Gardening: Fall in love with your garden - Valentine’s chillies are calling

While we’ve now become complacent about weather warnings and dogs negotiate with their eyes not to go out, we still need to complete specific jobs before the end of the month.

Once the lawn will take a footprint without backfilling it with water, you can get out and start the important work of cutting the boundary hedges. It’s the last month of the hedge trimming season and ideal for hedging shrubs to recover after a cut while it’s not freezing and there is a lot of water about to help them heal wounds.

Not attending to hedges can lead to rapid growth that prevents light reaching other plants and will inevitably become an expensive job when you eventually get fed up with the leviathan plants they become. By this time the stems turn into trunks and
branches can be as thick as your arm.

Like most maintenance jobs, little and often is the optimum and most effective approach.

If you have a light, long reach hedge trimmer then it will make the job less restrictive. Battery operated versions are much easier on the shoulders and the ears than the petrol machines I’ve learned. Working from the bottom up is much safer and gives you a good line to work from.

Many people use a line and string to achieve a straight edge, but I see less and less of this as time becomes a more precious commodity for us all. I find keeping the blades sharp with a file mid-cut doesn’t take too long and pays dividends. It can be incredibly frustrating to be cutting a hedge with blunt trimmers. Just follow the direction of the edge of the blade in one sweep, repeating it several times over each small tooth. It’s not sophisticated and keeps things running smoothly.

If you need anything other than last year’s new growth cutting back, then get the loppers out and gently make your way into the hedge to find the thicker branches, removing no more than a third.

Rake up the cuttings or put some tarpaulin down before starting the trimmer and wait for the birds to start nesting.

On the Plot

Sowing chillies on Valentines Day is traditionally very much like planting potatoes on Good Friday, a watermark in the gardening calendar.

If you have a greenhouse then you are very fortunate and will have no problems getting them to germinate. If not, all is not lost. Those clear storage boxes usually reserved for mothballed clothes or for some reason crockery, make ideal miniature greenhouses.

They can be left outside with small pots or modules filled with seed compost to germinate. This will also buy you goodwill from any non gardeners in the house who don’t always see the value of compost indoors!

Planting chillies now is essential as they need the long daylight hours of summer to ripen into the deep crimson or golden colours that we love to see. There is magic in visiting the chilli patch to see the colour change that seems to have happened overnight to ripen fruits.

Choose varieties of different heat and flavours from any of the specialist seed suppliers or maybe you ve saved seed from last year even. Unlike a lot of produce, chillies never fall into the category of a glut. This is mostly in part because of their small size and also because they can be processed in a variety of different and delicious ways. Even freezing them straight from picking keeps them fresh until they are ready to use even years later.

Even in excessively wet weather there is a lot we can be doing to make life easier in the coming months and also to be preparing plants to feed us this time next year and throughout next winter. Forward planning makes a successful gardener whilst living in the moment allows us to enjoy it.