What can you plant in March?
If you're a veggie-lover, sow lettuces, tomatoes, salads and cauliflowers undercover.
Outside, you can sow peas, carrots, beetroot, summer and autumn cabbages, herbs, leeks, spinach, turnips, spring onions, broad beans, Brussels sprouts and parsnips.
Now is also the time to begin planting summer bulbs so they'll be blooming gorgeous by the time August swings round.
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Timely tasks
- Pick off any developing seedheads on daffodils and other spring bulbs, but leave the foliage to die back naturally
- Finish pruning roses early in the month
- Cut dogwoods, willows, cotinus and paulownia right down to the base to promote vigorous new growth
- Start sowing hardy annuals outdoors, including California poppies, nasturtiums and opium poppies
- Tidy up alpines as they start to flower, removing dead foliage, then mulch with grit to keep the foliage off damp soil
- Plant faded forced bulbs out in the garden for blooms next year
- Plant lilies and other summer-flowering bulbs in pots and borders
- Feed ericaceous shrubs, such as rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias and pieris, with an ericaceous fertiliser
- Tidy up borders, removing established and newly-germinating weeds, then mulch generously with garden compost
- Plant new roses and other shrubs and climbers
- Sow native wildflower seeds in trays or modules, to produce plants for your own mini-meadow
- Check tender new shoots for aphids, and remove before infestations get out of hand
- Continue deadheading spring flowers and any remaining winter bedding so they don't set seed
- Scatter general-purpose fertiliser over flowerbeds and around roses, shrubs and hedges
Holly Chipchase
