Although the weather may be cold, every opportunity should be taken over the next few weeks to dig and manure the vegetable garden, leaving the ground exposed to the ongoing winter weather, a practice which will help ensure it is in good order for next season’s crops.
Sweetening the soil with lime added immediately after turning over the ground helps most crops, although potatoes are an exception.
Dig soft-wooded hedge clippings directly into the soil to decompose over the winter, or put them in the compost.
Gather the last of the autumn leaves and stack separately to form a seed sowing/potting mix or add them to the compost heap.
Left alone, most leaves take about a year to decompose into leaf mould.
In the compost heap, they should be ready within half that time.
Also useful for the compost bin are vegetable scraps from the kitchen, seaweed, sawdust, lawn clippings and vacuum bag contents.
Jerusalem artichokes should have the dead tops cut off but dig the tubers only as required.
In storage, they shrivel and toughen, however, the tubers can be lifted and kept in a corner of the garden covered with loose soil or sawdust, as recommended for carrots.
Asparagus plants should be cut close to the ground.
An old practice was to leave the tops on the bed until they were thoroughly dry.
They then were burned there, allowing the ashes to lie on the soil.
As well as adding nutrients to the soil, burning destroyed any ripened seed.
Unfortunately, fire bylaws mean this is no longer possible, so the cut stems should be removed and berries picked off the soil and thrown away.
Flowers
Late-flowering Clematis should be pruned before growth begins in spring.
Choose a pair of strong buds 30cm to 1m above the ground and prune 10mm above the buds.
There should be at least two pairs of buds below the cut.
Save prunings and use to propagate more clematis.
Pruning hard may sound extreme but it removes all the unsightly dead foliage and enables vines to be trained more readily on a trellis or fence.
Shrubs are expensive to buy but can be propagated at home from cuttings.
The best are firm, well-ripened pieces of the previous season’s growth.
Cut them into 25cm lengths, with the base cut squarely beneath a leaf joint and the top cut just above a leaf joint.
Dip cuttings in hormone rooting powder then place in a corner of the garden or in pots and cover half their length with soil.
Adding river sand will aid rooting.
Tread soil firmly around the cuttings and repeat that action in a few weeks.
Roots should be growing by early spring and some growth will be made in the summer — transplant into permanent positions after a year.
Fruit
Currants and gooseberries are ideal for small gardens and like raspberries, well-tended bushes will last for years.
Named varieties generally crop better and have bigger fruit.
There is an important distinction between black and red currants and that affects pruning: blackcurrants fruit on the young, light brown growth, so removing branches that bore fruit last summer provides space for new shoots to bear next season’s crop.
If a side growth of new wood 30cm or more in length springs from an older branch, prune the latter just above the new one. Otherwise, trim off all old branches near the base just above a bud.
Red and white currants fruit on old wood, so pruning should start when the bushes are young to encourage the growth of five or six main branches.
If that was not done, prune hard in subsequent winters to obtain that number of main branches and keep the bush to that size.
Each winter, reduce leaders (tops of branches) by a third in length and cut side shoots (laterals) back to 3cm long.
Since the arrival of the American gooseberry mildew in 1984, the number of gooseberry varieties has shrunk and only Invicta and Pax have so far shown resistance to the mildew curse.
Grow gooseberries in an open, sunny part of the garden with moist soil.
Gooseberries fruit on old wood and on last season’s growth.
Prune to keep to let air circulate and to make picking fruit easier.
Encourage sturdy, vigorous growth by mulching with an organic manure and a top-dressing of potash — 50g per bush.
