Gardening Tips for January 2025

Happy New (gardening) Year from EGRGA

I had a very pleasant surprise a few weeks ago, I found out I have a new reader. Welcome to my gardening article. To both of my readers and anyone who may be reading this for the first time, welcome to you all and let’s get gardening. And just a reminder, our AGM is on Monday 27th January, from 7 pm in Rudgwick Village Hall. The committee would like to invite everyone to attend and for non-members, why not come along and join EGRGA as we look forward to celebrating our 80th year.

January in the garden, it’s dark, cold, wet and miserable so there any number of alternative pursuits but if gardening is your chosen recreation please read on and hopefully you will be enthused enough to shake the spiders out of your wellies and gardening coat and get out into the garden. This month is very much one for planning ahead, deciding on the crop rotation, ordering seeds, cleaning gardening tools and empty pots and cleaning the greenhouse.

Just a brief update on the use of peat. The long running saga of banning its use continues. It looks like this piece of legislation only got as far as its first reading in the House of Commons before the general election, I can’t find any reference suggesting the law was ever changed or has yet become effective. However, retailers should no longer have peat for sale to us amateur gardeners. My own experience of peat substitute compost is not that great but it does appear to improve the longer you keep it. So, if you can afford the cost and the space to keep it, how about buying a few bags for use next year!

Being January, it’s time to sort out the box of seeds collected over the previous year, or more likely, years. I know I referred to this last year and the year before and most likely the year before that. It is worth going through all those packs of seeds and certainly discard any that are more than one year old, last year’s seeds should still be useable but the longer they are kept the less likely they are to germinate. So, treat yourself, either visit the garden centre or visit any of the growing number of online seed retailers, they do appear to offer good value for money, but as always, shop around.

January is also a good time of year for inspecting the garden boundaries particularly fences and walls separating you from the neighbour. With most of the plant life dormant and leaves missing from the trees it is easier to identify any areas that need a spot of maintenance.

The Kitchen Garden

If waterlogged, which is likely after the rain in October and November it is probably the better option to stay away, any attempt to dig over the ground will more than likely compact it. If you can access empty vegetable beds without trampling on them too much now is a good time to spread well-rotted manure or compost over and leave on the surface to weather in.

Broad beans can be sowed now if the ground isn’t frozen. The option is to sow in pots and keep them under cover to plant out in spring. Some growers prefer to plant in the autumn, I have tried this but haven’t found much benefit, newly sown beans soon catch up once the spring gets going. Much the same can be done with peas, sow now into pots and under cover and plant out in the spring for an early crop in May.

I’m trying an older method for planting onions this year. This involved planting several seeds in a plant pot and keeping covered, then planting out as a group in spring. I’ll let you know how I get on.

It is also chitting season again. For those with a kitchen garden or just enough space to have a go, the venerable art of chitting will have gardeners reaching for empty egg boxes. It is usually best practice to buy seed potatoes, they should be disease-free otherwise try using the shop bought potatoes that have the habit of chitting themselves at this time of year. Put the potatoes somewhere cool and light and in a few weeks the eyes will begin to sprout and form new shoots = chits.

The Flower Garden

Time to prune the Wisteria again. In the autumn, the year’s growth should have been cut back to 6 leaves. Now is the time to prune again, this time to two buds which is intended to concentrate the plant’s effort into building up flower-bearing spurs. As the plant is dormant and leafless, it makes it easy to see what you are doing. If the autumn pruning was missed, prune back to two buds anyway and hopefully these buds will become flower bearing.

Keep gardening.

Richard Haigh