Organic Gardening Magazine

March fruit

• In the south, forced rhubarb will be ready to harvest; in the north, it’s still worth covering a couple of crowns with buckets to give you an April crop.
• Protect early blossom on stone fruits from hard frosts by covering it with fleece or sacking. On large trees, cover individual branches as you can.
• Hand-pollinate early fruit blossom with a small paint-brush around midday. There are unlikely to be enough bees around to do the job this early in the year.
• Watch out for aphids, capsid bugs, winter moth caterpillars and tortrix moth cocoons. Scrape off or prune out any signs of woolly aphid on apples. Continue to maintain greasebands on apple and pear trees until the end of the month.
• Do any outstanding planting or moving of fruit trees and bushes as a matter of urgency – unless you live in the far north, in which case waiting until the latter half of March is probably just as well.

• MUCH more in the magazine

Ornamentals

Pot up overwintered dahlia tubers in damp compost, or take cuttings from tubers started into growth last month. Picture: Dave Bevan

• Sow hardy and half-hardy annuals in trays or, in sheltered gardens, the open ground. Move last month’s under-cover sowings of hardy annuals and perennials into a cold frame once they are well established.
• Sow tender annuals under cover. Stagger your sowings, leaving the quicker-growing varieties until early April, to avoid a log-jam when everything needs potting on at once.
• Plant summer-flowering bulbs like gladioli, alliums and lilies.
• Remove spent flowers on spring bulbs to stop the plants wasting energy on seed production, but don’t cut back or tie up the leaves.
• Move or divide snowdrops and winter aconites early in the month – they do much better transplanted ‘in the green’.
• Lift and divide congested herbaceous
perennials and pond marginals.
• Protect the emerging shoots of hostas, delphiniums and lupins from slugs.
• Take hardwood cuttings from shrubs you want to propagate – they often do better now than in the autumn.
• Cut buddleia back hard, prune roses, and cut back the new growth on shrubs grown for their colourful winter stems. (For more on March pruning, see pages 56-57.)


• More in the magazine

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March Veg

Sowing & planting
• You can now sow hardy crops like carrots, beetroot, lettuce, radishes, spring onions, spinach, chard, turnips, kohlrabi, celery and celeriac into the open ground… in theory. In a sheltered southerly garden unprotected sowings will do fine in the latter half of the month. Elsewhere, and early in the month, provide cloche protection. Alternatively, play safe and start these crops (bar the carrots and radishes) in trays or modules.
• Established seedlings in trays can be moved into a cold frame now; leave them in this halfway house for a couple of weeks before putting them into the open ground. Meanwhile, cover the bed they are destined
for with cloches or black plastic to raise the
soil temperature.
• Sow onions from seed and leeks this month; both need a long growing season. If your soil isn’t fit for direct sowing, start them in pots early in the month. Plant onion sets once the ground is dry enough (leave heat-treated sets until April).
• Sow broad beans in the open ground if you didn’t do it in February. Hardy varieties of pea can also be sown direct.
• Sow parsnips into the open ground as soon as your soil is reasonably dry.
• Sow summer cabbages, summer cauliflowers and calabrese in a seed-bed or in trays. Early varieties of Brussels sprouts and kale can also be sown this month.
• Set your maincrop seed potatoes to chit when you plant your first earlies. In the south, maincrops can be planted at the end of March, but if you have already planted enough first and second earlies to see you through the summer, there’s no rush.
• Plant asparagus crowns in a well drained bed.

Harvesting
• Pick sprouting broccoli regularly to keep it producing more spears, and also pick off any buds that appear on kale. These too are edible, but remove them even if you don’t want to eat them, to keep the leaves tender for longer.
• Check over your stored crops carefully; most things will be reaching their use-by date. Break off any sprouts on potatoes to stretch their shelf-life by another couple of weeks. Most other things will now need to be eaten, or made into soups and casseroles for the freezer.

• Harvesting details and more in the magazine

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