It’s the first day of 2024, a brand new gardening year. I’m starting with a garden update from my Welsh Homestead.

One of my biggest wishes for this year in the garden is for better weather! It has been very, very wet and because of this, a lack of sunlight has really slowed down growth. The mild, wet weather has been marvellous for slugs, which have grown huge.

Winter weather

Lilwen and Twm kittens

I am sitting here at my desk, looking out of the window – past our two kittens slumbering in their favourite cardboard box on the windowsill – watching the rain falling, again…. 2023 has been record-breaking wet here in West Wales, much more rainfall than is usual for an already wet location, since July.  This autumn and winter especially so, with such heavy downpours, and storm after storm, that our lane flooded and I’ve barely been able to get into the garden for weeks.  I’ve never seen it like this before, with a flow so fast that it brought stones down from the top of our hill.

Fortunately my house and garden is located above the lane so the flooding flowed by, but my poor garden is looking very soggy and squashed and sad. I’ve never known the ground so saturated, and it is impossible to do any gardening outside just now. Garlic and broad beans are sprouting, but if this wet weather continues there’s a real risk that these crops could rot. I am hoping not – one advantage of being located on a hill is that water does drain away – but will be planting some spare garlic and broad beans undercover in modules this week just in case.

Weather stats from my neighbour Carolmarie, who has a weather station at her farm located up the hill from my homestead, show that we’ve had 74.035 inches / 1880.45 mm of rainfall which is 126.5% of normal for the year. For the winter so far, we are at 5.2 inches / 132.08mm , 29% of the usual rainfall for winter, since 21st December or a whopping 52.9% of the usual winter rainfall from 1st December: 9.7 inches/ 246.38 mm.

Winter harvests

Looking on the bright side, there’s still a lot growing despite the relentless rain. Brassicas are still quite small because the first plantings in the summer were destroyed by slugs, but there’s plenty of beetroot, leeks, parsnips, perennial kale, many different kinds of salad and herbs. There are five sacks of winter-cropping new potatoes still to harvest, three in the polytunnel and two in the greenhouse. In the polytunnel, where growth has been slower than usual due to the cool, dark late summer and autumn, a wide range of brassicas, herbs, salads and greens are looking healthy and will be ready to pick when the days lengthen and growth perks up.

Winter polytunnel

Due to the slope of the hillside, I have found that I don’t need to water in the polytunnel during the winter, nature and gravity does that for me. The damp weather has caused some patches of moss in there though, which I’ll remove before mulching the paths with some wood chip. I’ll be mulching the beds late April and May, when the winter crops are removed to make way for summery tomatoes, cucumbers, melons etc.

Self-seeded violas have germinated right across the polytunnel beds, thanks to the unseasonably mild weather. I’m going to weed out most of these. I love violas, but really don’t need several hundred plants in my polytunnel.

Winter planting

Winter is the ideal time for planting bare root fruit trees and bushes, and I have had a happy time ordering new plants for the homestead. Of course they don’t want to be planted into waterlogged soil, or frozen ground, so if they arrive during a period of unsuitable weather I’ll heel them in undercover in the polytunnel. This is simply making a hole by sliding a spade in the ground, and sliding the plant roots in – more of a slit than a hole.

Some of the fruit bushes and trees are already here, spending the winter in a small nursery in the orchard until I’m able to plant them. Many are grown from cuttings, either by myself or from friends. I’ve ordered some new varieties to extend the cropping season for things like raspberries, strawberries and blackcurrants, and to replace some of the fruit trees that were killed last winter by that really deeply cold weather.

Winter propagation

perennial kale shoots and yacon

I’m already starting to see “sow these now” posts on social media, despite it being only a few hours into January! There are certainly some things that can be sown now: onions in trays in a greenhouse, or broad beans and garlic in modules as a back-up crop. Aubergines, chillies and sweet peppers can all be sown now but these heat loving plants need more than just a sunny windowsill (and who has a sunny windowsill in January?!) They need warmth and light to thrive – think heat mats and grow lights – and not being frost hardy, they’ll need keeping warm for months, so bear that in mind before reaching for the seed packets.

If you really have the urge for sowing, peas in pots for pea shoots will sprout happily on a windowsill and give you a pop of fresh pea flavour to add to meals.

Today I potted on some yacon which I’d ordered from Real Seeds to replace my plants which were mysteriously munched in the summer. And popped six shoots of perennial kale into pots to grow into plants. This is not just to increase the perennial kale harvest here, but also to act as insurance in case we have deep cold again – last winter it was enough to kill brassicas, very unusual for the UK.

Winter preparation

January is a brilliant time for sorting through seeds, deciding what else you need, tidying pots and finding out where your local seed and potato days are. If like myself you don’t live near a potato day, now is a great time for ordering seed potatoes. Do take a walk around your garden or allotment first and decide where all of those spuds are going to go. Last year I ordered enough for about three gardens….. whoops!

I’m making more new beds too, to increase our growing area. They’ll all be no dig beds, of course, using various different mulches including compost, well rotted wood chip, leaf mould, sheep fleece and other free mulches from the garden.

Winter pruning

Another job for the fine crisp, sunny days I just know are coming soon – pruning the apple and pear trees. They haven’t been touched since I moved here, and really need some TLC. I’ll also be thinning out some of the other trees to help more light come into the orchard (not the stone fruit – plums, cherries, etc – as they can become infected if pruned in wintertime.)

Winter DIY

A recent storm has ripped the felt off one of the shed roofs, so once the weather dries up (and surely we will have some dry days?) we need to repair this. Another shed has been so badly storm damaged that the whole roof, which is growing some interesting fungi on the wooden roof panels, needs to be replaced. I looked up the price of replacement panels and that is really way out of our budget for this winter, so I am working out how to construct a shed roof out of stuff we already have in the garden and outbuildings.

Hoping that there’ll be a long enough spell of dry weather, I have everything ready to paint the wooden sheds. They’ll each be a different colour because I am using second hand shed paint, to save money.

There are many more garden DIY jobs to do, lots of new skills to learn too as DIY really isn’t my area of expertise. What an adventure.