February, north of the equator

February is the hinge. The days are noticeably longer by the end of it, the soil is still cold and often too wet to walk on, and everything worth doing this month is done under cover or with a spade. It is the last month of the dormant season and the first month of the growing one, sometimes in the same week.

In the garden

Finish the bare root planting. Roses go in from late winter as growth is about to resume, which is exactly this month in most of the country, and fruit trees, hedging and soft fruit are all still available and still cheap. Prune roses towards the end of the month, cutting to an outward facing bud, and prune the summer fruiting raspberries by removing the canes that fruited last year.

Sow under cover rather than outside. Chillies and sweet peppers want sowing now because they need a long season to ripen. Petunias, cosmos and bedding dahlias can all be started under glass. Tomatoes are best at the end of the month for a greenhouse, or in March for outdoors. Sowing into cold wet ground achieves nothing except feeding the slugs.

Warm a patch of soil with a cloche or a sheet of black plastic and you buy yourself two or three weeks in March. Cut back the old growth on herbaceous perennials before the new shoots push through it and become impossible to work around. Plant garlic if you did not manage it in autumn, though it will make smaller bulbs.

In the house

Watch for the first new leaf. That is the signal, not the date on the calendar. From the moment a plant is in growth again it can take slightly more water and the beginning of a feed, and the interval shortens week by week as the light improves.

This is the last comfortable month to leave a plant unrepotted. If a monstera has roots out of the drainage holes or a pot that dries in a day, get the fresh compost ready for March, when the roots will actually use it.

Cut the dust off. A leaf that has spent four months in a heated room is filmed over, and in a month with this little light every bit of it matters. A damp cloth on the large leaves and a rinse in the shower for the small ones is a real improvement, not a cosmetic one.

What not to do yet

Do not put anything tender outside, whatever the weather does in the last week of February. A warm spell now is a trap, and the frosts that follow it will take the lot. Do not sow tomatoes for an outdoor crop yet either, because a plant that is ready to go out in April will only sit in a pot for six weeks getting leggy.