Fun Winter Gardening Ideas

GREAT FUN WINTER GARDENING IDEAS . The excitement of Christmas has gone, it’s cold and the days are short and there’s plenty to do indoors.

There’s not much happening in the garden now right? Wrong!
Winter is full of tasks opportunities you can fill your time with. Here’s some of our favourite Winter Gardening Ideas.

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1.Help Wildlife Is A Great Winter Gardening Idea

Winter is a great time to help your garden wildlife.You can even buy amazing kits for wildlife now like bug hotels find some other favourites here.

Try building a birdhouse from scraps of wood
Build a pond in a container
Make a bird feeder

Heres a few ideas to help your garden wildlife here too.

2.Making A Nature Journal Is A Wonderful Winter Gardening Idea

In January, we love to set up bird feeders and settle down to count the kinds of feathered friends as part of the Big Bird Count.
This is a national count of our garden birds that helps those in the know to monitor the health of our natural world.

Prepare garden birds for winter by providing bird food, nests, birds boxes and other areas to keep them save and cosy

This is a great way to do your part connect with the wildlife visiting your garden, and it help show your kids what’s going on around them.

It’s a great way to do our part in monitoring our garden birds and it’s an excuse to snuggle up together for an house.

The dishes can wait right?

We love to make a nature journal each January to keep our count in as well as all the other activities we do throughout the year.

You can find more reasons to love nature here

and find other ways to connect with nature here

3.Make Leafmould

If you gathered up some autumn leaves like we did, you will be able to make wonderful leaf mould. The light crumbly soil that’s left is perfect for using as a mulch or soil conditioner

Either gather the leaves into a bin bag with a few holes in it and leave it somewhere dark, or if like us you have access to lots of leaves.

The easiest way to store them is in a large wire mesh enclosure. Either way, in 12 months you will have lovely crumbly soil.

4.Making Compost Is An Easy Winter Gardening Idea

You can collect the dead materials all around your garden and make your own compost bin. You can use a plastic one like this, which is fabulous if you only have a small garden.

This one’s great if you have small amounts of material to compost. The tumbler action helps the compost to form a lot quicker..

We have an allotment plot and need a lot more space for compost so we have used pallets to make our own like the one above.

Here’s a guide to making your own compost
And we’ve tried a a fab experiment for kids, so they can try making their own compost in a soda bottle.

5. Planning your Garden Is A Must Do Winter Gardening Idea

Spend some time planning your garden space. We love to get the seed catalogues out and plan all the goodies we want to grow this year, where the play equiptment will go, what windowsill salads we can start now or what fruit we would love to try.

We draw out our plan and plan out our seed calendar and do what we can to organise our space so we can charge ahead when the weather turns.
Get our Free Garden Planning sheets here

6.Starting A Windowsill Garden Is An Easy Winter Garden Idea

Growing veg in pots

Winter is a fantastic time to start a windowsill garden. Sow seeds of lettuce, herbs, chillies, peppers, aubergine can be sown now indoors.
You can even try to regrow your kitchen scraps on the windowsill, try regrowing lettuce, cabbage and celery from their root stumps by sitting it in water.

More ways to get Fast Vegetables for free!

Carrots tops will regrow carrot leaves which you can chop.into a.sandwich or salad. Have a look at this post to find lots of ways to regrow your favourite vegetable scraps on your windowsill.

Garden tasks for January

Winter gardening tasks

Or try winter sowing in DIY mini greenhouses.

Sowing peas for the vegetable garden is easiest done in guttering

7.Chit potatoes

Winter Garden Fun For Kids

Now is the time to buy in your ‘seed’ potatoes. Remember to choose from earlies, 2nd earliest, and main crop. Once they come, set them in an egg carton with the ‘spottier’ end facing upwards. We like to have the kids draw the potatoes as they grow to show the stages in their garden journal.

6 ways to garden better

Sit back and watch as the firm green stubby shoots grow from each of the spots or ‘eyes’. This is a great activity for your kids to do and you can print out our garden journal here

Reduce plastic by reusing loo roll tubes as seed pods.

8.Collect & Make Pots

Start collecting containers & pots for your seed sowing now. Yogurt pots, loo roll tubes, muffin trays, scrap paper and so many more left over containers in your household rubbish can be used to provide a cosy seed pot for your seedlings.