British gardeners should complete one “key job” by the end of January, a landscape gardener has suggested. According to Bunny Guinness of Gardener’s Question Time, green-fingered people should be carrying out their mulching either during the rest of December or in January.
Mulching is the practice of applying a layer of material (like bark, compost, straw, or wood chips) over the surface of soil. It has a number of benefits for your garden including retaining moisture, suppressing weeds, regulating soil temperature and adding nutrients as the mulch breaks down.
It also acts as a protective blanket, reducing water loss and insulating roots from extreme temperatures, slowly feeding the soil as organic mulches decompose. According to Bunny, it is one of the key jobs to carry out during the coldest winter months.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, she said: “Mulching is a key job at this time of year. This year, I have plenty of top soil to use, taken from the old patch of lawn that I stripped back after killing off the grass.
“I will top up my raised vegetable beds with it to increase the mineral content of the soil. Having put on various organic mulches for the past 40 years – bark, digestate, homemade compost and leaf mould – I am hoping to balance up the proper ‘soil’ element.
“It will be interested to see whether my yields are improved. Elsewhere, in my ornamental borders, I am putting on a good 50mm layer of bark mulch, and my more tender plants like dahlias and cannas will get 100mm or more, to keep them snug from the colder frosts.”
Bunny is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s Gardener’s Question Time while she also regularly exhibits at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, where she has won six gold medals.
As well as the importance of mulching, there are a number of other jobs she carries out in the garden during the winter.
One of those is planting vegetables, and she warns British gardeners that “it’s not too late to plant”.
She writes: “My vegetable beds are best if kept full of plants: it helps stop the heavy rain from leaching all the goodness from the soil, feeds the family, and keeps the soil structure in better health.
“My broad beans and onion sets are in now, but it’s not too late to plant. I sow all my beans inside and plant out only after they have three or four leaves.”
Other tasks that Bunny looks to complete in the cold winter months include ordering her seeds, making a shelter for more tender plants and relocating plants to fill a bare area.
She also warned it “can be risky” to leave planting bulbs until January.
