Gardening in December

I'm well known for being in the early stages of becoming a grumpy old man. One manifestation of this trait is that I really don't like going shopping. Town centres are too crowded, with people bustling about and brash commercialism forced upon you at every turn. And of course this goes double for Christmas shopping - excited children, stressed parents, folk with tunnel vision looking to buy a mountain of gifts and shop assistants who ignore you when you need help and jump on you when you don't. So having a few winter tasks in the garden up one's sleeve can be a useful dodge at this time of year...

What you can do outside in December is affected by a number of factors - the weather, the sort of soil you have, how much time you have and how hardy you are! You can't do much about the weather but it's useful to have a variety of jobs to hand, some of which you can do outside and some of which you can do indoors whilst the rain streams down the windows. A good set of waterproofs, woolly socks and wellies can also be a great help as they can let you tinker around outside in cold, showery weather.

Your soil can be more limiting. If you've got heavy clay, wet weather is bad news. Rainwater can build up into muddy lakes on the surface and take ages to drain away. Digging and walking on wet clay soil isn't advisable. Not only do your boots end up weighing five times as much as normal and you tread mud around everywhere, but you can also compact the soil. This means that air pockets are destroyed and the ground becomes difficult to cultivate. Hard ‘pans' can build up that take a lot of work to break up later. If you do have to walk over the soil, use wide planks covered with chicken mesh. These will spread the load, and the mesh will give your boots some grip so that you are less likely to slip over.

Folk with lighter, sandier soils are better off and can work their ground soon after the rain as the water will easily drain away. However, this is a double edged sword - the rapidly draining rainwater can leach nutrients down out of the topsoil, reducing the fertility of your ground. A thick mulch of flattened cardboard boxes weighed down with compost, manure or cut-down old plant stems can help as it can shed some of the water to the sides. Digging in organic matter a few weeks before planting crops in the spring is also a good idea - don't waste time and effort digging it in now only to lose most of the goodness.

Raised beds

Raising the edges of beds to make them more obvious can also help dissuade people from walking over them. Raised beds are also useful in areas that are prone to waterlogging or have lots of tree roots going through, them as you grow your plants partly (or totally, depending on how high your raised bed is) above the height of the surrounding soil. The paths between raised beds aren't going to be grown in so you can worry less about compacting them and can use ground covers and mulches such as plastic sheeting with chippings on top, recycled paving slabs, or even our old friend, opened out cardboard boxes! Why waste more time digging over, hoeing and raking ground that you're just going to walk on?

The winter months are a good time to get raised bed edges constructed - it's a pleasant job on a brisk sunny winter's day outside, or it can be done in a shed or garage in wet weather. The raised beds should have a width slightly less than twice the comfortable reach of your arm. This is to ensure that you can reach the middle of the bed from either side. Beds can be as long as you like, but be wary of making them too long otherwise folk will be tempted to walk or jump over them rather than walk round. We've found square beds 4ft to 5ft long are good, as well as longer 5ft by 10ft beds. The height of the beds is up to you and depends on how much wood you have for the edges, how much organic material you can lay your hands on to fill them and what the ground underneath them is like. Really deep raised beds can also make it easier for disabled or elderly folk to garden as well.

You can buy treated wooden bed edges (as well as recycled plastic ones) ready made, but we tend to use scrap wood for ours. A lot of our raised bed edges are made from broken up pallets. We simply nail two stakes at either end of a couple of planks from a pallet to make a side, and then put four sides together to make a square bed, or six together to make a longer rectangular bed (one on each end and two on each long side). The edges can be screwed together or you can just knock the stakes straight into the ground - the latter is quicker and easier to move but you can sometimes find the weight of the growing medium pushes the sides out a little letting it spill out at the corners. We don't treat the wood in any way - it will rot in a couple of years but the edges are easy and cheap (or free!) so it's not a big problem. The old rotten boards can either go in the compost or be put in a quiet area for bugs to make their homes in.

