It’s Easter next week and normally – if I still did it, which I don’t anymore because our potatoes get blight as soon as they spot a bit of soil – but if I still planted potatoes, I would be doing it over the Easter weekend.

But there’s a Groundhog Day thing going on with winter this year. Heavy snow and high winds just keep on coming and there’s little point risking planting anything in the ground just yet.

Late spring snows used to be known as the ‘poor man’s fertiliser’ – the old-time gardeners and growers realised it was good for the soil and helped everything to green up – many of them would plough the fields right after a spring snow storm. The primary nutrient in snow is nitrogen (and also a fair bit of sulphur) and because the snow lies deep and melts gradually (very gradually in our case) it gives a slow-release nutrient feed to the ground below.
Which is nice.

But it’s not a lot of fun when you have trays and trays of seedlings in the greenhouse in need of a new home.

And even less fun if you’re a friendly minibeast (slugs don’t count) waiting for spring to kick in.

If you are going to Grow Your Own organically (and I really hope you do because organic growing promotes a healthy, nutrient-dense soil, biodiversity and care for all biological systems) then a healthy crop of beneficial minibeasts is a great ally.

But they must be having a really tough time right now. The Woodland Trust reported just a few days ago that there’s a significant drop in the number of ‘early spring indicators’ – the mammals and insects that herald the return of spring. So far there are very few ladybird sightings and delayed tree budbursts. Hibernating species are particularly vulnerable to a winter that just goes on forever. Those bats and hedgehogs don’t have the fat reserves to last through an extended hibernation and because it’s so cold, there’s virtually no insect food around to sustain them.

If you think this doesn’t matter as a gardener, think again. Hedgehogs love nothing more than a juicy slug for supper and bats can lay waste to vast armies of the infamous Scottish midge. Flying insects help with pollination – which if you want to produce fruit crops is massively important (hand pollinating a blackcurrant bush isn’t a lot of fun, believe me). You need them on your side.

It’s not just mammals that matter. Ladybirds and lacewing positively gobble up an aphid infestation – and not a nasty chemical spray in sight (in fact using chemicals is just as likely to wipe out the beneficial insects as it is the ones you don’t want, so you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime’s worth of spraying if you don’t let nature reinstate the natural balance).

But everything – from birds to mammals to invertebrates – needs a helping hand to get through this winter – and as the climate changes, it’s likely we’ll need to continue giving them extra support to make it through to spring.

What can you do?

First, get to know the good guys– you need to make sure you reserve any squishings for the bugs you don’t want. A ladybird larva for example is not the prettiest of creatures and it’s easy to look at them and assume they have to go. But a single ladybird larva can eat over 50 aphid a day (which matters because a single aphid can produce 10 million tons of new aphids within 100 days by parthenogenesis – they don’t even need to mate to reproduce).

Second, garden for wildlife. There are lots of books about what plants best suit our native wildlife, so check them out. The RSPB Gardening for Wildlife: A Complete Guide to Nature-friendly Gardening is a good example, and there are many more. By using native plants - especially simple flowers from which the insects can feed easily, creating a range of habitats and leaving the chemical sprays in the shop you can make a big difference to the biodiversity of your patch.

Third, forget the housework– well, in some areas at least. Beneficial insects overwinter under piles of autumn leaves, in the broken stems of perennials and in the soft upper layers of soil. If you tidy up all of this in the autumn, they’ll have nowhere to hide. If you can’t bear a messy garden in winter, then leave at least one area of your garden a tiny bit scruffy or establish ‘conservation islands’ at the top of your growing space – a kind of end-of-aisle wildness where the bugs can hide away.

Fourth, build it and they will come. There are lots of great ideas for bird boxes, bat boxes, lacewing hotels and bug hotels – all of which make wonderful projects to do with the children and really help keep wildlife in your garden. I love the ideas in Bird, Bee & Bug Houses by Derek Jones, but there are lots of other books on the market too. Or be ambitious and try and build a full size, five star bug hotel.

It may seem silly to be lavishing so much attention on a bug’s life. But insects are key players in the food web. Without bees, beneficial insects and yes, even without slugs, we’d really struggle to Grow Your Own. A little TLC for the birds and bees will reap rewards when it comes to harvest time.