the pruning treadmill, you can safely continue cutting back roses and most deciduous plants. You can get away without ever pruning deciduous fruit trees such as apples and plums but a little care keeps the tree to a manageable size and shape and can improve the health of the tree. Take out dead, damaged and wayward branches. Cut out branches that cross others. Remove any old fruit still hanging on the tree to reduce pests and diseases. Shorten very long branches to three or four leaf buds, or spurs as they are called on an apple tree. The aim is to have good light and good air movement. If you want to keep apple trees small, buy them on dwarfing rootstock and keep pruning them twice a year (mid winter and again in summer). They are excellent espaliered and don’t even need a wall if you train them along metal pipes. After about 25 years, we removed the somewhat unsightly metal pipes and our espaliered apples are free standing, narrow plants where the fruit is at just the right level to pick as we pass by.
• Get a copper and oil spray onto deciduous fruit trees. It cleans up mildew, scale, brown rot and all manner of generalised nasties.
• On bleak and miserable days, wander around the house looking out the windows and plan for what you can be doing to lift boring areas of the garden. Good gardeners probably spend as much time thinking and planning as actually doing it and it is a good way to while away dreary days.
• The Curious Gardener’s Almanac tells us that it is something of an urban myth that a worm will be perfectly happy if you cut it in half. Apparently while it may continue to wriggle for a while, it will die not long afterwards. Only if you nip just a little of its tail end does it have the capacity to repair itself. It all makes better sense if you think about the biology of a worm’s anatomy.