January on the West Coast may not be the easiest month to work in the garden but there’s plenty to do if you know what to do.
I suppose for many people it may be difficult to separate gardening myth from gardening fact when it comes to gardening in January.
Just the sheer volume of books, magazines, bloggers and salesmen marauding as gardeners can make it difficult to define what’s fact and what’s myth.
To help everyone get the most out of their gardening time, here’s my January gardening list of useful tasks and useless tasks.
Let’s start with useless gardening tasks for January — or gardening myths as I call them. By far one of the most enduring and useless gardening tasks for January has to be spraying fruit trees with dormant oil, lime sulphur or Bordeaux mix.
Aside from the fact that those substances are highly poisonous and mobile in the environment, dormant spraying in our rainy climate is quite useless.
The rainfall we receive is simply too prolific to allow those chemicals to stick and do their supposed work.
As well, fruit tree diseases are widespread so re-infection is likely. Also, the disease is often located within the tissue so surface applications do little to solve the problem.
If your fruit tree is diseased, either live with the disease by improving the tree’s health to mitigate the symptoms, or replace the tree with a disease-resistant variety.
Turning your compost now to speed up decomposition is commonly suggested as a January garden task.
However, who has the time, or the will, to go out and turn over the compost stuffed into one of those little rodent-resistant bins? Not me. The easy way to aerate your compost is to get a steel bar and poke holes into the compost.
Space the holes 10 centimetres (four inches) apart and make sure to push the bar all the way to the bottom of the compost.
Bar aeration is easy, simple and effective. As for those fancy compost aerators, nice idea but too much work.
There are many useful garden tasks that can be completed in January, and for me, centre on pruning, construction, bed renovation, planting and seeding.
Winter pruning is done for a specific purpose: to invigorate plants. When you prune in winter, the resulting growth response invigorates the plant, which develops new growth according to where the cuts are made.
Winter pruning is useful on woody vines to develop structure, on deciduous shrubs to thin out old growth and develop new growth, and on coniferous or broadleaved trees to raise crowns or thin out growth for greater light penetration to the plantings below.
Not all plants respond well to winter pruning, including Japanese maples, dogwood trees and several other thin-barked hardwood trees that are susceptible to disease infestation when pruned during our wet winters.
Those trees also respond to winter pruning by re-growing uncharacteristically straight and vigorous shoots that negatively affect presentation.
Building gardens during winter is useful in several ways. Firstly, there is disruption in the garden when building anything and it is more effective for overall garden usage to build in the low season and enjoy in the high season.
Secondly, landscape construction contractors often offer rates that are more competitive than during the peak seasons of spring and summer.
Bed renovation is an old school technique that is sparingly practised in our part of the world. Bed renovation is useful in winter and involves lifting out and dividing overgrown perennials or shrubs, enriching the soil with organic matter and replanting an improved and more balanced layout.
There is little need to worry about cold temperature damage during winter on hardy trees, shrubs and perennials that are the mainstay of most West Coast residential gardens.
If the temperature drops below zero, simply cover the plant’s root ball and wait for the inevitable warm-up that happens on the coast and continue renovating.
When it comes to ordering seed to grow at home, January is a good month to get your seed orders placed to assure you get the varieties you want before supply runs out.
Remember when you receive your seed order to place it directly in the fridge for storage, not the freezer where it can be freezer burned. Fridge storage of seeds preserves viability and improves germination rates. Seeds stored in a cupboard or the garage often become dried out or exposed to moisture which leads to rot.
There is one other very useful gardening task for January and that is to take time to enjoy the simple and sublime beauty in the garden you have created.
Todd Major is a journeyman horticulturist, garden designer and builder, teacher and organic advocate. For advice contact him at [email protected].
