The winter weather has set in good and proper. You are starting a quiet panic about Secret Santas, food shopping and impossible-to-buy-for relatives….
Better turn to some calming horticultural jobs while you can, like sorting out your seed packets, compiling a festive pot or maybe writing your own Dear Father Christmas list…
Sorting seeds
This is a fantastic time to have a good long look at your seed packets. I bet you’re the same as me – you very rarely sow all the seeds in a packet, and then put the folded-down envelope back with your other seeds till next year. That’s all very well, but the viability of those seeds will almost certainly decline with age. Yes, I know we’ve all heard of amazing stories of prehistoric seeds that scientists have managed to germinate, but that’s unlikely to happen with your Cosmos seeds from 5 years ago.
In the UK, since 2011 seed merchants are required by law to label their seed packets with both the plant’s botanical name (good old Latin!) and the month and year that the packet was sealed. So that’s good. But how do you know if old seeds are still worth keeping? By and large, the ones with harder seedcoats will last longer. There are a couple of relatively simple ways of checking:
Equip yourself with an old plate, some kitchen roll, and clingfilm or a plastic bag. Put a piece of kitchen roll on the plate, moisten it with water, spread some of the old seeds over the damp paper (it’s better if they’re not touching each other), and cover the plate with clingfilm or the plastic bag. Keep the plate somewhere warm and keep the paper moist. Check it every day for a fortnight, then calculate how many (if any!) germinated. Less than 50% and you know that you’re going to have to sow a lot of those seeds to get a reasonable ‘crop’ from the rest of that packet.
A quicker method is to drop some of the seeds into shallow bowls of water. Look at the bowl after quarter of an hour. The seeds that stayed on the surface are likely to be useless, the ones that sank to the bottom might well be viable. Dry those very well before storing them again, by the way! Again, calculate the percentage of ‘sinkers’ against ‘floaters’ and work out whether it’s worth saving the packet at all.
Make a note of the packets you’ve decided to discard, then you’ll have a very handy list for the ones you’ll be re-ordering next year.
Merry Christmas pots
Nothing says ‘welcome to my happy Christmas hearth!’ like a pot of bright and beautiful flowers, berries and foliage by your front door.
You can go for sparkly, pretty airiness with Christmas roses (Helleborus niger), white cyclamen and white winter pansies offset with green or variegated foliage such as ferns, ivies, evergreen grasses like Festuca or Carex, or perennials such as Ficinia truncata ‘Ice Crystal’.
Or maybe you’d prefer to welcome guests with a more colourfully festive display of bright flowers, berries, stems and buds, using plants such as skimmias, Gaultheria, Pernettya, Camellia (like our lovely feature pic – Camellia ‘Yuletide’), coloured stems of dogwoods (Cornus) like ‘Annie’s Winter Orange’, or ornamental cabbages. Contrast their textures with the evergreen foliage of young plants such as Choisya, Hebe, or Euonymus (they can be planted in the garden afterwards). Or curly kale? Or evergreen herbs like rosemary or sage?
Whatever your colour-scheme, my advice is to pack in the plants generously – we don’t need the ‘Bah, humbug! spirit here 🤣
Have some fun with it! To save money, I sometimes pot up some smaller plants from the garden to jolly up our front door, and restore them to their homes afterwards. And I’m afraid the large Schefflera (Umbrella plant) in the porch always gets hung with baubles and tinsel but that’s another story…!
One more thought – bright pots of plants that you’ve chosen and planted yourself make lovely festive gifts for loved ones too.
Gardening shorts
- This is a good time to sow alpine seeds – the winter cold will break their dormancy and they will germinate in the spring. Ensure the compost in the pots is free-draining with plenty of grit or coarse sand added, and leave the pots outside, though protecting them from excess winter wet is a good idea so a cold frame, or a sheet of glass or plastic over them will help. Just make sure they don’t dry out.
- Coppice willows (Salix) now by cutting stems down to the base. if you want more plants, these stems will root easily. If you want to use them as plant supports (they are great for this because they are pliable) but not grow, dunk the ends in a bucket of boiling water first and leave the water to grow cold before using them. Or more dramatically, sear the ends with a blowtorch or kill them with wood preservative!
- Harvest your beetroot when you need it – these are hardy plants so they can stay outside all winter until required in the kitchen. Also harvest the central head of broccoli while it’s tightly budded to stimulate the development of sideshoots.
- It’s National Tree Week! Click on the link below to hear more about the great initiatives in support of our precious trees. I shall be ‘celebrating’ by joining the fantastic folk at Treebourne on Saturday for another session of sapling maintenance – this brilliant charity has planted over 20,000 trees already, with the ultimate aim of making Eastbourne carbon-neutral by 2030 (Again, link at the bottom). If you’re buying bare-rooted trees and shrubs this winter, remember to keep the roots covered until you’re ready to plant. Before they go in the ground, soak the roots for a couple of hours in a bucket of water, and then trim some of the roots by about a third of their length. This will encourage the plant to grow more lateral roots near the stem.
- Make sure that your own Christmas Wish List has been widely distributed among your friends and relations! We have some really lovely gift goodies of all sorts in our online shop – just saying…
Flower carpet roses – exceptionally long flowering; drought tolerant, easy in terms of maintenance and the prettiest thing to cheer up a winter day! It’s one of Louise’s Great Plant this Month and here’s why…
Here is the link to all the info from the Tree Council about National Tree Week.
And here is what Treebourne are all about.
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