The Gardener's Journal is a free monthly gardening guide delivered direct to your inbox.

Each month, receive tips on the top jobs needed in your garden as well as a wealth of information on a range of gardening topics. From sowing seeds to picking fruit, each month get access to information on the care and maintenance of your flowerbeds, vegetable plot and lawn. As with your own gardening diary, the journal is split into separate sections, each covering a different area of garden care.

Friday 1 March 2013

This Month in your Garden - March


Your hard work in the autumn and winter months, digging and preparing borders, working in compost and tidying up is coming into its own. 

Frosts will have had a beneficial effect on the soil, breaking it down to a good tilth – that’s ideally a loamy, nutrient rich soil, a mix of sand, clay and organic matter will give you a friable soil that is not prone to compacting. 

Finish preparing borders, ready for planting biennials and perennials in April, by forking them over. 

Time to give the lawn some attention by feeding it and seeding bare patches. If the weather is dry and reasonably mild you can sow some hardy annuals such as Sweet Peas and Clarkia. Sweet Pea seedlings started in the autumn or in January under glass should be ready to plant out about now. 

Stop and consider how the garden looked through the winter months and where you could create winter interest with plants bearing berries and colourful bark. Large clumps of hostas can be divided before their leaves grow.

  • Take spring cuttings of tender bedding plants such as pelargoniums, marguerites and petunias
  • Grow perennials from seed, lupins, pinks, delphiniums
  • Plant and move snowdrops, winter aconites and hardy cyclamen
  • Split polyanthus after flowering to make several plants
  • Plant layered carnations, chrysanthemums, dahlias, pansies and violas
  • Propagate rock plants by division
  • Under glass pot on azaleas, camellias and marguerites
  • Sow under glass a list as long as you like from antirrhinums to delphiniums, dianthus to hollyhocks and penstemons to verbenas and everything in between
  • See on the seed packets on display in the garden centre when to sow

No comments:

Post a Comment