The gardening year on the Wirral, month by month

The peninsula has a milder, wetter climate than most of the north west, tempered by sea on three sides. Frosts are fewer and later, the growing season runs longer at both ends, and the wind and salt on the western side do more damage than the cold does. All of that shifts the calendar a fortnight or so against the national advice.

January and February

The garden is dormant and this is structural work: pruning what wants pruning in winter, cutting back dead perennial growth, mending edges, and taking the first hedge cut of the year in late February before nesting season starts and while the shape is still visible. Bare soil work is easier now than at any other point, and nothing is growing fast enough to undo it.

March and April

Growth restarts, unevenly. The first cuts are taken high, because scalping grass that has sat wet all winter tears it. Edges get re-cut properly now, once, and are then maintained rather than re-cut all season. Spring feed goes down once the soil has warmed, which on the Wirral is usually the second half of April rather than the first.

May and June

The fastest weeks of the year, and the point at which a fortnightly round starts to feel too slow. Grass can put on enough in ten days to need taking off in two passes. Hedges make their main flush. Beds fill and weeds establish quickly in warm damp soil, so this is when weeding stops being tidy and starts being necessary.

July and August

Growth slows in dry spells and the cutting height goes up rather than down, because short grass in drought browns off and recovers poorly. Deadheading keeps borders going. The second hedge cut lands in late August for beech and hornbeam, which is also after nesting season for most species.

September and October

The most useful two months in the whole year and the most neglected. Soil is still warm and rain is returning, which is exactly the window for scarifying, aerating, overseeding and laying turf. Anything done to a lawn now has months to establish. Leaf fall starts in earnest from late September, particularly on the tree lined roads through Bebington and around the mature gardens in Caldy.

November and December

Growth all but stops and the visits space out, but they do not stop. Leaves left on a lawn over a Wirral winter exclude light and hold water against the grass, and what emerges in March is a bare patch shaped exactly like the pile of leaves. Cutting back, structural pruning and edge maintenance fill the rest.

What this means for a round

A garden visited fortnightly all year is being over-visited in January and under-visited in May. The sensible shape is tight through the growing season, weekly or fortnightly from April to October, and every four to six weeks through the winter, with the seasonal jobs booked into the month they belong in rather than whichever visit happens to be next.