Gardening: Winter jobs that set your garden up for a fruitful spring

We’ve had all sorts of weather since the garden worked out its now meteorological winter.

As soon as you’ve scraped all the ice from the windscreen you’re driving through deep puddles in heavy rain. Fortunately in-between the cold and rain there is some blue sky to enjoy a potter or some more substantial work pruning trees, or clearing out the pond.

Deciduous trees that shed leaves every year are now make it easy to see where their crossing branches need trimming back to their starting point. Trees seem to grow branches quickly and in secret, so before you know it they are taking over and you’ve noticed that no light is getting through it any more.

Read next: Gardening: Small winter jobs that make a big difference

Without leaves we can obviously identify and remove branches that rub against each other making it straightforward for disease to affect the whole tree. When this happens to an expansive degree you can then be into calling a tree surgeon.

Using a sharp pruning saw to remove crossing growth back to where the original growth started. If using a bow saw for larger growth then it’s worth changing the blade. New ones are cheap and easy to replace. Sharp tools reduce the occurrence
of further injury to the tree and are much easier on your arms.

To prevent a heavy branch tearing or ripping away from the tree then remove it in sections to take the weight out of it. Before embarking on this then check that the tree isn’t a prunus variety as most of these need to be pruned in mid summer after fruiting.

Cherry and almond trees are a good example of prunus. This is to prevent silver leaf fungus and canker which lurk around all winter like the Dementors from Harry Potter waiting for a weakness to rest on and multiply.

If you've only time for a half hour potter then take the snips and cut away any diseased rose leaves. This is a therapeutic task that we’ve needed to do more often on recent years due to warmer winters allowing roses to cling onto their leaves for
longer.

On the Plot

If you can afford the space, and by space I mean 4m square by 10m in height you can plant a cherry tree this week. A Morello variety will give you a heavy crop in mid summer as well as creating an eco system for all kinds of wildlife. It will also create
much needed shade.

It will be fully grown in around 5 years and then only need light pruning after fruiting and a bucketful of water a week in the first two summers. I think young trees are one of the last great bargains in life. For around £20 it will provide you with so much.

They are great things to give as a gift too especially at this time of year. Hard to disguise what they are when wrapped I imagine.

Sometimes you can pick them up in the sale section of garden centres looking sorry for themselves. If I had the space I’d plant a Morello cherry orchard. Imagine the sight of that in late April.

Some cherries can be trained like a fan or espaliered, flat against a wall looking decorative and not taking up too much room. Just prune anything growing away from the wall and train the horizontal growth along wires. This was a clever trick to increase fruit yields in market gardens and is still seen in pretty much every estate garden you visit.

This tells me that its stood the test of time and therefore well worth attempting. Not everything we invented in the dim and distant past needs to be consigned to the bin.

Progress isn’t just the passing of time, it's making essential tasks easier. Growing food against walls is exactly that and gives us something else to do in December.