Your plans for December are probably dominated by Christmas and New Year's Eve – buying presents, cooking turkeys, holding parties and more. But the impending festive season shouldn't distract you from carrying out a few important tasks around the garden.
While lawn mowing and soil cultivation aren't exactly top priorities over Christmas, there are plenty more chores to keep horticulturalists occupied. It's the perfect time to get on with a few garden maintenance tasks – whether that's tidying up allotments or cleaning your tools and other useful items.
One way to keep yourself busy while the weather is cold is to give your old pots and seed trays a decent clean. To remove encrusted dirt, scrub them with a stiff brush in warm water and household detergent.
When your pots and trays are free of the worst dirt, soak them in a garden disinfectant, leaving them for several days as the chilly conditions can make the disinfectant work a little slower than usual. This will ensure any spores are killed off. Unwashed pots might even need to be left for a few weeks to make sure the disinfectant really does its job.
Before you start using your seed trays and pots again, make sure you give them a decent rinse.
That's just the start of your December gardening itinerary, though. You should also take the opportunity to scoop out leaves from ponds, drains, gutters and any other corners of the garden where they can accumulate.
The Al-Ko Hurricane 2200E Handheld Electric Blower-Vac from MowDIRECT will no doubt come in handy with this task. Solidly built, practical and powerful, this leaf blower will save you hours of time spent raking up scattered leaves, giving you more time to get down to the far more important task of planning your Christmas revelry! It comes with a two-year warranty from the manufacturer and is on sale now priced at just £109.
Fallen leaves can be a handy form of compost, so it's well worth dumping them at the back of a border to improve the quality of the soil. They'll also give blackbirds something to rustle through as they look for food during the colder months.
On another wildlife-related note, Christmas is a good time to give any bird boxes, feeders and baths in your garden a decent clean in order to prevent disease from spreading. Put up one or two bird boxes in a shaded, sheltered part of the garden away from any potential predators if you want to attract a few more feathered friends.
To ensure the birds in your garden are well-fed, you don't necessarily have to shell out on special food. Instead, a few items that you'll probably have dotted around the house anyway can be just as effective. For example, starlings are big fans of peanuts, and thrushes and blackbirds both enjoy raisins and over-ripe apples.
Part of the challenge of creating a beautiful garden is forward planning, so why not take the opportunity to look ahead at next year's seed catalogues and jot down a shopping list? If you've got a greenhouse or an indoor propagator you'll need to get your orders in soon, as they can be sown from the end of January.
The new year is also the time when seed potatoes begin appearing, so snap them up as soon as you get the chance, because a few of the newer ones will almost certainly be in short supply.
If you're in a particularly energetic mood, it's a good idea to prepare new ground by double digging ready for spring sowing. It's fine to get on with this work as long as the ground isn't waterlogged or frozen.
Finally, we think it's a good idea to capture the memory of your garden at Christmas by taking a few photographs, particularly if there's snow on the ground and robins in the trees. Make it a new year's resolution to take some more snaps each time a new season arrives, so you'll have a handy slideshow of your garden throughout the year.
