January brings the snow, makes our feet and fingers glow.......at least according to the first stanza of the 1834 poem, The Garden Year, by Sara Coleridge, an accomplished poet in her own right notwithstanding her better known father and one of the Lakes poets, Samuel Taylor.
Anyway, back to January and If you can no longer bear the sensation of your garden glaring at you through the kitchen window or patio doors, daring you to sally forth armed with trug and tools, this is a good month for meeting the challenge head on by planting out one or more bare rooted fruit trees if the weather permits. At this time of year they will be plentiful and much cheaper than the fully nurtured pot grown variety.
However, as Harlow Carr Garden's bluff Yorkshire supremo, Geoff Smith, used to say to listeners on Gardener's World "start with a decent hole - what's the point of paying a fiver for a tree and then digging a ten bob note hole for it".
A couple or so years ago, Izzy undertook this very same task on a narrow terraced strip of land on her steeply sloping rear garden despite the fact that the last time she did any serious digging was as a three year old on Ainsdale beach testing out her newly acquired bucket and spade in the sand dunes. Anyway, of the three trees she planted, the apple and pear have survived and are doing well, although the cherry succumbed early doors to a suspected ten bob note hole. In fact the two remainers (no political pun intended) are now too close together and are constantly squabbling with each other in their struggle for more resources and light.
So, Izzy needs to give them a bit more elbow room by very carefully digging out one of them and preparing a new pit, but this time making it a ten quid hole (allowing for inflation), and applying along with the soil, a generous bed and mulch using her oft neglected, but nevertheless excellent, well matured compost bin material. Izzy doesn't have a lot of room to play with here, but a couple of metres spacing might be just enough, enabling the pair of them to continue to flourish and still be on speaking terms with each other at least.
A sturdy well placed placed stake, having regard to the prevailing wind if necessary, set a half metre or so into the ground and tied to the tree with a strong, but flexible tie to avoid rubbing, will help the newly sited tree to stretch out and bed itself in over the coming months - oh, and don't forget to water it well of course.
On a final note, it's back to infants school again, recalling the well practised children's song, Little Birds in Wintertime, which entreats us to keep them 'fed for the Father's sake 'til the winter's o'er'. Please keep your bird table and hanging feeders well topped up and you'll be rewarded with regular, frequent and very grateful feathered visitors.
