Spring Into Action: Prepare For The Growing Season Ahead 

Becky_Alton
7 March 2022

March is one of my favourite months as bulbs burst into vibrant colour and life begins to return to our gardens. Spring doesn’t officially arrive until 20 March but now is the time to get busy with plans for the growing year ahead. Here are some tips on how to prepare your garden for spring.

Plan & Go Wild

Use March to plan how you will use the space in your garden. If your garden is always perfectly pruned, I recommend trying rewilding. No matter how small a space, plant a mix of wild-flowers for the bees and butterflies or simply let the grass grow.

If we all leave a little space in our gardens for plants and grass to grow wild, wildlife has a much wider area to find food and shelter. By all doing a little bit, it will make a massive difference and you’ll be rewarded with lots of wildlife in your garden.

Order Your Seeds

If you haven’t yet stocked up, now is the time to begin ordering. Once you’ve planned your garden design for the year ahead, it’s time to place your seed order. There are many places you can order seeds from, my favourite supplier is Tamar Organics who have been selling organic seeds since 1994. Based on an organic market farm in Launceston, they have a broad variety of popular and more unusual seeds.

Each year, I purchase one vegetable and or flower that I haven’t grown before and give it a go – it’s a great way to set yourself a little personal challenge! Don’t be afraid to experiment, that’s the beauty of growing plants. At Heligan we grow over 300 varieties of fruit, vegetables and flowers so I have a lot to learn from.

I always opt for organic seeds to make sure my plants have the purest DNA. To find an organic seed producer near you, check out the Soil Association.

Spring Clean

This time of year is well known for giving our homes a spring clean but we can also give our sheds, greenhouses and flower beds a clean up. Re-organise your shed so you have everything easily on hand, hose down the greenhouse glass to allow optimum sunlight to shine through to help those young seedlings and dead-head old flower heads. When dead-heading flowers, be sure to look closely before you pull them off as you might just see insects such as ladybirds nesting inside.

When it comes to weeds, a gardener’s job is never done. At this time of year, the weeds are easy to remove because they have not become settled in and by keeping them to a minimum, you’ll give your seeds the opportunity to flourish. Here are a common few weeds keep an eye out for, and remove:

Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine pratense)
Willowherb (Epilobium spp)
Doves-foot cranes-bill (Geranium molle)
Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Planting potatoes in March

Potatoes are classified as being either earlies or maincrops. Begin planting ‘Early’ varieties around late March, these are what we call ‘new potatoes’. The Main-Crop comes later in the year and produces a larger harvest and bigger potatoes.

It’s important that potato seeds are ‘chit’. This can be done now. Stand your seeds rose end up (the end with the most small dents or eyes) in egg boxes or trays. I often use old egg boxes. Place in a frost free place – they like to be away from direct sunlight and in the cool so a pantry or cupboard can be a good option. Water frequently and when the shoots are approximately 3cm long, they are ready to go into the ground.

At Heligan, we grow over thirty varieties of potatoes. Each year, we save thousands of the harvested potato seeds for the following year, and we have been doing this since the restoration of the gardens, over thirty years ago! Some varieties are so rare that they cannot be bought at all anymore, meaning that they are extremely precious. One of the oldest varieties we grow is Fortyfold, which was introduced here in the 1800s. Another is Shetland Black which has a beautiful dark purple skin and yellow flesh.

Spring sweetpeas

Sweet Peas

Sweet peas can be sown at this time of year, when we’re emerging from deep winter into early spring. They are a wonderfully fragrant, blousy looking flower which come in many different shades and climb high to add a little drama to your garden. I’ve sometimes opted for the easier option of buying plugs later in the season because it’s a great way to free up any needed space in your greenhouse for other seeds, but if you do have the space they’re a very easy and rewarding flower to grow from seed.

As some varieties have hard shells, they need to be soaked overnight before sowing them to help germinate. Also, if you’re running out of pots, then use a cardboard toilet roll instead – a great way to recycle! Once the sweet peas are ready to go out and be planted, you can pop the whole cardboard container in the ground as it will break down and compost in your soil so there’s less waste, and less root disturbance.

Other growing ideas

If you have the luxury of a heated glasshouse, tomatoes, peppers, aubergine and chillies can all be sown in March too, or you can of course find somewhere warm in your house – I usually do mine on a windowsill and I love checking back every other day to see the progress and new life in action. Seeds that can be sown directly are broad beans, onion & shallot sets.

Luckily in Cornwall we benefit from mild winters which means we can usually get a head start on some sowing.

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