• 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.

• If you are in a relatively frost free area, you may be enjoying the cheerful flowers and fragrance of luculias. The winter flowering varieties are gratissima and pinceana whereas it is grandiflora which flowers in summer. These plants can get a bit scruffy and leggy and the time to cut them back hard is straight after flowering. Most forms will root easily from cuttings as long as you use the fresh new growth as soon as it has firmed up and is not floppy or brittle. Luculias only come in pink or white.
• Deciduous plants are given their most severe prune when dormant in winter. This is because their energy has been stored in their root systems over winter so it is less of a shock to them if you cut the top back hard. So June and July are the time to get out pruning – fruit trees (but not cherries or plums which are summer pruned), grape vines, raspberries, kiwi fruit, roses, wisterias, deciduous trees and shrubs (but not flowering cherries, either). Head out with the ladder and the loppers, the secateurs and the snips.
• We don’t use pruning paste to seal cuts, even after major tree surgery, but we do try and make sure that cuts are clean and not hacked and jagged. In plants as in humans, clean cuts heal faster. You can buy pruning paste and use it if it makes you happier.
• Regrettably one size does not fit all when it comes to pruning and it helps to have a little bit of knowledge at least. We can’t compress all of it down to two simple rules or one sentence but we will try and demystify it as we go.
• Pruning ornamental trees is for shaping purposes. Keep most trees to a single trunk, avoiding forks for the first few metres. These are weak points where the tree can split apart. A balanced shape is more pleasing to look at than a lop-sided tree which can end up pulling the tree over. It is much easier to trim a small tree around two metres tall than to work on a misshapen tree of five, ten or fifteen metres tall so start young when you can do it with the secateurs and not the chainsaw.
• Rose pruning can continue through until August.
• Wisterias need regular, if not constant pruning. However, as they flower on last year’s growth, you can not cut them off at ground level and expect them to flower in spring. Find the main branches to give some structure and shape, and trim all side growths back to three or four leaf buds from the main branches. Borer can be a problem so check for tell tale holes and dead branches and cut these out. You can spray cooking oil or use any light oil down the borer hole if it is in the main stem and you don’t want to cut it out. There is nothing shy and delicate about a wisteria but you do want it to flower.
• The rule of thumb for pruning grapevines and kiwifruit is the same as wisterias though grapes you are pruning the side growths back to one or two buds whereas kiwifruit you count out to about the eighth bud before cutting off the rest of the vine. Apples are done the same as wisterias.
• From the school of random pieces of curious information: Chinese wisterias flower on bare wood and naturally twine anti-clockwise. Japanese wisterias flower a little later with their leaves, have longer racemes of flowers to compensate and twine clockwise.

• Ash from fireplaces is a natural fertiliser. Woodstove ash is more concentrated than from an open fire so spread very thinly across gardens and lawns or add to your compost heap. That is as long as you have not been burning tanalised timber, plastics or polystyrene which are all round bad for the environment and leave toxic ash.
• As an addendum to our Outdoor Classroom spread in the newspaper last week (not available on our website at this stage) on potting citrus, we should advise taking any fruit off. There were no fruit on the tree we bought and nor should there be fruit set on such young plants. If you are buying beautiful little plants bearing fruit (I have seen mandarin trees available looking splendid and fruit laden at around 40cm high)it is most likely to be what we call spray-on fruit. Often it is the use of gibberellic acid which is a plant-based hormone used to stimulate growth and fruiting. The plant is too young to be fruiting and it will set it back. Take the sales crop off and let the plant get established and decide when it is ready to fruit or risk your plant getting deeply stressed.
• If you have an abundance of lady birds around your windows and crawling into curtain folds, regard yourself as fortunate. They are hibernating. The do no harm whatsoever, make no mess and deserve your tolerance from now until they spring back into activity when temperatures rise. They will reward you by busily dealing to aphids and other nasty garden pests in summer. So do not vacuum the poor creatures up.
• You do not have to wait for the shortest day to plant garlic. Any time now is good. Garlic needs rich, well cultivated soil with lots of compost and nutrient. Only plant the big cloves because squitty little cloves will give squitty little bulbs at harvest time. We remind you all not to plant Chinese garlic which may be cheap to buy but will give greatly inferior yields and potentially unleash viruses in your garden. Pay the extra and get good NZ garlic to plant out. Around 12cm spacing allows room for the bulbs to grow.
• Don’t delay on gathering your nut harvest or rats will beat you to them and those that the rats don’t get will go mouldy and rot. All nuts need drying out before eating. Spread flat in trays somewhere which is dry and has good air movement. It takes longer to get a good harvest from nut trees than from fruit trees but if you are fairly settled, planting nuts is a good investment in the future. The world demand for nuts is outstripping supply so the prices will keep rising. Only buy grafted nut trees from a creditable outlet. Don’t waste time with seedlings which may never fruit adequately. Walnuts are the easiest to cope with here and the bigger the nut the better. Macadamias can be grown in optimum conditions of warmth and protection. If you grow pine nuts, when it comes to extracting the kernels, you will see why they are so expensive to buy. We are not aware of anybody being particularly successful with hazelnuts or almonds in Taranaki.
• The common edible walnut is juglans regia. What we have growing as a weed through the Uruti Valley in particular is the Japanese walnut (ailantifolia or sieboldiana). Its only redeeming feature is its autumn colour. In every other way it is a noxious self seeder which is not even good for firewood let alone fruit and we would have been better off had it had been left in Japan.
• We were amused to notice some thermal underwear for sale in The Warehouse. NZ made and Woolmark accredited, it was in the shade of red common to many arboreum rhodos. Clearly somebody thought that because alongside the other colours labelled such things as Charcoal, Slate and Sand, these red thermals were labelled with the colour of Rhododendrum. Shame nobody in the production process could spell.

