Garden Planning, Tips and Planting Advice

Gardening Tips: March Lawn Care

You will need to give your lawn its first cut. Weather permitting a weekly trim is desirable. For the first cuts of the season, it is best to have your lawn mower blades set high to medium – about 3 cm.

The edges also need trimming with long handled shears, an edging tool, grass trimmer or strimmer. Apart from looking good, this helps prevent grass spreading into your flower borders.

With the arrival of spring, you should also use a lawn feed to encourage strong growth and reduce the amount of weeds and moss.

Gardening Tips: Pruning

March is a good time of year to prune evergreen hedges. Depending on the length of the hedge ‘run’, you can prune evergreen hedges with hand shears or with an electric, battery or petrol hedge trimmer. If you are using a powered hedge trimmer, use protective goggles and gloves.

You can also prune any bush roses or shrub roses. Consider the space you have for the rose and the shape of the bush and take out branches that are ruining your shape or taking too much space. To prune your roses, use secateurs, or if the branches are thick, you may need to use loppers.

Gardening Tips: Container pots and patio plants

If you have plants in container pots on your patio or elsewhere in your garden, this is a good time of year to replace the top layer of soil with fresh compost. Where plants re beginning to outgrow their pots, you can also re-pot them, remembering to tease out the roots before re-potting.

Daffodils

You should now start to see colour from your daffodil bulbs. Once the flowers fade, you must ‘dead-head’ them to allow the plant to put energy into the bulb for next year.

Gardening Tips: Planting or transplanting

To plant, the type of equipment you will need includes:

• Trowel
• Shovel
• Rake

Watering can or hose

When planting or transplanting, use compost from your compost bin, manure or purchase compost. Once you have dug a hole big enough for the plant, add 2-3in of compost or manure into the hole to feed the plant. Fill the hole with water, preferably from your water butt and let the water sink in. Place the plant in the hole and water again. Fill in the hole with soil to the top of the root ball and water again.

Examples of the type of plants you can plant in March are:

• Fruit bushes, for example gooseberry, raspberry
• Fruit trees, for example, apple and cherry
• Hedges
• Shrubs
• Roses
• Vegetable
• Potatoes
  For planting you need chitted seed potatoes and you should plant with the shoots pointing upwards.
• Garlic
• Onions
• Flowers
• Hardier plants, for example, border carnations, gladiolus, polyanthus and sweet peas. Summer bulbs, for example, Lily.

Indoors or in your greenhouse, it is also time to pot on plants you have wintered inside, such as begonias, fuchsia.

This is a good time of year to divide up older clumps of perennial plants. Break these into small pieces and discard the hard central portions. Replant the younger outer portions.

Sow

Note: Always check the instructions on the seed packet concerning time of sowing and transplanting. Different varieties are designed to grow at different times. The information below is a general guide for common vegetable and flower seeds that can be sown this time of year.

Vegetables

The following are examples of vegetable seeds that can be sown outside in a sheltered spot or under cloches:

• Broad beans
• Carrots
• Parsnips
• Peas
• Turnips

The following are examples of vegetable seeds that can be sown in seed trays in greenhouses or propagators:

• Aubergine
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Radishes
• Tomatoes
• Flowers

The following are examples of flower seeds that can be sown outside:

• Hardy annuals, for example, alyssum, calendula, candytuft, cornflower, lavatera, poppies and Virginian stock.

Summer bedding plants can be sown in seed trays in greenhouses or propagators.