Another gardening year is just beginning, and this could be the year you actually plant all the bulbs you bought, rather than leaving them in their bag and discovering them in June in a forgotten pile of ‘things to do’! This could also be the year you really do disinfect the greenhouse and scrub your empty pots with warm soapy water ready to refill them. You may also take cuttings from your tender perennials rather than meaning to and losing them, and label all the seeds you sow rather than thinking that you will remember and ending up with a lucky dip! So on that note, here are some suggestions for January...

Reduce pests and diseases
Tidy up the vegetable plot by clearing away the finished crops and putting them on the compost heap to reduce pests and diseases. If you cover the soil with black plastic this will warm the soil up ready for sowing seed later and keep weeds down.

Try forcing some rhubarb. Cover the dormant buds with either straw or dry leaves inside a terracotta forcing pot or a large bucket to keep the light out. Tender pink stems will be produced in a few weeks’ time. Don’t do this to the same plant every year, as it will need to recover and build up its reserves.

Put pea sticks in place early to enable plants to grow through them
A useful thing to do now is to collect material for making pea sticks in order to support plants in your borders in the summer. Hazel and birch twigs are the best ones to use. Pea sticks look much more natural than using readymade supports and can be bent and semi-snapped to create the desired shapes. Leave them tied up in bundles in a corner somewhere outside and put them in place early on in the season to enable the plants to grow through them for a natural look.

A well-needed boost for the coming season
Garlic grows best when it has endured some winter chill and rain, so plant out individual cloves in a sunny spot, pointed end up, 15cm apart with 2.5cm of soil covering them. If the soil is heavy or really wet you can start the cloves off in small pots of soil-based compost and leave outside in a sheltered spot ready to plant out in spring.

Mulch fruit trees, bushes and canes with organic matter unless the soil is waterlogged or frozen. This will give them a well-needed boost for the coming season.