Planning to go into hibernation during January? You can’t, except possibly in some parts of Idaho, Montana, and eastern Washington and Oregon. Dormant spraying, sowing seeds indoors and in coldframes forcing flowering shrubs into bloom, forcing bulbs, taking care of Christmas plants, and checking the new plants for your garden – all these will keep you awake.
Prune fruit trees, grapes and summer and fall blooming deciduous shrubs before you dormant spray them. This way you can treat the fresh cuts against infection. If possible, spray when there is little wind, to avoid drift. Also give beds and borders a chlordane treatment to keep ground insects and larvae under control. Check out your solar garden lights to make sure it is ready to go.
Let poinsettias, bulbs, etc. Go dormant and store them indoors if they are tender, outdoors if hardy, until time to start them into growth for the next season.
Winter doesn’t usually hit hard until January in the Willamette Valley and along the coast, and there is very little natural snow mulch to rely on. Mulch with peat, sawdust, straw, etc. – and lay in a supply of boughs or plastic covers for quick emergency protection. Hotbed cables laid along the ground surface and covered with a mulch have proved effective many times where freezes come quickly and end suddenly.
In the vegetable garden cover beets, carrots and others still in the ground with soil or sawdust and you can keep right on using them until new growth starts.
Bulbs – Daffodils bloom by mid-January in southwestern Oregon and the bloom extends steadily over the whole Northwest until mid-June. You can plant tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, ranunculus and anemones this month if the bulbs are still available.
Indoors, force amaryllis. Start feeding them when shoots appear and continue until they are ready to go dormant. Lily-of-the-valley pips forced in shallow containers bloom in three to four weeks.
Quince, forsythia, viburnums, deutzia, mockorange, cherry, peach, pussy willow and various other woody branches can be cut and forced indoors now. Winter sweet, Chimonanthus praecox, which has proved reasonably hardy in western Oregon and Washington, can be pruned now if it needs pruning, and the cuttings brought indoors for forcing.
Check dahlia tubers, gladiolus, tuberous begonias. Get rid of any rotted ones and dust the rest with fungicide. Put DDT on gladiolus corms if you find insects on them.
Sow annuals outdoors that do not transplant readily, like poppies, larkspur, and baby’s breath. Sweet peas can be sown outdoors in western Oregon and Washington from now on, with a moderate mulch protection during the first few weeks.
Perennials that self-seed and need freezing for good germination can be started outdoors in flats. Sow others in flats in coldframes. In snow areas, you can broadcast fertilizer on the surface now, to start working as soon as the thaw comes. In other areas, fresh manures in vegetable gardens, flower beds and borders will leach into the ground unless it slopes, when nutrients will run off. Many manures that cannot be used this way later in the season, because they are likely to burn plants, can be applied safely now.