Tidying the garden is an essential task in these windy climes
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Gardening on the Edge by Diana Wayland
It has been a fairly cold winter, with two spells of snow and ice, outbreaks of rain, usually a lot in one go, and more winds this month than last!
I was quite pleased, however, to be able to carry on with my fall-back rolling programme before it all closed in.
I was also delighted to be able to get outside one late, sunny if chilly, but not windy, January day and do another couple of hours of it.
This programme is hand weeding. The bed I was weeding in January, in particular, I had been unable to weed before winter closed in, and was clogged with daisies.
This little plant, Bellis perennis, the common daisy, is a charmer, and even continues flowering sporadically throughout winter, as these plants were doing. Unfortunately it is a bit of a thug and, although it has herbal properties, is not going to be included in the formal herb garden when it is completed and planted up this spring. We have enough everywhere else!
Many gardening books and TV programmes advise against tidying up gardens for winter, by cutting down plants and clearing dead leaves, as they can provide food and shelter for many forms of small wildlife, especially beneficial insects.
Tall plants like sunflowers and teasel provide seeds for birds. However, leaving tall herbaceous plants standing is not an option in our gardened area, due to the ferocious winter winds.
I cut back all but shrub roses, which tend to be multi-stemmed and bushy, for the same reason – wind rock. Strong winds blowing against tall plants such as these can move them from side to side in the soil and weaken the root system.
Obviously, most shrubs and trees are not cut back, and trees planted in the last couple of years should still be staked, low down, to prevent wind rock weakening the young root system, leaving the trunk unstaked to enable it to taper as it grows.
I leave dead herbaceous plant matter, such as the leaves of montbretia or lady’s mantle, however, as these can provide shelter for small creatures.
Hand weeding, which involves pulling or digging up the weeds by hand, does not really come into this category. Weeds compete with the plants you want to grow, for space, nutrients and water, and can choke small plants. Weeding is an ongoing issue throughout the growing season, but during winter even weeds slow down. Slightly.
It was lovely to get out that late January day and remove the daisies that were proliferating in the bed of bay trees. While not exactly choking them, they were stealing any nutrients from the soil.
Winter weeding, if you can do any, eases you gently into gardening mode again, as well as keeping you ahead when the season starts. One delightful bonus about weeding in late winter is that you can evaluate the state of many herbaceous plants and some shrubs because they are just starting to sprout again after winter.
Next to the bay trees, in the rose bed, the roses, not as weed-choked, are starting to sprout and snowdrops coming into flower. In other beds, I could see that other plants just beginning to grow again, although yet others were still invisible.
It will be a slightly nervous time until I find out whether those have survived the winter.
