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Spring Garden Tasks

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.
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.

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