January Winter Garden Tips

Thank you so much to Suzanne Millard for the garden tips!

What to do in Your Garden this month:

It is winter in the garden and it has been cold! January is a time of renewal and that certainly applies to the garden. While there was not a great deal of activity in the garden in December, January starts fresh with opportunities for planting and planning for the upcoming year.

For die hard seed starters, your catalogs have been trickling in over the last few weeks. Now is a good time to start your garden design and planning and to start purchasing seed for spring and summer. It’s also a good time to inventory your personal supply from seed-saving. Clean up, repair and replace any tools you’ll need for the new season in order to maintain your garden throughout the year. This is the time of year to prune your deciduous trees and feed them with a fresh application of compost. You’ll want to prune your cane berry and grape plants.

What to plant?

In late January you can directly sow spinach, radishes, carrots, turnips, beets, peas and Asian greens such as bok choy and mustard greens. You can also start seeds indoors for onions, lettuce, peas, leeks, Asian greens and brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, cabbage, etc.).

Flower lovers can start Hollyhocks, Scabiosa, Calendula, Gaillardia, Centaurea, Helenium, Viola, Yarrow, Rudbeckia, Columbine, Agastaches and Lavender indoors.

When in doubt, there is a tremendous body of knowledge about gardening in California, provided by University of California Cooperative Extension. This site, geared toward the home gardener can be found at http://cagardenweb.ucdavis.edu/.

Final thoughts…

Don’t forget about frost. Frost can cause severe and fatal damage well into April and sometimes May. Please refer to the Frost Protection for Citrus and Other Subtropicals guide from the University of California Cooperative Extension for additional information on the impact of frost damage to plants and frost damage prevention measures.

For year round tips on what to plant, click Greater Hopland Planting Guide (Peter Huff and Kate Frey's Monthly Planting Calendar for Inland Mendocino, also found at the "How to - Grow Food" page on The Garden's Project Website).

Happy Mendo Winter Gardening!