Well, you might indeed be happy to put your feet up by the fire and there’s even more excuse if, in your Christmas stocking, you find the RHS Plant Encyclopedia. But before then there’s work to be done.
Lawn watching in December can save you work in the summer. When it’s very wet or after snow melts, keep an eye on any areas of the lawn which don’t drain as quickly as the rest. These are places that will need treatment, probably scarifying and aerating at the earliest opportunity.
Q. I get puddles of water on the lawn that don’t drain after it’s rained, what can I do?
Great for Boxing Day and you can use turkey if that’s what you’ve cooked.
Another poet, James Rigg, in his ‘Wildflower Lyrics’ wrote of October ‘yielding her easel bright to November’s black and white.’ A slight misquote but one which demonstrates the way we used to see November. With so much choice today, it needn’t be a dull month at all. There’s plenty of activity with late digging, composting, cleaning the greenhouse, and planting bare root roses, along with clematis, honeysuckle and jasmine.
The nut roast of nut roasts, serves 6-8.
You might be relieved to know if your soil is light, sandy loam, it’s best to leave digging it over until the spring, whereby it won’t lose too much moisture. For those of us where the subsoil is heavy clay then, sorry folks, we’ll need to take a fork to it and turn it, leaving it rough to break down in the frosts.
With the spells of dry weather, you have by now probably done the scarifying and aerating to clear thatch and moss and give the lawn a new lease of life, with oxygen reaching the roots and plenty of good drainage.
Vegetable like parsnips and celeriac actually benefit from a little frost so it’s no bad thing to leave them in a while longer. Carrots, beetroot and turnips, however, need lifting now. Potatoes should also come up and be allowed to dry before they are stored, preferably in paper bags or sacks.
Makes a nice, simple veggie dish or as a side. Use other veg as you wish.
How do you see your garden next year? Do you have a picture in your mind of swathes of colour across bright borders or muted, subtle shades and architectural planting. The act of gardening is good for physical health and the pleasure a garden brings has bearing on mental wellbeing. The garden need not be a complicated affair, often the simplest plan outshines the complex.
If the lawn suffered from the hot weather now is the time to bring it back and prepare it for the winter. This is the best month to treat for moss, which you can do with lawn sand or an organic treatment such as MO Bacter. Scarifying the lawn will remove dead thatch and moss, while aerating will provide drainage and get air to the roots of the grass.
Crop rotation in the vegetable plot is important to avoid soil nutrients becoming depleted. It also helps reduce the spread of soil-born disease and lessens the need for pest control. You decide what crops you want to grow and plant the same type in one area. Then every year the type of plants grown in that area are changed.
Simple, healthy, low calorie vegetarian bake from BBC Good Food
Vacation or staycation, holiday time needs a bit of planning. If you’re away is there someone who could lend a hand in your garden to water and keep things ticking over? If it’s a large garden with lots to do it may be worth getting a local company in and they can be sorting out borders and planting while you’re putting your feet up on a sunbed in some tropical paradise.
If it’s been raining in your area then you probably have more than a few weeds on the lawn to deal with. Plantain, speedwell, dandelions, self heal and ragwort will pop up given half a chance, especially if you haven’t done much weed control. If you did treat in spring then now and into September is a good time to spray using a knapsack sprayer.
August is a month for both harvesting and sowing on the vegetable plot. Crop peas, courgettes and beans while they are young and tender. What else have you grown? Tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, peppers, beetroot, carrot – keep them coming for summer salads.
A Danish style recipe by Trine Hahnemann for House & GardenQ. I have just cut down a large tree 54"x62" in diameter that was hollow. The trunk is about 3' high, we thought maybe fill the centre with earth but what would be the best plants to grow that would in time cover down the sides of the trunk?
Gardens with plenty of flowers naturally draw in the honey bees. We need their help as pollinators and they need as much help as we can give them. They sometimes suffer from a drought of pollen from June into July.
A new lawn can often run into trouble early on for a number of reasons. There‘s nothing worse than seeing a load of weed appearing in your carefully nurtured grass you sowed back in April. Fear not, mowing takes care of much of the problem.Q. We laid a turf lawn in April and now there are ugly cracks everywhere. What went wrong and what can we do?
It’s easy to think of July as month when you don’t do too much in the vegetable garden. Depending of course on the size of your plot you can still be sowing summer and winter salad crops, spring cabbage and root crops. Parsley can be sown for a winter supply. It may take a bit of time to germinate – up to six weeks for seedlings to appear, so be patient.
By Sabrina Ghayour from Saturday Kitchen
May rolls into June and the mowing regime is much the same with twice a week cutting if the soil is moist. If there’s a long, dry spell, raise the cutting height on the tractor deck or mower and leave off the grass box. But mostly continue as you were, with frequent mowing a benefit for the grass.Q. We seem to get a lot of areas on the lawn that get shaved bare when we cut the grass. What can we do to stop it?
‘Shipping is a terrible thing to do to vegetables. They probably get jet-lagged, just like people.’ - Elizabeth Berry 
Smoky, tasty, fast fresh veg with fried gnocchi for extra crunch. By Michel Roux Jr. From Food & Drink.
Just when the lawn is looking good you step out one morning and notice there are a lot more weeds than there were yesterday. Or so it seems. The speedwells, chickweed, dandelion and daisies all find your lawn a nice place to live. The buttercups with their pretty yellow flowers are creeping around and may be regarded as not offensive until, that is, off they go covering the turf at an alarming rate.Q. We have cracks appearing in the soil surface of our newly seeded lawn, what can we do about it?
Succession sowing brings you a plentiful and regular supply of fresh vegetables through spring and summer. Somehow there’s a greater delight in enjoying the crunch of home grown lettuce, salad onions, carrots and radishes on a warm summer evening, compared to taking them out of a plastic bag.
Super, simple midweek dish serves four, courtesy of Delicious Magazine.
‘Sweet April showers Do spring May flowers.’ - Thomas Tusser, A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry, 1557 
Q. We have prepared for a new lawn but we’ve not yet seeded because of the weather. Is it too late?
All things nice grow in your vegetable patch and more than fill your five a day. Succession sowing will see you stocked with veg right through to autumn and beyond. What a list it is! Carrots, turnips, beetroot, spinach, radishes, Brussels sprouts, peas, parsnips, broad beans, leeks, broccoli, summer cabbage, cauliflower and lettuce.
A tasty way with spring lamb serves four and takes little time to prepare and cook. The pesto keeps in the fridge a few days and goes nicely as well with goat’s cheese and roast beetroot salad.
Whatever the weather, March is going to be a busy month because nature is irrepressible and once winter has bowed out around mid-March the show begins. Assuming you don’t have a carpet of snow, early month is usually best approached with general tasks of clearing and preparation, cutting back and tidying up. Hedges need trimming back before birds start nesting.
The time has arrived, out with the garden tractor or mower, set the deck to the right height and away you go. That is assuming the ambient soil temperature has the grass growing and needing a haircut. That’s all it should be to begin with.