Here is what you could be getting on with in the garden this month
- Seed lawns or turf your bare patches of lawn.
- Scarify and aerate the lawn and it will thrive.
- Apply lawn treatments, if it is still wet with care not to burn the lawn.
- Spray your roses for pests and fungus every 2 weeks.
- New Tip for Gardeners:Slug pellets in jam jars placed on their side in the hostas will stop the slugs(idealy from Feb) and birds can't eat them. Organic pet safe pellets are available.
- Feed the plants with Fish Blood and Bone Meal, Growmore or pellet slow release feed, seaweed or chicken pellets.
- Treat the soil to mulch with farm yard manure or soil conditioner, it will make it rich and improve the texture and drainage.
- Plant your perennials for best establishment now.
- Plant as much as you can before the soil really warms up . Ideal time for planting herbs and fruit.
- Planting trees in now will give them a better chance of establishment.
- Secure your climbers and ramblers.
- Pot on your seeded bedding plants and begin seeding outside
- Plant out beetroot, spring onion, brussels, cauliflower, cabbage, carrot, celery, kale, celeriac, kohlrabi, peas, spinach, swede, mangetout, broad beans and any other harder earlier veg plants you have grown from seed in a greenhouse or purchased ready grown.
- Broadbeans can still be sown direct into the ground.
- Plant potatoes and onion sets.
- Earth up your first early potatoes at the end of the month if they are shooting.
- Seed your root crops outdoors.
- Harvest your rhubarb weekly.
- Plant Hanging baskets under cover.
- Spray your broad leaved weeds.
- Prune shrubs into shape, whilst they have lots of energy.
- Prune your wooded sub shrubs such as penstemons and lavender now the new shoots have emerged.
- Feed your citric plants with seaweed feed.
- Prune your cornus so you can have fresh colourful bark stems in autumn.
- Pollard any trees now.
- Cut back the foliage of your evergreen ferns to allow fresh fronds to grow.
- Cut back the tatty leaves of your shade loving epimediums to enjoy the pretty flowers (see pic below.)
- Watch out anything tender outside does not get caught in frost.
