This spring as we begin to look at getting on top of our Garden, it is a great opportunity to introduce you to our new campaign to help Lakers build our Forever Home.
This month why not plant a seed, shrub or tree and text to donate €2 and watch your plant grow with Lakers. {Text ‘LAKERS’ TO 50300} see our website for details and terms and conditions.
Although the weather has been very unsettled in the past few weeks and we did have some rain, there has been some very strange weather around Europe leading to shortage of many items in the supermarket such as tomatoes and cucumbers due to the lack of rain in Spain.
But with the recent increase in daylight hours and daytime temperatures, it means it is a good time to be thinking about the garden.
Where to start
If you have borders for bedding plants, dig them out and get rid of all the weeds and add in some good compost. Then after a few days plant some of your spring bedding plants to add a bit of colour to the garden.
And for your vegetable beds, March is a good time to weed them and turn over the soil. Cover them with well-rotted manure or compost and then cover that with black plastic bags, cardboard or old carpet to try to begin warming up the soil. Raised beds will warm up about two weeks before the open ground.
Now is also the time to prune fruit trees and bushes to improve the shape or remove winter damage. It is best to complete this before the true spring. Prune back some of your annual plants too. Shape and reduce the size of overgrown and bulky plants by cutting unwanted stems to the base of the plant or where stems meet. Typically, it is good to remove up to one-third of the stems, especially in overcrowded areas where the foliage is beginning to discolour or die.
Vegetables – where to start
You can begin to sow some vegetable seeds now, but it will need to be indoors, somewhere warm like a sunny window ledge or in a heated greenhouse (if you happen to have one!) There are many different types of seed propagators available to help with this.
But if you can’t get one of these, why not just plant your seeds in some yogurt pots or any small tubs and pop them even on your bedroom window until they begin to sprout. Water them gently, keeping it a bit moist, but not too wet.
Start with something easy, but also those with a long growing season such as tomatoes, peppers and aubergines, or in my pot I am planting a Courgette seed. You can also start some lettuce and oriental greens and some of what they call ‘eat & come again’ crops such as spinach which are handy because you can pick a few leaves and the plant continues growing more. Lettuce seeds need light to germinate, so when you pant these, you don’t need to cover them with more soil and they should begin to sprout in just a few days.
You can also buy the plants as seedlings and nurture them on your window ledge until it is time to plant them outside too. Your local shops like Woodies or local garden centres will have lots of vegetables and bedding plants.
You can also begin getting your potatoes ready to sow. You buy special seed potatoes and then before planting, you need to ‘chit‘ them. This involves letting the potatoes grow shoots, which will give you a bigger potato crop. Place seed potatoes in trays or egg cartons with the end that has the most eyes uppermost. Stand in a cool, light spot until 1-2cm long shoots have formed and then later in a few weeks we can talk about how to sow them outdoors.
You could also start some of those jobs we hate like cleaning your decking and furniture, sorting the shed and cleaning the gardening tools and pots. And maybe consider painting sheds or fences to brighten it up for the summer.
These might not sound like fun jobs, but painting a fence can be something that all the family can do together. And maybe you could even paint a mural if you have a space – like we did last summer in our garden.
Time to get those gardening gloves out and get going!!
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