Garden Editor Clare Foster and her hen getting the garden ready for planting.
Jessica Hage
I love March. It’s the beginning of spring and growth is accelerating quickly in the garden. Primroses are flowering, apple blossom bursting and perennials thrusting upwards in vivid green. The colour of the month has to be the lime green of Euphorbia characias wulfenii – even better when it is offset by purple-flowered Lunaria ‘Corfu Blue’. Smaller Euphorbia epithymoides also flowers in March, forming rounded hummocks in the border that are the perfect foil for the emerging tulips.
One of the most important tasks is to mulch the flower borders with coarse-grade compost. This improves the soil structure, locks in moisture and suppresses weeds. I work methodically, the chickens around my feet, forking compost from the wheel-barrow and spreading it round the plants using my hands. Once this is done, I feel ready for spring.
Seed-sowing can start now in earnest. I have been experimenting with wood and bamboo-fibre seed trays and plant-fibre or coir modules. Results were good, but non-plastic inserts wick water away fast, so you have to make sure the seedlings don’t dry out.
The other thing that I love doing this month is potting up dahlia tubers. I leave some in the ground each winter, protected by a mulch, but lift half of them to overwinter in a box of sand or straw in the shed. In March, I get them out, dividing some of the bigger tubers to create more plants. Put the tubers in pots with multipurpose compost, setting them fairly high up in the pot with the tops of the tubers just showing. Then keep them well watered – but not waterlogged – and enjoy watching them as they put on masses of growth over the next couple of months before you plant them out in May or June.
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