Living Greener: February provides opportunities for gardeners

THE days are getting longer again, so it’s a good time to think about what to put in the garden next year.

When you plan your garden, try to think in three dimensions, using not just fields or garden beds, but hedgerows and woods.

We grow mushrooms on the surface of the soil, brassicas over them, and pea vines over them. In our woods, we had sorrel on the surface, blueberry bushes over them, and apple trees over them – multiple levels of crops going upwards.

This is also a good time to start thinking about keeping animals like chickens, rabbits and bees, and whether you could keep them on your property.

Many people find spring the best time to get new animals, so best to start planning their new environment now.

You might be unpacking all the winter clothes around now, but this is also a good time to start buying extra blankets and old clothes from the charity shops and boot sales, in case you need them. Those blankets and old clothes are not only good for people, but for home insulation as well.

As people become busier each year, they have less and less time for the basic socialising out of which a community is built.

Go down your neighbour’s houses, one by one, and talk to them, inviting them to meet at the pub with your family and chat.

For the first time, many of us are surrounded by strangers, and we need to get to know them and find out which ones want to be part of our communities and can be trusted to help in a crisis.

Once you meet them, meet regularly, rather than sitting at home playing video games or watching television.

Spend as much time outdoors as possible while there is still some sunlight in Ireland – we all need Vitamin D, which we synthesize from the sun, and there is too little of it here for much of the year.

This is the right time to spread well-rotted manure or compost over your beds and replenish the soil before planting, or at least to turn over the soil and aerate it.

Many gardeners cover their soil with newspaper or cardboard this time of year to start warming up the soil.

If you live in the bog, you might have quite acid soil; you can buy a soil pH testing kit in most garden stores and can add lime or some other alkaline to balance out acid soils.

This is also a good time to mulch the pathways in your garden if you plan on walking on them all year.

This is also a fine opportunity to plant in a poly-tunnel, greenhouse or cold-frame – the last being a box with a transparent roof, like a mini-greenhouse. If you don’t have any of these, try making cloches by cutting plastic fizzy-drink bottles across the middle, leaving bell-shaped domes for your seedlings.

The resulting plastic will be quite floppy, so you might want to support it with a criss-cross of sticks poked through the plastic and taped together where they cross.

You can place the bottle over seedlings in the garden – preferably with the bottle-top screwed on at night to keep out frost and left open during the day to allow the plant to breathe.

This is the right time to cut willow, either to build a hedge, weave a basket or just spread the willow around.

If you want to take a row of willows and make them into a hedge, cut the willow partway through the stem at whatever height you need.

Then fold the stem down and weave it around the trees and branches around it so the tree will remain alive and continue to grow above the cut and create a living fence.

This is also the time to prune fruit trees to remove any winter damage – best to get this done before the sap starts to rise in spring.

Tie young trees to posts or some other solid structure, to make sure they do not crack or are rocked back and forth in the spring gales.

February is not an easy month to get out in the garden – the days remain short and chilly. Everything remains wet, meaning that a shovelful of earth is much heavier than it should be.

The more you are on top of things now, however, the less you have to wait later, and gardeners do enough waiting as is.