What to do in the garden this month, February 2025

[MereDintofPandiculation]

For starters

pruning roses, wisteria, autumn raspberries, anything else that needs winter pruning
sow tomatoes, sweet peas
if you haven’t already, order seeds.

Thank you @MereDintofPandiculation.

When would you sow normal eating peas?

My job for tomorrow is to prune all my roses and raspberries

Sweet peas are sown indoors and planted out later, culinary peas are usually sown outdoors or planted out very young. In Yorkshire I’d wait till April, but going by what it says on the packet is usually reliable

Greenhouse windows are absolutely minging, but it has been too cold to deal with it. Will find a day when the temps are at least 10C later in Feb and get the brush and Jeyes Fluid onto it.

Noticed 3 single snowdrops have come up which is only a fraction of the amount I planted. Plus a few clumps of crocus leaves and little buds. I am hoping they haven't been damaged by all the flooding we had in January

I'm resisting the temptation to plant any seeds yet. Last year I planted them too early. Won't start until March this year.

thank you for the new thread Meerdint

Thanks for the reminder to prune roses. I have a climbing rose. Last year DH pruned it so hard that it didn't flower in the summer. I'm going to do it myself this year 🙄.

Sweet peas are sown indoors and planted out later, culinary peas are usually sown outdoors or planted out very young. In Yorkshire I’d wait till April, but going by what it says on the packet is usually reliable

Thank you

Hi, thanks for the thread! I've pruned my roses today and sown some sweet peas. I put them in the greenhouse, last year they survived in the greenhouse all through the winter so I'm hoping it will be OK. I'm close to the coast so it doesn't get very cold. Also sowed some snapdragon seeds (collected from the garden) indoors, they grew very slowly last year.

Resisting the temptation to sow too early. We’re in Scotland and have a shorter growing season but I think that, bar a few things, it’s not worth planting out earlier than late May/June.
If I had a greenhouse I’d start my tomatoes soon but I don’t and can’t have things languishing indoors for months.

If he's pruning a climber correctly, it's pretty hard to prune it too hard. Is he maybe cutting off the main canes rather than the laterals ?

He cut it down to practically ground level. I'm afraid once he gets the secateurs on anything he gets chop happy.

I thought as much 😂 .. you never cut a climber to the ground, you need to maintain your main canes ( the ones growing from the base ) train them to sit at least 45 degrees, and then the laterals grow upwards off these canes and carry the flowers .. it's these laterals that should only ever be pruned.
Hope that makes sense, (professional gardener with a passion for roses, apologies if I over explained the obvious 🙄😁)

@LolaM71 Your advice is very welcome, thank you.

Those that sow tomatoes now, do you have a heated greenhouse? Mine is unheated, so I think that means I can't put tomatoes out until April at the very earliest?

I would like to try to get some tomatoes in time for a village show in July, but was no-where near last year! Considered a heater, but apparently they are around 60p am hour so that's a no-go. We're in Yorkshire.

Sit and stare out of the window at what is the quagmire in my borders...

Also seeds.. seems to miserable yet....I'm waiting till March. I'm in the north west.

Can anyone help with my raspberry plants please? I have no idea what to do with them. I don't even know if they are summer or autumn fruiting. They just seem to give a few raspberries throughout summer and autumn.

I'm sure I had a lot more fruit a few years ago but last year was pretty lean. This may because I pruned them wrong. Or maybe the plants are too old?

I chopped some stems down to about a foot last winter but those chopped back stems didn't seem to grow. So far I have left last summers stems long and they have buds on them. But they look like very weedy stems.

Do I need to rip them up and get new plants? Is my soil the problem? I just occasionally put a bit of multipurpose compost on top of the soil and some rotted manure.

What should I do?

@baisedred Do you remember if your fruit came from new green growth, or old brown canes?

Im in the West Midlands and I'm waiting a month too - I've been impatient to start sowing in the past and it's not been successful.

This year I'm thinking about less seed sowing and more buying plug plants. The trouble with that is less choice of varieties, but I don't really have anywhere to keep seedlings.

I sow in a heated propagator, then transfer to an unheated porch which is warmer than the unheated greenhouse. Probably won’t sow till late Feb

I’m in Yorkshire too

What are the leaves like when they come? Nice and green, or mottled? Raspberries can succumb to virus, at which point it’s better to start again, in a different spot.

They do sound as if they’re not growing well. You could try some actual fertiliser.

Try treating them as summer raspberries for a couple of years, cut out already fruited canes but leave the rest. Autumn and summer fruiting are different varieties of the same species. The autumn fruited fruit naturally later but are aided in this by pruning all the canes in winter, so they have to grow fresh canes before they can fruit, whereas raspberries pruned as I’ve described can get cracking fruiting on the non-fruiting canes left from last year, without having to grow new canes first. It might work!

@MereDintofPandiculation

Thanks for that
The leaves look really healthy when the plants get going.

I'll try fertiliser and pruning like you said

Help! I have wisteria.. planted last April and is slowly growing over my pergola. Should I be trimming it 🙈 it's quite wild but seems to have survived so far.. the aim is to cover the pergola but understand that will take me some time.

I have bought :seeds
sweet peas
nasturtiums
night scented stock
tomatoes

I an looking out for freesia bulbs and a forsythia shrub

Plans for garden maybe this weekend-
cut back more if the dogwood
weed some pots that have bulbs growing
cut back roses

Is now the time to prune woody bushes? I'd like to encourage thicker growth and I believe you have to take some off the top but as it's a vital privacy screen on a boundary, I'm scared of getting it wrong. It looks like a pile of sticks at the moment but with buds

Morning. In principle yes, this does work, but I think we need to know exactly what said " woody bushes" are... any clues ? Do they carry flowers ? I assume they're deciduous ? If they're Weigela or Philadelphus ( mock orange ) you need to be a bit more cautious when/how you cut back.

We're building a living ditch as we're still very much in cleaning mode.
It's coming up beautiful, hiding all the garden waste and branches fitting together well. How many years might it stay in place before it rots?