A GARDENER’S YEAR 2025: JANUARY - WEEK ONE - FILMING EVERY DAY FOR A WHOLE YEAR!

Hello everyone and a huge happy new year to you all. The weather here has really been marking the new year with a bang with gale force winds and lots of heavy rain so it's been a very interesting start to 2025. Today is Wednesday the 1st of January which marks the beginning of my new year-long series A Gardener's Year. Throughout this year my aim is to document everything I'm doing in the garden every single day of 2025. Then I plan to share a video every Sunday where I share with you what I've been doing throughout the gardening week. I'm really hoping this will be useful so you can see what a gardener is doing every single day of the year. We can then look back on it and use it as a guide for future years. Obviously no year is exactly the same in the garden weather conditions are different on a yearly basis but it will be great to look back and have a document and a record of everything that I was doing in 2025. I think as the weather has been so turbulent today I'm just going to take today to have a walk around the garden and see how things are looking on the 1st of January 2025. There are some things appearing that don't normally appear this early and lots of things that are growing and changing as always so I'm going to just use this opportunity on this vlog to document where I am on Wednesday the 1st of January 2025. So let's take you outside and see what's going on. Okay so stepping outside here by the greenhouse I have already noticed down where I planted all of my new daffodil bulbs that we have got daffodil bulbs shooting up through the soil down here and this is fairly early. I can see some more hiding under the leaves. I'm keeping them down here well protected because we are due some very cold conditions coming up but interesting to see those coming up so early. More concerning is over this side. So down here in my tulip bed I believe I can see some signs of tulips appearing and this is really really early so I'm quite concerned that they're coming up quite so soon. Again they're under a blanket of leaves so I'll keep them covered up down there but we are due some really cold conditions and I really don't want them to get wiped out because they are absolutely stunning when in flower. This is where the broad beans are as of the 1st of January. I'm really pleased with how they're all looking really really healthy but we are due some really cold weather so I'm going to need to fleece these really really carefully over the next few days to prevent them from all being polished off before we even get started. As I shared with you in my last video I'm absolutely thrilled with my new fruit cage and there is already some signs of life on one of the raspberry canes which again I'm not sure if that is something I'm hoping to be seeing at this time of year in January when it's very cold. This is an early fruiting variety through there but I'm hoping that it'll be okay and there is also little tiny tiny shoots on this one as well so we'll see how they do over the coming months and I'll keep sharing that with you. Things are looking okay down in the onion and garlic bed. As I said in an older video some of the garlics got moved around when they were being dug up by various things and they've kind of ended up in places I don't want them so I'm wondering whether to move them so that they have a bit more space or to leave them and see how they do in the positions they're currently in. Let me know what you would do. The elephant garlic is down there coming through and the lovely hardneck garlic from Claire at the Farmer's Garden is over there. Reality for the 1st of January, lots of areas looking a bit like this, a bit overgrown and unkempt and needing a tidy up so this is something for January for sure. This area needs some sorting out, the spring boll border is not looking too bad but it does need a bit of a tidy up with some grass and this area needs a proper cut back but I'm sort of leaving it in case there's anyone overwintering in here and then over there is my new hellebore border which looks really lovely and has some beautiful flowers. Lastly I thought I'd come down here and have a look in the spring boll pots. Can you hear Mr Robin singing? I don't know if he's being picked up on my microphone. Hello! But let's see what's happening down here. This is my wild garlic down here which was brilliant last year and I think I'm going to actually plant it up in my shaded border area so we have some growing up there rather than in a pot. These look a bit like crocuses I think in here. I think this might be a bit of a bulbous arnia in this one, I can't remember. I know I've got some hyacinths down here and they're coming through. In this one it could be tulips, it could be daffodils. Someone's coming through here. We've got some muscari in this one so pretty much every pot down here has got some kind of life starting to show through. Once it all warms up a bit these will be moved to the spring pot display area around in my dining area where they can be enjoyed from the window. So that was the 1st of January and as night fell I cosied up in the warm with a cup of tea and sat down with some of my gardening books to make some plans for the year ahead. What a difference a day makes. Like many of us I'm sure I found some bulbs hiding in the back of a cupboard. Is it too late to get them in the ground? No, I'm going to give it a go. These bulbs are alliums and I would like them to grow up around the sides of this bench. Even if it does end up being too late for them to flower this year they'll put on some nice green foliage which will feed the bulbs under the ground for an even better display of flowers next year. Fingers crossed. Right, that's one job off the list today and now I'm going to do my final job for today which is to cover the broad beans because last night we had quite a hard frost and the temperatures are only dropping over the next few days. We are due potentially some snow. We've got a weather warning out for the weekend with some fairly significant snow forecast. You never know whether it's going to come or not but we're going to go with that in mind that it may happen. So let's get those broad beans covered and protected. And then see how many