Tender care under cover
I am trying to catch up as usual with taking cuttings of more tender plants. I will also start lifting one or two parent plants, such as heliotropes and nemesia ‘Wisley Vanilla’ to fill the conservatory with scent for the spring. I am starting the tidying up of the greenhouse to overwinter slightly tender plants. Tomatoes will be the first to go, but I will leave the peppers in for a few more weeks and keep on picking the basil until it succumbs to cold and damp. I shall have to start taking cuttings of the pelargoniums. This really should have started earlier, but pellys generally take quite easily, as long as the compost is not overwatered. Later this month, the leggy mother plants will be cut back quite hard and potted up in fresh compost. They will look fairly miserable in the conservatory through the winter, but soon start to perk up as the days lengthen from March onwards.