* It is a good time to give the perennial herb garden some attention. Clumping herbs such as oregano, marjoram and mints benefit from being lifted and split up into smaller divisions for replanting. Cultivate the soil well and add compost because they like richer conditions. Mint is best kept somewhat confined to keep its wandering ways under control. You can plant it in a pot and bury the pot. Sage, rosemary and thyme are herbs which grow in dryer, harsher conditions. If your plants are looking woody, leggy and ugly, try taking some cuttings of firm recent growth. They root easily. Apparently rosemary will even put out roots in a glass of water on the kitchen window sill after a few days. If you have an area where it can naturalise, you can sow parsley by scattering the seed onto the ground.

* Keep an eye on the plant shops for fruit trees. One spin off of the current upsurge in interest is the large range of fruit trees now available. We even found a blood orange which we have not seen on offer before (gives the red orange juice often served in Italy which we initially mistook for added food colouring). Don’t delay if you want the biggest selection. All fruit trees like full sun, good drainage and generally all round good conditions including well cultivated, rich soils.

* You can be planting broad beans and winter spinach, both directly into the ground. Soaking the broad beans overnight will speed up germination.

* We are proudly still harvesting fresh corn here. Readers who followed our advice to continue sowing late crops may also still be harvesting cobs.

* If you have box hedges, give them the once over to thin the build up of dead leaves and debris caught in the middle. The fastest way to do this is to blast it all out with a leaf blower or compressed air but you can do it by beating the hedge and raking up the debris. The reason you are doing this is to try and hold the dreaded buxus blight at bay. More air movement and a looser structure slightly reduces the chances of the fungus getting established. If you wish to tempt fate by continuing to plant box hedges, you can direct stick large cuttings into position now. You can use rooting hormone on the cuttings but it is not necessary. However our previous advice stands: buxus blight is here to stay. Look at alternatives for hedging in the longer term.

* We wished we had realised earlier (many years earlier) that green tomatoes are so edible. There is nothing of the poisonous green potato about them and nor do they have to be a special variety to eat them green. The Victory Gardens programme on Sky showed a useful recipe. Slice larger green tomatoes in half and place face down in a single layer. Sprinkle with a dash of olive oil and a dash of ouzo (now we know what we should have done with the souvenir bottles of that drink brought back from Greece) and bake for half an hour until softish. Puree feta cheese with the drained liquid from the tomatoes and make a bed of it in an oven dish. Place the cooked tomatoes on top of the feta, season well and pop under the grill. Serve sprinkled with chopped fresh herbs. Yum.

· Queen’s Birthday Weekend is always rose weekend at garden centres for some unfathomable reason. This means that most will have their largest range in stock now. Most roses will have been dug very recently from the open ground and given a trim back of sorts. When planting, trim any damaged roots and plant into well cultivated soil with plenty of humus. Follow up at some stage soon with a proper prune of the bits of the plant above the ground. Most roses don’t ever develop big root systems so they need good growing conditions. Full sun and plenty of air movement helps to reduce disease later.

· There is a great deal of mystique and strongly held opinion about the when and how of rose pruning which we will attempt to decode on these pages this winter. However, the bottom line appears to be that you can do your rose pruning any time from now through until August. The signal to the rose to spring back into growth in early spring is related to temperature, not time of pruning so cutting back now does not trick the plant into flowering earlier. Be very careful of skin wounds (think potential cellulitis) because roses harbour some nasty bacteria and fungi. Don’t try and compost or chip rose prunings. All you do is spread their diseases and they don’t rot down at all easily. They need to be burned or put out to landfill. We think that is what our wheelie bin is for at this time of year.

· If you have saucers sitting underneath any outdoor container plants, remove them. You don’t want the pots sitting in a small reservoir all winter. It can be fatal for the plants.

· Reduce watering house plants to once a week or less. Over winter, most only need watering when they start to look a little floppy. Move any really frost tender plants away from window sills to protect them cold.

· Last week’s bad weather saw an unexpectedly early frost here. We can see a little damage to vireya rhododendrons, it took out the African marigolds and Mark has hastily constructed his winter shelter for his prized banana plants as well as moving the choicest tender plants into our sun porch. Batten down the hatches if you have frost tender material which needs winter protection because there will be more frosts to come.

· It is time to be preparing for planting garlic. No matter whether you still spray your lawn with hormone based applications, defiantly eat pork without knowing its provenance and drive an SUV, you should not be buying imported Chinese garlic. It is destroying our local garlic industry; it is inferior in flavour; it should never be grown because it apparently carries virus. Buy New Zealand grown garlic or better still, grow your own. Ask at your supermarket to ensure that you have local garlic or if you want to be certain of virus-free cloves for growing, buy them from a reputable garden centre.

· Shallots can also be planted now and these, like garlic, are grown from cloves or segments.

· Don’t delay on getting strawberries in. If you had a patch last spring, you will probably find runners which can be cut off and planted in fresh ground. Strawberry beds crop best if started anew every two years.

Quote of the week is from early Alan Titchmarsh (inimitable gardener and media personality and currently the unlikely High Sheriff of the Isle of Wight): “Avant-gardeners do not have lawns; they have grass. But not much. The ‘bowling green’ lawn is a feature that belongs in front of council houses where it is surrounded by borders of lobelia, alyssum, French marigolds and salvias with standard fuchsias used as ‘dot plants’. The avant-gardener’s grass is intermingled with daisies, plantains, buttercups, … dandelions and plenty of moss (usually at least 50% of the total coverage). This is a state of affairs to be encouraged.”