Seasonal Notes - January 2026

Well, I’m ashamed to say I didn’t get very far with my seasonal notes posts last year did I? Or indeed any posts at all! 2025 turned out to be a remarkably busy year where we were away in total for about five and a half months. This is not conducive to domestic life or indeed maintaining and enjoying the garden. I have declared to whoever is listening that this year I want to be more home-based so I can get on top of things, can develop some routines and actually enjoy living here rather than it being a quick pit stop before rushing off somewhere else. I fear the universe will have other plans for me - it always does - but I am keeping my fingers crossed. 

The weather here has been quite ghastly since a brief very cold patch in early January when we actually had a bit of snow and some glorious blue skies. Gone are the days that snow was a given here in January, I’m sad to say. Global warming has meant that instead of seasonal snow, we tend to get just howling winds and pouring rains leaving the land soaked, the lanes like rivers, the puddles like lakes and the sky a permanent leaden grey. It is truly a lightless time and I yearn for those bright, crisp, white glorious winter days of old. We’re not getting any younger and all this dampness is playing havoc with my arthritis and my husband’s lungs. Poor Susan (our llama) and the sheep look bedraggled and miserable in the field and I’m forever changing the straw in the shelter as it seems permanently waterlogged. 

On my return from a short post-prandial digestive walk, entering through the field gate at the top of the garden by the vegetable patch, I just did a few little jobs. I cast my eye around the green house and found no gardening gloves so decided to leave tidying and leaf clearing up there for another day as everything was so wet. I rammed the tall runner bean obelisks back into the soil as they were at a dangerous lilt from all the high winds and noted that the netting on top of the fruit cage had been blown back - again, a job for another day. 

Walking back down from the top of the garden towards the house, I checked on the bees to see if they were still alive and kicking which they were - thousands of the little creatures shuffling slowly around their extremely cramped quarters, feeding on the honeycomb and waiting for spring to come round again. I noted how we had failed to strim the long grass of the orchard and that now it was too late as the daffodils were already poking thought. Daffodils in January! How ridiculous is that? Even more ridiculous is that the snowdrops are barely out - just a few in early flower - so frankly it’s a bit rude of the daffs to come muscling in on the act before the humble little snowdrops have had their time to shine!

The sound of the stream gushing down through the dell accompanied me as I continued my perusal of the garden. The wild cyclamen have finally started to spread a bit under the cherry tree - not exactly the pink carpet of naturalised plants I’d envisaged when I planted a few small ones in the lawn about 20 years ago now, but it’s better than nothing! The further I got towards the house, the more snowdrops were starting to nod at me with their pretty white bowed heads. I picked up some twigs from the many strewn all over the lawn and snapped them into smaller pieces to be dried out in the potting shed and used for kindling. I had planned to rescue a couple of houseplants from their sorry state by repotting them but with some regret, I decided they were a hopeless case and tipped them onto the compost heap. Instead I potted up some muscari (grape hyacinths) into a little wicker basket and covered it in green moss harvested from the walls in the garden. I then spotted a tub of sulphate of iron feed on the shelf and decided to go out and spread it around the base of some of my camellias and azaleas which then led to me flattening out a large pile of slimy grass cuttings which were piled up against the base of one of our yew trees - something I’d been meaning to do since forever, as it will be doing the tree no good. Next task is to mix in all the bags of autumn leaves to create, with time, a lovely leaf mould mulch to re-spread on the borders - but that’s a job for another day too.

Looking at the main lawn with its large patches of ugly black dead moss (from the Autumn lawn care treatment), I realised that I really should be scarifying it all. Half-heartedly I grabbed a tined rake and started to scrape away and quickly gathered a large pile of dead moss which released the sweet scent of petrichor. But the light was lowering and a cup of tea beckoned in the warmth of the kitchen, so I decided this would go on my increasingly long ‘another day’ job list…one hopefully when there is more light in the sky and the birds are singing and maybe even a little red-breasted robin will keep me company me as I work…