• Mark planted his 15 metre double row of garlic this week (167 cloves, to be precise). Having heard that the average American consumes 6kg of garlic a year, while the average Italian eats 20kg, he feels he may have underestimated the yield we should require. At an average of 15 bulbs to a kilo, with each clove delivering one bulb, planted in a double row at 30 cm between the rows and 15cm between each clove, if you have not yet planted your garlic, you should be able to calculate how much area you need so that you can hurry up and get it in.
• While the weather is fine and the ground dry enough to work, beds can be prepared now for spring plantings of vegetables. The better the ground preparation, the better the yield will be. Vegetable gardens in particular need to be very friable and well tilled. If you get in now, when the frenzied activity of spring arrives, your beds are all ready for planting.
• Buy seed potatoes and set them in trays on their ends (chitting). Put them in a dark place to shoot for early planting in August (which is only six weeks away now).
• This is the first year we have grown chicory (witloof) and apparently now is the time to start forcing them by lifting them, trimming off the leaves and either blanching them in a box in dark shed or by burying them in a trench at least 20cm deep. From there it takes about a month for the fresh leaves to shoot again. Blanching them takes away the bitterness. We will report in due course as to whether the final product is worth the effort.
• It is still time for digging and dividing in the ornamental garden.
• Pruning of hydrangeas can start in mild areas. Prune back to two fat buds if you want flowers next year. While they will generally come again if you cut them to the ground, you won’t get flowers because they set buds on the previous year’s new growth.
• Give deciduous fruit trees a copper and oil spray to clean them up and carry out winter pruning.
• Mark is worried about fire fang, which is apparently something that can happen to your compost. Or so his heritage vegetable gardening book cautions. The only problem is that the book fails to specify exactly what fire fang is and we don’t think it is spontaneous combustion.

• After our comment a fortnight ago about seeing the first snowdrops of the spring season in flower already, a kind reader sent a breathtaking photo from the UK Daily Express showing snowdrops below a copse of white barked birches. Not so much a clichéd carpet of them as the dense shag pile of the woodland world. Millions of them flowering across six acres in Berkshire.
• Cut back on watering house plants as they are best kept on the dry side in winter. Don’t leave them sitting in saucers of water and don’t keep their soil saturated. Overwatering in winter is the fastest way to kill indoor plants. If you have frost tender treasures, move them away from windows unless you have curtains between them and the cold night air.
• Most of the popular annuals are perfectly hardy and can be planted out now as seedlings or sown as seed. If you are not sure whether a particular variety is suitable for scattering freely (as opposed to the much more intensive practice of starting in seed trays) read the back of the seed packet and take notice of it.
• Plants in garden centres flower earlier than those planted out in gardens so while there are only a few camellias open at the moment, the plants for sale will be showing much more colour and open flower already. It is a good time to look for the biggest selection.
• Plant garlic and shallots now. For better yields, search out the New Zealand garlic rather than the cheap Chinese imported bulbs. Break the clump into separate cloves and plant the cloves upright in shallow trenches about 10 cm apart and 5cm deep. The bigger and better the clove, the better the crop will be. Garlic needs rich, friable soil, very well drained in full sun. No garlic lover has ever reported a vampire attack. Ergo, It is an indisputable fact that garlic repels vampires.
• If you are growing globe artichokes, plants need renewing every three or four years. Unless you are very cold, you can lift them now and separate the new suckers at the base to replant, keeping as much root as possible attached to them. Throw away the old parts. Unless you absolutely adore artichoke hearts and have a large area, you only need a very few plants to give a seasonal harvest. If you have an old clump you want to keep growing, limit the number of shoots to about four or five.
• Gather your nuts in June. Walnuts that is, though after a bumper crop here last year which lasted us for many months, the crop this year is so bad that it was hardly worth collecting. All nuts need drying – spread thinly on trays in a sunroom, glasshouse or by the fire will work. It can take a few weeks to dry them out.

