Spring Garden Tasks
There's lots to do in the garden during March!
MARCH winds and April showers bring forth May flowers!
According to this
proverb, the garden season has begun!
March winds have
swept through the month and, as long as April brings the rain, the
necessary steps are being taken by Nature to get the garden growing –
all by itself!
Spring Garden Tasks. Flowers. Kitchen Garden Blog. |
But if a kitchen
garden is the plan, for a few edible fruits and vegetables, then a
little more than hope alone is necessary to set the garden up for a
productive summer.
Even without a
specific kitchen garden plan, some general tidying can be done on
sunnier, warmer days and compost could be dug in to help prepare
a vegetable bed.
For an extremely
simple (re)introduction to vegetable gardening, a handful of
ordinary, shop-bought potatoes can be put into the soil over the next
week and, in this budding little kitchen garden in Kent, half a dozen
broad beans, that have been growing as plug plants for the past
month, will be planted up around the same time. A little compost will
be added to the soil to help them along the way with a burst of
nutrients.
Some courgette and
aubergine seeds will be sown this month for future harvesting in the
height of summer. For a more enthusiastic gardener, or for a gardener
with a little more time for gardening, there’s a vast range of
vegetables that can be grown from seeds this month, including (to
name a few):
- carrots
- salads
- parsnips
- beetroot
- radishes
- spinach
The aubergines and
courgettes have won this vegetable garden's slot for March and some
outdoor cucumbers might make it into some seed trays next month - but
home grown spinach is delicious, beetroot grows rapidly, salads in
abundance and a few hand-pulled, home-grown carrots are a gardener's
delight!
The kitchen garden
will start to fill up with early vegetables in just a few weeks, once
the sun hits the soil – so it is worth bearing in mind the amount
of work needed for planting up and caring for all those seedlings
grown from seeds; though, if a full range of vegetables are sown and
they all work out, it can be an enjoyable time pottering about in the
vegetable garden and planning for bumper harvests throughout the
growing months.
Fruit trees should
start blossoming this month - if they haven't already had a head
start with the warm February that just passed! Plums, cherries and
apples (including the delightful crab apples) should all soon be
putting on their pretty displays – and with their
blossoms come the bees!
There might be just
enough time to prune rose bushes, if it it was missed last month and
the warmest February on record didn't progress their growth too much,
but hedges should probably be left as they are now – some of the
UK’s native birds may already have made plans for them as potential
nesting sites.