bricks I can find lying around. I know I've got some down by the house so I'll go and get some if I can't find any up here. So you can see, I don't know if you can see, but this is the fleecy blanket which is different to the mesh that you can see on the right of me here over the being munched broccoli. So this is for warmth whereas that is for, in theory, protection. Although I'm not sure it's doing the best job in the world. There we go. Right, let's get some bricks along here. Tuck it down the edge here. Sorry spinach. This is exactly what I did last year and they were okay. We went down to minus eight. Now the fleece is touching the top of the broad beans here so there's no staking going on which might not be advisable because if the snow falls on here it's kind of going to sit on top of them, isn't it? But I haven't got anything at the moment to cover it with. So I'm going to have to do what I did last year which they did survive despite the temperatures we had last year. So I'm hoping the same can be said for this year. Tuck it underneath a bit and get a brick on the top there as well. So they're now tucked in. Fingers crossed they will survive this next cold spell. After a quick cuppa it was time to join the live with Dani at the Grow Up channel alongside Mags at my garden and the dinosaurs that lived there and Dora from Dora's Allotment. This cold and crisp January day started in the best way with a trip to the garden centre. With all of the lovely spring bulbs on display of course I had to pick up a few but more on that tomorrow. They had a great selection of gardening books including the little book for plant parents, the gardener's year by Carol Caper, the five minute garden, how to garden in next to no time and the vertical veg guide to container gardening. And I just love these miniatures. Can you imagine making this tiny little greenhouse? And of course always time for a cuppa. So something I'm going to do today is to begin to force one of my rhubarb crowns. I did this last year and it meant that I could enjoy some rhubarb in the kitchen from the end of March and it was absolutely delicious, really tender and amazing to have some harvest from the garden at that early stage in the season. Last year I forced the crown in the middle of the bed so this year I think I'm going to force the crown over to my right here. It's looking the largest and I think it's the one that's going to show signs of life soonest this year. So to do this the first thing I need is a large pot. I think you can get rhubarb forcing pots specifically but this one will do just as well. Cover the crown with a pot, place a brick on top here which will stop the pot blowing away and then this will starve the plant of light forcing it to grow quicker than it would do naturally and you'll be harvesting rhubarb much much earlier. Last year when I did this I was worried that the rhubarb then would struggle to recover later in the season but it regrouped as soon as I had harvested the early stems. I then uncovered it and it grew in the same way as all of the others for the rest of the season. Okay something else I'm going to do is to stake this bed because the fleece is touching the broad beans underneath and I'm worried that that's going to cause damage. So I am going to lift the bricks off from the corners and then try and get some canes in the ground just to lift this fleece a little bit up above the plants themselves because we've had a very hard frost as expected. I don't know if you can see any of this frost on the top here but it's all looking very crisp, beautiful but cold. How many should I get? One, two, three, four, five, maybe eight. Let's have a look at how they're looking under here after this really hard frost last night. Hopefully they haven't been too squashed. Oh bless them. Oh crisp, very crisp. They did look like this last year and they were okay. Oh sorry guys it's so cold. I'm sure I'm not the only one that talks to their plants like they're people. I'm sure they understand don't they? Gosh look at you guys. Please live. That's that half. Sorry. How's the hole? Is it still there? Sort of. Oh no. Actually that might work. Yeah that'll work. I'll go with it. Slightly broken but keeping them off there. Yes okay there we go. So it's a bit makeshift to make sure it's all covered. Not neat by any means but covered. And the fabric's not actually sitting currently on the thing until it snows. And the snow weighs it all down. But oh no there's a hole over there look at that. Oh dear. Well we tried. Have we made it worse? Probably. Did we try? Yes we did. Good luck guys. Good luck. Another cold but picture-perfect January day. Today's task, clear this area in preparation for my Monty Don-inspired spring bulb display in a few weeks time. After clearing the area I swept the leaves behind the shed to give me a clear space to work with. Sadly I don't have a pressure washer but I think this hose did a fairly good job. In a few weeks this table will house my spring bulb collection but for now this autumn planter can brighten up the area. Now back to those bulbs I picked up yesterday. Some hyacinths in pink, purple and yellow. Some larger daffodils and some tiny little baby jacksnipes. I'm planting these into some spare pots that I've got that housed my dahlias a few weeks ago. Once planted I'm covering them with some of the leaves I swept up a few moments ago to protect them from the worst of the winter weather over the next few weeks. Finally I move them to a sheltered spot with my other spring bulbs. A sense of anticipation is building. I can't believe in just a few short weeks we will be enjoying this wonderful spring bulb display. My final job today is to deadhead these beautiful primula. If you have any winter flowering plants make sure you deadhead them regularly to keep those flowers coming. And now let's recap those jobs for the first week of January. Number one, force rhubarb. Number two, protect tender plants. Number three, deadhead winter flowering plants. Number four, plan for the gardening year ahead. And number five, don't forget to feed those garden birds. Thank you all so much for watching. If you've enjoyed the video today please don't forget to like and subscribe and I'll see you all again next week for a gardener's year week two.