February is a good month to plant bulbs and flowers tubers of all sorts.

Published On:Tuesday, February 02, 2010

FEBRUARY is a busy but very rewarding month in the garden. We are halfway through the vegetable growing season and need to keep our produce coming by planting seeds for successive crops. Easter is around the corner and our seasonal flowers should be sown soon.

A sowing of sweet peppers should last through the year but it is a good idea to plant more if your fruits have started to grow smaller, as they tend to. You may wish to sow seeds of varieties that will do well in warmer weather, such as banana pepper or Cubanelle. Hot pepper plants can live for several years.

If you grow tomatoes from indeterminate plants you may be happy with the occasional fruits that are produced after the main harvest.

Commercial farmers are more pragmatic and grow determinate vines that produce their crop and then die. This type of tomato is easier to grow successively: when the present crop puts out its first flowers you can sow seeds for the next crop.

During December I came across my first giant hornworm caterpillar of the season. This was a bad sign for they usually appear in late January and February. You know they are around when you come across a tomato plant that is partly denuded and the smaller fruits eaten into.

Because they are green they are hard to spot.

If you know your tomatoes are being attacked but cannot see any caterpillars, go out to your plants at sunrise when they are most active. The giant hornworm is about four inches long and has a horn-like projection near its rear end. This looks dangerous but is

harmless. Pick off the caterpillars when you find them and stomp them, an effective and organic method of disposal. Giant hornworm caterpillars are the juvenile of the sphinx moth, the moth with the fastest-beating wings of the lot. They resemble one-and-a-half-inch hummingbirds when in flight.

The 120 to 150-day vegetables like carrots, winter squash and pumpkins should be ready or almost ready to pull or pick. If you pull some carrots that are smaller than you expected, do not fret; these are gourmet baby carrots.

If you are a salad lover I am sure I need not tell you to keep planting your loose-leaf, mesclun and crisphead lettuces so you can reap your leafy gems in abundance.

One vegetable I have been growing for the first time over the past two years is fennel, a favourite of the French and Italians. The lovely anise flavour exists in both the bulbs and the feathery leaves making fennel both a vegetable and a herb. I have found them easy to grow and they take the early summer heat very well.

New crops can include Irish potatoes grown from store-bought sprouting potatoes, and watermelon. If you are new to growing watermelons you should note that they need very different circumstances than all the other cucurbits, which love heavy mulching. Watermelons prefer un-mulched sandy soil and therefore require plenty of fertiliser.

Plant your seeds in hills of three, 18-inches apart in triangles, the hills about six feet apart. This is the dry season so you will have to water your young plants regularly and spray with liquid fertiliser as well as using side applications of granular fertiliser.

Watermelons are usually a 120-day crop so we may be into the rainy season when the fruits ripen, but let us worry about that later. The standard varieties of watermelon are the most reliable - Charleston Gray, Congo and Jubilee.

Easter is at the very beginning of April this year so there is still time to plant flowering annual seeds and have a show you can be proud of. My favourite for Easter and beyond is the humble petunia that comes in a fine array of colours and forms and takes warm weather very well.

Many bulbs will be producing flower stalks in the next few months so early February is a fine time to plant. Bury each bulb according to the nursery's instructions. If no instructions are available the general rule is to plant bulbs in holes twice the depth of the bulb. A three-inch bulb should be placed in a six-inch hole and covered with three-inches of soil.

* j.hardy@coralwave.com