Emily Hartley
Start With the Soil, Not the Seeds
It is tempting to rush straight to the seed packets, but early spring rewards patience with the soil. After months of rain, most beds are cold and heavy. Dig or fork them too soon and you will smear the structure into sticky clods that take all summer to recover.
There is a simple test. Take a handful of soil from a spade's depth, squeeze it, then tap it with your finger. If it holds together in a wet ball and smears, leave it alone for another week or two. If it crumbles into crumbs, it is ready. Fork over only the top 5–8cm, working backwards and never standing on the soil you have just loosened. A plank laid across the bed spreads your weight and saves a great deal of backache.
Once the surface is open, spread a 5cm layer of well-rotted manure or garden compost over empty beds and let the worms do the digging. Spread it as a mulch rather than digging it in, and the soil will warm up faster and hold moisture through the drier weeks ahead. If your soil is very acid and you are growing brassicas, a dusting of lime now will have time to settle before planting. Rose beds, fruit bushes and herbaceous borders all benefit from a handful of balanced fertiliser scratched into the surface just as new growth appears.
Prune Before the Sap Rises
Early spring is the last comfortable moment for most pruning. Once the sap is moving strongly, wounds bleed and plants waste energy they need for the season ahead.
- Apples and pears: cut out dead, diseased and crossing branches, then shorten last year's growth on spur-bearing trees to encourage fruiting spurs.
- Roses: cut back to an outward-facing bud, removing thin and twiggy stems altogether. Aim for a open, goblet-shaped framework.
- Summer-flowering shrubs: buddleia, dogwood and hydrangea paniculata all respond well to a hard cut now, flowering on this year's growth.
- Wisteria: shorten side shoots to two or three buds to keep the plant tidy and the flowering spurs strong.
- Ornamental grasses and perennials: cut back to the crown before new shoots push through, then lift and divide anything that has outgrown its space.
Leave plums, cherries and other stone fruits until midsummer. Pruning them now risks silver leaf, a fungal infection that is far easier to avoid than to cure. If you still have bare-root trees or hedging whips waiting in a bucket, get them in the ground this month while the soil is still cool and damp.
Sharpen, Clean and Store Your Tools Properly
A blunt pair of secateurs tears stems and leaves a ragged wound that invites disease. Ten minutes at the bench will transform a whole season of cutting.
Hold a flat file against the bevelled edge of the blade and stroke away from you at a shallow angle, following the original bevel rather than inventing a new one. Five or six passes is usually plenty. Turn the blade over and remove the burr with a single light stroke. Do the same for shears, loppers and the cutting edge of a spade. Never file the flat back of a blade.
Scrub rust off with wire wool dipped in oil, tighten any loose nuts, and replace split handles before they fail mid-job. A bucket of sharp sand mixed with a little oil makes a useful resting place for spades and forks, keeping them clean and lightly protected. Give the lawnmower a service, check the hose for splits, and set aside an oily rag in the shed so a quick wipe-down becomes a habit rather than a chore.
Feed Containers and Wake Up the Borders
Pots and hanging baskets suffer most in early spring. Scrape off the top 5cm of old compost and replace it with fresh, then water sparingly until growth is underway. Tip out anything that looks sickly and check the roots for vine weevil grubs, which are plump, white and curled like commas.
In the borders, mulch fruit bushes and roses, fork compost around emerging perennials, and top-dress alpines with grit to keep their crowns dry. Tidy the edges of the lawn with a half-moon before the grass gets going, and give the lawn its first light cut on a dry day with the blades set high.
Sow and Plant — Then Protect Your Efforts
Direct sowing can begin once the soil has warmed. Broad beans, parsnips, radish, spinach and early carrots will all cope with a cool start, particularly under a cloche or a length of fleece. Under cover, sow tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and sweet peas, pricking seedlings out as soon as they have true leaves.
Keep fleece, cloches and a stack of newspaper to hand. A late frost in April or May can undo weeks of work in a single night, and tender seedlings need hardening off gradually over a fortnight before planting out. Start a nightly slug patrol with a torch — it is surprisingly effective and oddly satisfying.
A Half-Term Job List for Small Helpers
Children make excellent gardeners if the jobs are short, messy and theirs to own. Filling pots with compost, sowing quick cress and sunflower seeds, building a bean teepee from bamboo canes, and assembling a bug hotel from old bricks and hollow stems will keep everyone busy for an afternoon. Give them their own labelled patch and let them decide what grows there.
Then reward yourselves with a day out. Bluebell woods are at their best from mid-April, and many gardens open their gates for spring walks and plant sales. The season's food is worth seeking out too: forced rhubarb, purple sprouting broccoli, wild garlic and the first spring greens and new-season lamb. A rhubarb crumble made from forced stems is one of the finest puddings of the year, and it tastes even better after an afternoon spent sharpening tools and turning soil.