• It is blower vac time. If you have one of these handy (albeit somewhat noisy and intrusive) machines, you can easily blow all the fallen leaves off the driveway and paths and onto the garden where they can be left to rot down and suppress the weeds. Or blow the leaves onto the lawn and run a mulcher mower over them to feed the lawn. We can’t believe it took us so long to discover what a boon a blower vac is in maintaining the garden. Electric powered models are fine for small town gardens. Large gardens need petrol driven motors and we have worked out that for very large gardens, the much more expensive backpack models are greatly preferable. Such a shame we bought a cheaper hand held one.
• Plant trees and shrubs and continue lifting and dividing clumping plants. While summer is all about maintenance in the garden, the cooler months are more about planting. Now is the time to reassess messy patches or to replace tatty looking plants which have not performed to expectations.
• Luculias and vireyas in sheltered, frostfee positions or sasanqua camellias provide some flowering shrub interest at this time of the year. Dichroa versicolour (an evergreen type of hydrangea) is still in flower.
• Clean up the asparagus bed. If you are intending to start a bed of this taste treat in early spring (the traditional time for planting asparagus), start preparing it now. Fork in as much compost and manure as you can. More is better in this case, as is a well dug, double dug or even triple dug bed. Don’t waste your time and effort if you are planning on moving house in a year or two – asparagus beds are long term commitments.
• If you have fires indoors, be cautious of the ash which comes from closed wood burner units. It can be highly concentrated and needs to be spread very thinly. If you are ecologically challenged and burn plastic or polystyrene or even tanalised timber offcuts in your fire, don’t spread the ashes on your garden.
• On the planting front, if you are frost free you can continue planting potatoes.

1. Beware of frosts which are starting to make themselves felt. It is time to bring any particularly precious vulnerable plants under cover until spring.
2. It is the optimum time for planting and for redeveloping areas in the garden. Review tatty areas and plan on starting work on them as soon as possible. When winter really hits, it is easy to lose the motivation to grub around in very cold and wet ground whereas at this stage it is still quite pleasant. Garden centres will have a good range of new season’s trees and shrubs in stock by now.
3. Queens Birthday weekend is regarded as rose weekend for gardeners and their garden centres so there is probably the largest range you will see in store right now. Roses are best planted in full sun and in areas with good air movement to reduce diseases.
4. Bare rooted plants are those that have been field grown and then dug up very recently to be sold. They are a great deal less common than they used to be (far more plants are container grown in pots or planter bags), but if you are buying any bare rooted plants, chose the ones with big root systems rather than impressive tops. If the tops look far too large for the small root system, then prune the top back as you plant it. If you can see any severely damaged woody roots, prune them back with sharp secateurs.
5. Give some attention to the herb garden. You can take cuttings of woody herbs now and divide up the clumping types.
6. There is a lull in planting in the vegetable garden at this time but you can still plant broad beans and winter spinach.
7. Keep on top of the weeds as usual. At this time of the year, hoeing is not as effective in the vegetable garden so use your shovel to turn the dirt and weeds over, trapping the weeds below the sods where they will hopefully rot off. Push hoeing for weed control is best when there is a hot sun to fry the weeds.
8. We have found the first English snowdrops (galanthus) in flower already. Harbingers of spring? Maybe we will skip winter this year.

It is wrap up time in the garden, preparing it for its winter sojourn. Keep dividing up clumping perennials and plants.

• If you have a glasshouse or conservatory, it is seed raising time for late winter plantings of annuals. It is a great deal cheaper to raise your own if you can, than to buy potted colour. If you have polystyrene trays (the sort that mushrooms used to come in), they make great seed trays provided you punch many holes in the bottom. Raising seed in trays under cover is generally a great deal more successful than just scattering a packet of seed where you hope it will grow. Our heavy rains through the winter can wash away and cake the soil, making it difficult for little germinating seeds.
• If you have seed raising capabilities, sow a crop of mixed salad greens or micro veg to provide tasty winter salads. A tray of these grown under cover is very rewarding.
• Continue wrenching those large plants that you are root pruning in preparation for moving. You should be on to your final cut.
• Sow down a green crop in any part of the vegetable garden which is currently empty. It suppresses weeds and feeds the soil.
• You can still sow winter spinach from seed and plant out silver beet for spring eating.
• If you have not done it yet, get on to the copper and winter oil spray on the citrus as soon as you possibly can. This is the most important spray of the year and done now, the plants may not require any further spraying in the winter.
• This is a critical time to keep on top of weeds everywhere with the rash of autumn germination taking hold. The snails might be starting to hibernate but the slugs remain alarmingly active.