What To Do in the Winter Garden
We’re more than half way through January and you might be itching for spring to get back into your garden.
But in fact there’s plenty you can do in January and February in your garden, whether it’s planning for spring or actually getting outside.
This week I’ll walk you through my garden so you can get an idea of what I like to do in these cold winter months.
Watch below or click here to watch in YouTube. Prefer to read? Scroll down below this video.
Time Stamps:
- 0:16 Harvest winter vegetables in the greenhouse
- 2:02 Harvest winter vegetables from cold frames and hoops
- 4:05 Outdoor gardening jobs in January
- 5:21 Start seeds under grow lights
- 6:10 Spend time enjoying outdoors
- 7:31 Make a garden plan for spring and summer
- 10:24 Enjoy homegrown preserved food
If you enjoyed this and might want to come back to it later, pin it to your Pinterest winter gardening board.
Eating from the winter vegetable garden
I have a 4 season garden and I live in a cold climate. One of my favorite things to do in my garden in winter is spend time in my greenhouse and in my raised beds and harvest food! Even though there’s snow outside, I’m still eating vegetables like carrots, kale and arugula.
Eating my preserved foods
Winter is the ultimate time for using my preserved foods. I’m pretty obsessed with drying and freezing herbs, greens, zucchini and tomatoes. I talked more about this in this video on eating seasonally in winter. These are easy options to throw into a dish and take advantage of some of the surplus from my summer garden.
Planning my spring garden
January is also an ideal time to plan for spring and summer. In these cold months I like to flip through seed catalogues, check out online garden stores, take inventory of my seeds, and design this year’s garden. Once I’ve decided what I’m going to grow, I create a planting schedule so I know exactly what I’m supposed to be planning and when in my climate. I like to start seeds using this seed starting setup. I like to use my garden planner to make this step much easier and more fun.
Outdoor Jobs
Whenever I get a warm winter day (which to me is anything above freezing), I like to get outside and do odd jobs that I can get done around the property. This year I’m planning on redoing my raised beds so I spent some time laying down landscape fabric and measuring out the space. I also had some neglected areas that had overgrown weeds, so I spent a few hours clearing it out while the soil had thawed out a bit.
These are some of my favorite things to do in January in the garden, although this is what I do in February too. As the weather warms up I’ll start planting more in and most of this food will be eaten and made room for new plants
What do you do like to do in your garden in January? Do you try to get outside?
