Gardening month by month: February

February in the Garden

February is on its way and the garden may well still be in the grip of the winter weather. However the canny gardeners know that this month is when they can begin to get a head start on the seed sowing, especially if they can do it under glass in a greenhouse, polytunnel or warm window sill.

Sowing

For those folk with cold frames, a first sowing of some of the early varieties of carrots can be made on a fine day this month if the local weather conditions aren't too cold. Suitable varieties include Early Nantes and Amsterdam Forcing and the cold frame needs to be kept shut whilst the seeds germinate as they need the soil to reach around 10°C. Greenhouse and polytunnel owners might also be considering some early tomato sowings now, as well as some leafy green vegetables such as winter lettuce and rocket. Sweet and chilli peppers and aubergines should also be started off this month to get a nice long growing season. Cloches can also be popped over some of your strawberries if you plan to get an early crop from them.

Weather permitting the herb garden can also see a bit of action this month. A couple of warm, dry days would let you pop a row of parsley seeds into a raked section of soil and if you can get mint and lemon balm (melissa) root cuttings they can also be popped into the ground. Don't forget that mint can be really invasive if allowed to spread, so it is often put into containers sunk into the ground, or surrounded with buried slates or old paving stones to constrain where it can grow.

Planting out

Seed potatoes will have been available for a while now and many people will be ‘chitting' them. This simply means standing the tubers in a light, cool (but frost-free) place so that the short, stubby, green shoots start to develop - old egg boxes are often used as convenient stands for the chitting tubers. The chitting can take up to six weeks - any longer and the shoots will turn long, pale and brittle and will be more of a hindrance than a help. The tubers will be planted from mid-March onwards, although in some of the warmer areas of the UK some of you might even be able to sneak a few first early spuds into the ground at the end of February if the weather is kind to you. Don't worry about being too late though: potatoes are a very forgiving crop and aren't all that fussy about when they get planted.

There is often some debate as to whether chitting makes much difference. The BBC Gardeners World team did a small trial a few years ago and found that chitting can help first earlies, didn't really make much difference to second earlies and was not really worth bothering with for main crops. Incidentally the first early/second early/main crop designations for seed potatoes really just describes how long the variety needs to be in the ground before harvesting: first earlies grow the quickest in around 10 weeks whereas second earlies can take 13 weeks and maincrops will be growing for 15 to 20 weeks. Some folk grow potatoes from spuds saved from the previous season or even supermarket or greengrocer bags, which of course can help save a couple of quid. I should raise a word of caution with doing this though - potatoes can suffer from some rather serious diseases and these tubers will not be guaranteed to be free from them. This can result in not only you losing your crops but also friends and neighbours losing theirs - in the worst cases whole areas can be declared off limits for potato growing for several years. That's a great way to make yourself very unpopular, especially if you live in a rural, potato growing area!

Harvesting

You should still be able to lift leeks, swedes, winter cabbages, the last of the brussels, some broccoli, and any spinach/spinach beet that has survived the harsh winter weather.

Other jobs

If you've got evergreen hedges they can have a first light prune towards the end of the month to encourage new growth in the spring.
Prune established autumn fruiting raspberries.
If you're planning on planting any asparagus, now is a good time to get the crowns ordered and also, if the weather allows, to get their bed dug. Remove all perennial weed roots.

One last job to be getting on with is sourcing some manure from local stables and farms. If they have a supply of well-rotted manure this can be used immediately in the spring and summer to give hungry crops like spuds and squashes a boost. However if it is fresh (in other words less than six months old) get it now, pop it into a heap in a corner of the plot with a bit of tarpaulin underneath it and then wrapped over the top (to stop weeds from sprouting from below and rain from washing away the nutrients) and then leave it alone until the autumn. Fresh manure can ‘burn' plants and really needs to be rotted down for half a year at least before it is applied to the ground. Prices of manure vary from area to area and also depend on how much you are going to take in one go. A bulk trailer-load for an allotment plot will often work out cheaper than individual bags and sometimes you'll be lucky enough to come across a stables or smallholder that will let you take some for free just to clear some space! This year it is worth asking the supplier if they know if the horses or cattle that supplied the manure were fed on grass sprayed with weedkillers containing aminopyralids. There was quite a problem with this last year as the weedkiller passed through the animals' digestive tracts to appear in the manure and then attacked some types of vegetables that the muck was used to fertilize. If the supplier can't answer the question all is not lost - just knock the price down and leave that muck for longer, or use it around plants that aren't affected by aminopyralids such as fruit trees. Next year this shouldn't be an issue as these weedkillers have thankfully now been withdrawn.

Jim'll

photos (c) Jilly Graham 2009 

Our affiliate merchant AMAZON has lots of books for sale around this subject. The Big Green Idea is paid a commission if you choose to buy via our links. These are not recommendations by the author and are chosen purely to give a representation.