Keep up with the winter work
Particularly during the wet winter months most garden jobs come with the warning ‘if the soil is not too wet’. Digging vegetable areas, planting new stock, winter tidying plant beds, winter tidying the lawn and last of the leaves, mulching etc etc. While this is of course very sound advice and gives you a good excuse to keep warm and dry and do nothing in the garden, it is important to keep up with the jobs at hand.
For some jobs like digging your vegetable area it is actually beneficial to do so sooner rather than later. Opening up the soil now and incorporating well rotted farmyard manure gives the frosts a chance to work on the ground, particularly heavy soil, and help break it up while also giving the manure a chance to incorporate into the soil. This will make your spring work so much easier when you are cultvating the soil down for seeding and planting.
If you practice the increasingly popular ‘no dig’ method of vegetable growing you will of course not be cultivating your soil but just be mulching over it with organic matter. I haven’t tried this method yet but maybe I will start this year, it appears to be a permanent style rather than an annual one so you must persist for a few years once you start. Having read up on it I feel that the soil must be in good condition to start with as I can’t imagine begining this method on some on the marly hard soils around the country.
Keeping off the soil and working from planks must also be important, especially on heavy soils, as again the compaction from footfall caused in wet weather would make heavy clay soil irredeemable.
One area where I do practice a no dig policy is in the ornamental plant borders. Digging in established planting areas can damage surface root systems of shrubs and trees and encourage suckering and weeds. Better to use an organic mulch like bark, compost or manure.
Again ‘if the soil is not too wet’ I like to mulch at this time of year, assuming that you have done your main winter tidy up clearing away all the herbaceous dead material and leaves from the planting areas.
Mulching can be done individually around the base of plants with manure or compost, ideally manure shouldn’t touch stems and crowns of plants where it may cause burn, or by blanket cover of the entire planting bed with a bark mulch. The individual treatment is fantastic for boosting the nutrients to established plants and as a soil conditioner. Bark mulch doesn’t have the nutrient benefits of manure and compost but it is a great weed suppressor, good at stopping winter rain compaction, acts a thermal blanket to keep the soil warm and is highly decorative. I prefer to use fine bark mulch as it looks the best and blows around less once it is bedded down.
In the long term it will break down into the soil and encouage earth worm activity and improve your soil condition. Ideally you need a 75mm depth of bark to stop weed seed germination but you will still get weed seeds blowing in from the general environment. It is important to pull these weed seedlings before they get established. Be careful also that around woody plants that up don’t allow bark to build up around the stems as this can cause stem rot in our wet climate and ultimately kill your plant.
In wet and frosty conditions it is best to stay off lawns as much as possible although this is not always practical and therefore possible but be as sensible as you can. I have seen burnt footprints on lawns that have been walked over after heavy frosts. Don’t give up on your garden for winter just be weather sensitive and follow my personal gardening mantra - little and often- to get the job done.