Compost bins

As well as making raised bed edges, pallets can also be used to construct compost bins, and again now is a good time to be constructing some new ones ready to start filling up next year. There are lots of designs for pallet based compost bins. Some people simply screw three pallets together to form a back and sides and then have another pallet at the front that is tied on or held in place by a couple of stakes. A fifth pallet or some old carpet can be put on top as a lid to keep the worst of the rain out. This is dead quick to make and fine for an allotment style garden. However, if you want you can dismantle the pallets and use the planks to make a much tidier bin. Or better yet three bins - one to be filling up, one to be left processing and the third to be extracting finished compost from.

Sowing

When you've had enough of woodworking with pallets, there are some other jobs to be getting on with in the garden now. December is a traditional time for sowing garlic for example. We usually plant out our garlic cloves in several batches from early November to late December to hedge our bets against bad weather and pests. Garlic that is put out some time between the Winter Solstice and the end of the month should be ready to harvest roughly around the Summer Solstice. Garlic is pretty hardy stuff so you can plant it out as long as the ground isn't frozen. Simply prepare a bed by digging in a little organic matter, rake the surface smooth, lay out some lines and then dib a shallow hole for each garlic clove to be dropped in. You might want to put some twigs or chicken wire over the bed to deter the birds from trying to pull the cloves out - they don't eat them but they can quickly make a mess of a newly sown bed. As well as garlic, in mild weather you can also get the last of the autumn sown onion sets out. Preparation is much the same as for garlic and they can live in the same area in your crop rotation (both being part of the allium family).

The start of the month is also a good time to get the last of the spring flowering bulbs in if the ground is not frozen. For individual bulbs dig a hole with a trowel or bulb planter, pop the bulb in with its pointed end facing upwards and then cover with the removed soil. For larger areas you can ‘naturalise' the bulbs in grass. Use a spade to lift a section of turf an inch or so thick and then scatter the bulbs randomly over the soil. Scrape holes for them to sit in where they fell before replacing the turf on top. Make sure you do this in areas where you are happy to leave the grass to grow quite long as you will need to let the bulbs' leaves sit untouched for a while after flowering in order to let the bulbs build up energy reserves for the following year.

Mid-December is also our favourite time for pruning apple trees - we usually seem to end up doing it around Boxing Day (it's a good way of working the pud off from the day before!). Remove dead, damaged or diseased branches first and dispose of these by burning rather than composting. Then trim out any branches that are crossing, rubbing, facing into the centre of the tree or getting in the way (such as being at head height over a path for example). For standalone trees we then just step back and check that we've got a roughly bowl shaped structure. For trained trees such as espaliers and stepovers you need to follow the specific training regime for the shape you want - most fruit and veg growing gardening books contain details of the techniques involved.

Healthy pruning material can be chipped and put in the compost bins, or used as pea or bean stakes. Any cleared crops that haven't yet made it into the compost bin can do with going there now as well. In fact a good tidy up around the plot is another useful job to get done on a winter's day. Those of you with greenhouses or polytunnels that haven't given them a good clean out yet can do that on wet days - make sure that you remove all detrius from last season's crops to help stop diseases from spreading. Check in any pots or containers for pests as well - they make good hidey holes for slugs, snails and woodlice.

The perfect Christmas present!

And what about that Christmas shopping I mentioned at the start? Well, there's always garden centres and nurseries to mooch round if you have to buy a present for a fellow gardener. But what about putting a bit more thought and effort in and doing a spot of recycling as well? For example, you could make your own veg growing starter kit. Simply pop some spare or saved seeds in little homemade manilla packets (easily fashioned out of an old brown envelope), decorate some small pots (either spare flower pots or recycled yoghurt pots), sieve a little of your homemade compost or wormery output into a bag and write up some simple instructions for what to do. Box it all up with some recycled packaging (you do save your wrapping paper don't you?) and you've got a unique gift that might encourage a child or non-gardener to take up 'grow you own'. But most importantly you can do it at home at your leisure rather than battling round the shops on Christmas Eve!

Jim'll

photos (c) Salena Walker 2009