Gardening jobs in February (including what to prune and how to prepare the vegetable garden)
Gardening in February: It might be cold, but the garden is starting to come alive. It's the ideal time of year to start preparing for the spring and summer months, and what better place to start than to sow seeds? Feeding, mulching and pruning are also high on the agenda, so it's a busy month outdoors.
Fruit and vegetables
• The vegetable garden is all about preparation at this time of year. Prepare vegetable seed beds for spring planting by digging over the soil, incorporating compost and removing any weeds. Warm the soil with polythene or a cloche for a couple of weeks before sowing – this raises the temperature by a few degrees and dries off the surface, creating a warm, crumbly seedbed that’s perfect for the germinating seeds.
• Gardening expert Sarah Raven loves growing from seed – it's not just rewarding but also sustainable and provides a wide variety and more plants at less expense. To get a head start, salad leaves and spinach are ideal for early spring picking. If you have room under cover, you can sow tender vegetables such as tomatoes (see more below), chillies, peppers and cucumbers. You can also start on some of the more hardy vegetables that just need a bit of protection, such as broad beans, beetroot, carrots and early peas.
• Tomatoes are the perfect choice for grow your own beginners – just a couple of plants will reward you with lots of fresh, flavoursome fruits throughout the season. Easy to grow from seed, tomatoes can be sown in containers in a greenhouse or sunny spot from late-February through to April, and will be ready to harvest from July onwards. Try staggering the dates of when you plant your seeds to ensure you have a steady supply throughout the summer. Try smaller varieties, like bitesize sweet cherry tomatoes, in a hanging basket, but full-flavoured, meaty beefsteak tomatoes will require much more space and a stake or trellis to grow up.
• Potatoes (see more below), onion sets and shallots can be planted in a few weeks, so it's a good idea to order them now.
• Sprouting or ‘chitting’ early potatoes before planting is useful for earlier varieties in cooler climates and maincrop potatoes if they’re being planted late. Put a layer of seed potatoes in a seed tray, ‘rose end’ up. Place the tray in a cool, light, frost-free place and wait for them to sprout. After six weeks at 7C, the shoots will be about 2.5cm long and ready for planting.
• Brussel sprouts, sprouting broccoli, turnips and leeks can all be harvested.
Edible flowers
• Pansies, violets, and violas are all edible and look wonderful in a pot or on a plate. Grow from seed or go buy a tray from your local garden centre. 'By February, if sown in the autumn, the native variety in distinctive purple and yellow will be in full flower,' says author and gardener Sarah Raven. 'I also love Viola x Wittrockiana "Nature Antique Shades" for its unusual colouring and Viola Cornuta "Tiger Eye Red" F1. Grow from seed or go to the garden centre and buy a tray to pick flowers from.'
Pruning
• It's time to prune deciduous shrubs and fruit trees before the sap starts to rise and the buds break. Cut out anything that's dead, diseased or damaged. If you didn't do it in autumn, this is the time to prune roses and other summer-flowering shrubs such as late clematis and buddleias. Wisteria should also be pruned now, as they will bleed if left too late.
• Cut back autumn-fruiting raspberries. These flower and fruit on this year's growth, so if you cut back the old stems, you'll encourage new growth and get a better crop. Apple and pear trees should be pruned by the end of February.
Hedges
• February is a good month to plant hedges. It's worth looking out for bare-root plants as they're cheaper than pot-grown ones; they're dug up from the field and posted directly to you, so they miss out on all the costs of watering and repotting that bump up the price of container-grown plants. The availability of bare-root plants depends on the weather, but they should be around until the end of February and into March.
If you only do one thing...
...get ready to feed your plants. They're about to have a huge growth surge, and it would really help them to get off to a good start. If you have time, dig in well-rotted organic matter, but for a quick fix, sprinkle a balanced fertiliser onto the soil.
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