A good time for lovely lilies

This is the shortest month of them all, but there is still plenty to keep you busy as you get your garden ready for spring.

Think of planting up pots of lilies. A 25-30cm pot will house three bulbs. Fill it with proper potting compost like John Innes No.2 or No.3, which is loambased (meaning it contains a mixture of sand, silt, and clay) and heavy enough to give the pots some stability, as lilies can grow very tall.

Plant bulbs deeply and cover the top with horticultural grit to stop weed growth. You can use the Asiatic hybrid lilies which are very colourful, or something more unusual. Asiatic lilies are mostly un-scented, but they flower for about a month and are the first to flower in early to mid-summer.

Heavily scented with immense flowers

Oriental lilies are heavily scented and derive from Japanese lilies. They have immense flowers – mostly white, pink or red – and flower for a longer time from mid to late summer. If you plant in pots you can move the lilies around as you wish – they need a sunny site, and no competition from being crowded by other plants.

To keep on top of our slimy friends, put out traps to prevent damage to early-flowering plants. Slugs don’t like ‘crawling’ over sharp surfaces, so try scattering broken eggshells around the base of plants. Alternatively, use empty grapefruit halves and make little shelters for slugs to take cover. You’ll then need to clear out all the sheltering molluscs and dispose of them (grandchildren seem to like this sort of job!).

February is a good time to divide hostas when the new growth is just starting to come through, but before the leaves emerge. Use a sharp spade and cut into pieces with roots and growing tips on each clump. Repot in fresh compost.

I can’t grow them in my borders, as they get decimated by the slugs and snails, so I use pots. You can stand them in shallow trays of water to stop the attacks, or try Vaseline, copper wire or sharp grit – not failsafe answers, but better than using slug pellets.

Prune winter-flowering jasmine

Now is also the time to prune winter-flowering jasmine to ensure it doesn’t become a mess of twiggy growth. Cut back flowering shoots to within two or three pairs of buds of the main branch, leaving the framework intact. You can prune it quite hard, but if it is very old and unruly it is probably best to replace it and start from a new one that you can train properly.

Paint need a good quality paint, with good colour tones and a bit of advice Wallpaper a feature wall for the lounge would make all the difference! Curtains want to check out what fabrics and styles are in at the moment something decorative with glass/crystal finials maybe? Blinds a voile roller for privacy should do the trick Lights something that makes a statement ... something different! Shutters - may be a possibility, a change from curtains? I need lots of help and advice!