Organic Gardening Magazine

January fruit

• Mulch fruit trees and bushes with well rotted manure. Remember that the roots will extend as far as the branches, so cover as wide an area as you can.

• Re-apply grease to grease bands on fruit trees – if they’ve dried out, they won’t be working.
• Move strawberries in pots under cover to start them into growth for the earliest possible crop.

• Force an early crop of rhubarb by mulching a couple of crowns with manure and covering them with upturned buckets.

• Winter fruit pruning should be complete by the end of January. If you still have fruit awaiting attention, do it now!.

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Trees & shrubs

Check tree stakes and ties, making sure the ties are secure but not so tight that the tree is being throttled. Picture: Dave Bevan

• You can plant or move trees, shrubs and hedging in milder areas this month if the soil is reasonably dry, but in colder areas you’d do well to wait until the end of February.
• Check recently planted trees and shrubs and heel them back in if they have been lifted by frost.
• Watch out for trees and shrubs sitting in a puddle. This indicates windrock; proper staking is a matter of urgency.
• If you opted for a real Christmas tree and have access to a shredder, give it a useful afterlife as a mulch. Alternatively, cut off the branches and save them to use as pea sticks, and use the trunk as a stake.


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January Veg

Get set to sow!
• Sort your seed-box and make a list of the still-within-date seeds that you already have – you’ve got far more than you think! Then, if you haven’t already done it, get that seed order drawn up and sent off.
• When your seeds arrive, store them in a cool place; a sealed plastic box in the fridge is ideal.
• Stock up on spring varieties of garlic, shallot sets and first early potatoes, all of which can go in in February if the soil is fit for planting.
• If you’ve already bought your first early seed potatoes, or have saved your own, set them to chit – better that they are chitting in good light than sprouting quietly in the bag. Set them ‘rose’ end up in trays or egg boxes (the rose end is where most of the eyes are congregated).
• Cover the beds where you are planning to make outdoor sowings next month with cloches, cold frames or black plastic.

Sowing & planting
• In sheltered gardens in the deep south you can (theoretically) make your first outdoor sowings under a cloche or cold frame at the end of January. Crops worth trying are winter varieties of lettuce and spinach, spring onions, radishes, and hardy varieties of peas and broad beans. In most gardens, however, you’ll get better – or just as quick – results if you wait until mid-February.
• If you’re itching to plant something this month, start a row of Jerusalem artichokes. Put them on the north side of your plot, so that other crops will benefit from the shelter they provide, rather than languishing in the shade they cast.

Harvesting
• Make the most of kale, sprouts and parsnips now that frost has assuredly sweetened the crop. Let frost thaw before you harvest leaf crops, however, or they will collapse when you take them indoors.
• If hard ground frosts are making digging impossible, harvest a couple of weeks’ supply of root crops when you can and heel them into a shallow trench near the house.
• Keep a very close eye on stored crops; even with the best of storage conditions, there does come a ‘use them or lose them’ moment. And watch out for maurauding mice, which will be getting hungry and venturesome by now.

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