Garden Centre

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Gardening in February – weather, tasks and diaries

It’s possible you have fruit trees in your garden – if so, take this as a cautionary tale. The people who owned our house for a decade or more before us must have looked at these apple trees every day, and done absolutely nothing about pruning them! Admittedly the trees were probably oversized by the time they (the previous owners) moved in, but even so, to ignore them for so long was daft behaviour. I know what any tree surgeon would tell me, ‘They’re too old, too big and too badly shaped to do anything with. Take ‘em out.’ But the tree surgeons reckon without ‘himself’ who is mortally opposed to cutting down any tree, even one that’s three times the right size and produces only two apples a year and has diseased leaves. Himself gets up in the trees every third year and cuts them. I can’t says ‘prunes’ because that implies some kind of logical work that results in a desired outcome – all we manage is to stop the trees shading the garden entirely. But while they may not be pretty, or good croppers, they are a superb wildlife resource – this tree has a woodpecker that visits (I have pointed out to himself that woodpeckers are not a good sign for trees, but he ignores me) and the other apple, which is in a sunnier position, attracts many solitary bees. So, in February, we get out the ladders and try to make the trees reasonable for another year ….

At least this year the weather cooperated. Last year we had an unseasonal frost the night before we intended to prune and it was bitterly cold work – this year ‘himself’ took his T-shirt off, it was so hot in the tree. But the poor old frogs are frisky and it won’t do them any good, their frogspawn, assuming they lay it before the weekend, will get caught by next week’s cold snap.

And I’m starting (again) my seed diary. Every year I say I’m going to write down the dates I sow various seeds and every year I get to about April and forget to continue the plan, so I can never remember when the last frost date really was, or when I planted the begonias or salvias last year … I wish I knew a foolproof way of keeping track.

Labels: all-year gardening, apple trees, sowing seeds, winter pruning

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:27 AM

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