Into action
Natasha Holt discovers it isn’t just cold weather that could make pain and stiffness worse in winter
tal grasses, and cutting back flowering plants after blooming season.
It’s handy to have a large durable bucket to collect weeds, mix compost and fertilizer in and drop damaging snails and slugs into.
Check your lawnmower engine and if necessary have it serviced before grass growth takes off. Always change the oil before grass cutting gets underway. If you haven’t been out much, there’s probably a lot of tidying up to do, cutting back decaying perennials, weeding and mulching.
If you are working in areas where you have spring bulbs emerging, you’ll will need to adopt a delicate approach so as not to damage new foliage. It’s a job I love – I pop my earphones in and enjoy getting to grips with the borders again, usually accompanied by a robin redbreast on the lookout for worms.
As the soil thaws, it’s a good time to do some moving of deciduous shrubs while they are still dormant. All of us make mistakes – perhaps planting too close to another shrub or simply in the wrong place so now’s the time to shift things around. Replant at exactly the same depth as the plant was in its previous position as planting too deep can kill trees and shrubs.
Depending on the size of the shrub, this can be hard work so pace yourself and be realistic about what you can achieve or what you will need assistance with.
February and March are an excellent time of year to prune many shrubs to ensure they look and perform their best for the rest of the year. When shrubs are leafless, it’s much easier to assess their overall outline and see exactly what you are doing.
To encourage the best flowering possible on deciduous shrubs that flower on new wood later in the summer, an annual shearing is necessary. Established deciduous flowering shrubs should be pruned back now to 2-3 buds of the previous season’s growth and remove about a fifth of the old stems. This will encourage the shrub to produce vigorous shoots that will carry flowers in summer such as buddleja davidii, deciduous ceanothus, perovskia, ceratostigma, cotinus, hardy fuchsia, lavatera and spiraea japonica.
What you don’t want to do is to remove flower buds that are about to open – eg forsythia, ribes and kerria, so leave these shrubs alone until after they have flowered.
Once you get out, you’ll see there’s plenty to get stuck into – happy gardening!
As the soil thaws, it’s a good time to replant deciduous shrubs
As the temperatures dip, people who live with joint and bone conditions such as arthritis can feel more discomfort than they do in summer. But in reality, could those problems actually be down to a lack of the ‘sunshine vitamin’ in the dark winter months?
“Vitamin D helps regulate the amount of calcium and phosphorus in our bodies and is crucial for bone and muscle function,” says Dr Marilyn Glenville, nutritionist and author of Osteoporosis: How To Prevent, Treat and Reverse It.
“It may also have anti-inflammatory effects. As a result, it’s believed vitamin D plays a role in relieving joint pain, particularly where inflammation is the cause. It can also help prevent osteoporosis, which weakens the bones.”
One study, published in 2017, showed that adults over 50 who had a moderate vitamin D deficiency were more likely to develop knee pain over five years and hip pain over two years.
The research suggested that correcting this deficiency could reduce the pain or stop it worsening.
How a lack of vitamin D affects the body
A clinical paper in the British Medical
Journal revealed that more than 50 per cent of adults in Britain have vitamin D levels that are too low, with 16 per cent being severely deficient in winter.
Yet vitamin D plays a vital role in boosting our immune systems and it has even been suggested that it could help fight Covid-19.
So if you feel you’re often ill with colds or the flu it could well be due to a deficiency. A lack of vitamin D can cause tiredness and fatigue as well as hair loss.
Other symptoms include respiratory issues, numbness, depression and low mood, specifically seasonal affective disorder
(SAD). Most significantly, a lack of vitamin D can lead to muscle pain, bone loss and pains in the bones, especially in the lower back.
One study that looked at skeletal pain showed that those with a vitamin D deficiency, particularly in women, were more likely to suffer from pain in their legs, ribs and joints.
Bone and joint issues
Given the importance of vitamin D for bone health, it’s hardly surprising to hear it also has an impact on conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis.
Research on patients with the autoimmune condition rheumatoid arthritis showed that most of the participants had low levels of the vitamin. However, it is unclear why this is. Some medical professionals believe that low vitamin D levels are a complication of rheumatoid arthritis itself, while other studies suggest that depleted vitamin levels are actually caused by the corticosteroid medicines taken by sufferers of the disease.
According to US non-profit group Arthritis Foundation, people who take oral steroids are twice as likely to have a vitamin D deficiency as those who don’t.
“Not only is vitamin D deficiency highly prevalent in rheumatoid arthritis patients
Not enough vitamin D causes the bones to soften and weaken