Keen gardeners are encouraged to prepare for the seasons ahead by setting up their 2026 calendar. This essential month-by-month guide highlights key tasks to ensure your garden thrives throughout the year.
Check the insulation around outside taps and carry out repair jobs on broken fence panels, greenhouses and sheds. If it’s been windy but not wet, water plants in containers, as anything which is coming to life will need water to survive. Order seeds from catalogues and online suppliers, and if you have a frost-free greenhouse sow early crops such as lettuce, radishes and early carrots under glass.
Prune large flowered (Group 3) clematis, which flower on the current season’s growth in mid to late summer. Cut back deciduous hedging before birds start nesting in it. Plant summer-flowering bulbs such as lilies either direct into borders, if the ground isn’t frozen or waterlogged, or in pots. Plant bare-rooted shrubs including roses and bare-rooted raspberry canes if weather permits.
Start weeding, hoeing off weed seedlings as they appear and removing pernicious weeds by hand. Prune shrub, bush and climbing roses, Buddleia davidii, dogwoods with coloured winter stems and willows. Mulch the soil with a generous layer of organic matter up to 5cm deep to enrich the ground and suppress weeds. Lay new turf while the soil is still quite moist but is warming up.
Watch out for slugs, which will destroy young emerging plants. Set beer traps, or place eggshells around vulnerable leaves, or simply pick the slugs off after rainfall. Alternatively try a biological control, a nematode that attacks them which can be watered on to the soil. Deadhead daffodils and other spring-flowering bulbs before the seedheads start to form, which ensures the bulb’s energy is focused on next year’s flowers.
Continue to sow vegetable seeds such as broad beans, peas and lettuce direct into prepared soil. Clean out overcrowded ponds, dividing large clumps of waterlilies. Plant up summer bedding in borders and containers and hanging baskets when all danger of frost has passed and keep them well watered. Prune early-flowering shrubs such as forsythia and Japanese quince, to encourage flowering next year.
