January 2011 - Preparing the Potager for Spring

PLANTS IN FLOWER: Snowdrops, Pulmonaria, Hazel catkins, Hellebore niger (Christmas Rose),  Viburnum (buds).

In contrast to last month, January has been quite mild. The snowdrops are out in the raised beds and the oriental hellabores are beginning to push their way through the dark compost which I put down in autumn last year. Only the Christmas Roses are actually in flower with their delicate pinky-white petals. My main job before early Spring is to get the deep beds filled up with top soil and the ground mulched with bark around them. Although the thermometer outside the kitchen door showed minus 5 c. first thing in the morning, I spent a very chilly couple of days lining the two deep beds closest the field with cardboard and then shoveling a layer of compost and straw into their base.  The promised top soil arrived right at the end of the month in a vast digger, but I have yet to fill up the beds with it as will take a quite a bit of solid work. This I will do in February when the soil has warmed up a little ... hopefully.

Instead I spent the last day of January planning how to divide up the beds for planting.  I would use the bed closest to the field for salad crops and some cut flowers;  beans and peas etc in the next bed along; root vegetables in the deeper soil of the third bed; and finally position long-term fruit and vegetable crops in the bed closest to the hedge. The soil elsewhere in the garden was frozen too hard to do much other work outside.  The pond was also frozen solid with a thick layer of ice, but I could see several goldfish swimming around quite happily beneath the surface.  

Making a the tour of the garden in the the pale but welcome winter sunshine, I was amazed to see that nearly all my rosemary 'Miss Jessup's Upright' that I had planted in the sloping bed at the front of the house had survived the harsh temperatures of December. But all my other varieties of rosemary were dead again - just like last winter - even some pink and white flowered rosemany bushes which I had planted right up against the shelter of a west facing wall. Emerging buds of the tiny reticula iris which I planted around the west facing terrace were beginning to emerge but many of the surrounding grasses were bleached white by the freezing wind.  I only hope they will spring into life again when the weather gets warmer.  All around the garden a few hesitant shoots were beginning to appear:crocus; early narcissus; hyacinth; daffodil; and several types of allium. Drinking tea on the terrace in the afternoon sun with  the sound of the stream mingling with birdsong in the valley, it was almost possible to believe that Spring was just around the corner.