A big welcome to any new subscribers this week. This is my once-a-month round-up of what’s going on in the garden; next week I’ll be continuing the Seasonal Planting series for paid subscribers with some ideas on creating planting plans, including plant lists from my own borders. But this post is all about celebrating early spring. I love this time of anticipation almost more than any other time of the year. The furry buds of Magnolia stellata are about to burst, spring bulbs are starting to flower, perennials are pushing through the ground and everything is growing with increased urgency and momentum. The colours are so intense - fresh greens in so many different shades, lime-green euphorbia flowers with purple-flowered honesty and muscari - and shapes are forming in the borders almost before my eyes.
Every autumn I plant miniature bulbs in terracotta pots for the table outside my kitchen so I can look out on little pots of colour as they come into bloom. I always have some muscari, which seem to come back year after year without needing anything done to them, and miniature narcissi like ‘Minnow’ or ‘Hawera’. This year I planted some different tulips that I’m looking forward to seeing in bloom: Tulipa cretica ‘Hilde’, which has palest pink flowers with darker pink tips to the petals; star-like Tulipa turkestanica, and magenta Tulipa humilis ‘Persian Pearl’. My plan with all these is to take them out of their pots once they’ve finished flowering and plant them at the front of a sunny border.
In the garden, I have just about finished cutting back all the perennials and grasses, with a couple of beds still needing to be mulched. Everything looks quite bare, but I can see the new growth coming up at the base of most of my perennials which makes me feel happy. The main focus for me this month is seed sowing. I become obsessive about it, making sure I use every available opportunity to sow a few more of the many seeds I have ambitiously bought this year. Unlike mammoth garden tasks like cutting back and mulching the borders, seed sowing is a breeze, and it can be done little and often - stolen moments during the day when you’re meant to be in front of your computer working, or even first thing in the morning before you’ve sat down to work. Sowing one or two seed trays takes at the most twenty minutes; and just think of the dozen or so plants you’ll get from that one sowing, as well as the flowers that you’ll be able to cut and bring inside.
In February I sowed sweet peas and perennials including Salvia nemorosa, Echinacea pallida and dahlias. The dahlias have grown so quickly I’ve already pricked them out into individual pots. In the first half of this month I’ll be sowing hardy annuals like marigolds, ammi, orlaya and larkspur; later on in the month I’ll start sowing half hardies such as cosmos and zinnias which can’t be planted out until at least mid May when the danger of frost has passed. I bought a useful wooden potting tray for my greenhouse last year which is brilliant - it stops me stooping down the whole time to fill up seed trays with compost. The compost I’m using this year is a multipurpose compost from Sylvagrow. It’s a peat-free, bark-based compost that holds the moisture much better than many peat-free composts. I sieve it to use as seed compost, so I don’t have to buy two different types of potting compost.
If there was one thing I’d like to communicate to you in this journal it would be the joy of sowing from seed. I have been doing it for many years but I promise you the pleasure I get from it doesn’t diminish in the slightest as time goes on; if anything, it grows. And it really isn’t rocket science. If you want more information on growing flowers from seed, have a look at my website, where you’ll find posts and photos on a range of different flowers, from sweet peas and marigolds to dahlias and verbena. Or buy my book, The Flower Garden, which compiles a collection of the easiest and most beautiful flowers to grow from seed.
Other Garden Tasks for March
• plant seed potatoes 30cm apart in trenches 15cm deep
• pot up dahlia tubers to start them into growth, keeping them under cover this month until the weather warms up reliably
• increase the watering regime of auriculas and feed them twice this month with a liquid seaweed feed
• early in the month sow hardy annuals under cover or directly into the ground if the soil is warm enough
• later in the month sow half hardy annuals such as cosmos
• sow vegetable seeds such as spinach, chard and beetroot outdoors
• sow more tender vegetables such as tomatoes and chillies indoors
• start hoeing beds to keep annual weeds under control
• re-invigorate perennials in pots by top-dressing with new compost
Hi Cheryl, I live in Berkshire, UK, which is an hour west of London. Thank you for finding me! Where are you?
Clare
I read, with a certain degree of envy, about the joy of sowing seeds in March because, for those like me without a greenhouse, only sowing directly into soil is possible. And talk of a cool windowsill, as in old gardening books, is unrealistic in central heated houses.