Time to organise your veg beds!
Posted:9 March 2012
March is here and it’s time to get organised in your vegetable plot
- Check, repair or replace any rotten raised-bed boards, and build new compost bins. Clean, sharpen and oil secateurs, loppers and shears.
- Set up more water butts – you may need them this year!
- Chit early-maturing potatoes such as Charlotte, Vivaldi, Red Duke of York, Maris Bard and Accord egg boxes make good chitting trays, put the tubers with the ‘eyes’ facing upwards.
- When chitted (sprouted) you can carefully plant your early potatoes under cover in special vegetable bags, or even use an old compost bag.
- Plant out individual garlic cloves 10cm apart in prepared ground and cover with cloches or fleece.
- Plant onion sets in modular trays of compost, keep under cover to plant out later.
- Last chance to plant out bare-rooted fruit trees and summer fruiting raspberries.
- Plant out cold-stored strawberry runners, sowing seeds of alpine varieties or even pollinate strawberry flowers under glass.
- Sow in trays and modules in the greenhouse (for growing on in the greenhouse): tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and cucumbers.
- Start sowing hardy veg outside or under cloches: carrots, beetroot, broad beans, salad onions, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, leeks, lettuce, rocket, coriander, mixed salad or stir fry leaves, radish, turnip, peas, lettuce and Swiss chard. Don’t sow too many at once, leave some space for a second sowing to extend your season.
- For early veg, grow some of the hardy veg under cover in your greenhouse beds: radish, rocket, lettuce and salad leaves.
- Fork over your beds, clearing any weeds (don’t throw into compost bin!) – you could also warm your bare soil by covering with a sheet of polythene and pinning it down, just for a week or two before planting commences.
- Get your hazel or bamboo bean-pole structures in place – make sure they’re pushed well into the ground as they’ll be bearing a lot of weight once your beans start growing.
- It’s not too late to dig a compost trench for your runner beans. Dig a trench to about a spades depth, then fill with kitchen peelings and vegetable waste, rotten apples etc, also a bit of torn up old egg boxes or cardboard. Cover with soil to stop foxes scavenging. Leave to compost down until you plant your beans, around mid-May.
- While your beans and pea beds shouldn’t need any more feeding for now, you could enrich the other beds with garden well-rotted compost, manure or an organic fertilizer.