The Land Gardeners: Preparing Your Garden for Spring

Preparing the Garden

If you have not already prepared your beds, don’t worry, there’s still time.

We recommend cutting down any over-wintered grasses and perennials as well as removing any weeds. At this time, we lift and divide our perennial plants in herbaceous borders, feeding them with our Garden Tonic and mulching with a thin layer of leaf mould or compost.

It's a good time to prepare cut flower and vegetable gardens by removing any over-wintered green manures and then preparing the soils for sowing. If the soil is relatively friable (easy to crumble) then we gently hoe the top. If it's very compacted then we’ll use a broadfork to incorporate air before giving it all a good rake.

Biodynamic Preparations

Before sowing, we like to spray our gardens with a biodynamic preparation, made from manure that has been stuffed into cow horns and matured over winter. This won't be for everybody so, if it sounds a bit intimidating, we recommend buying a pre-made preparation, placing it in a bucket, then dynamising it for one hour (stirring alternatively clockwise then anti-clockwise). Stirring the water is strangely relaxing and the water becomes silky and soft.

Another means of preparation is to fling arches of water onto garden beds, before using a soft brush to cover the soil. The aim is not to cover every area of soil, but to radiate an energy from the droplets like ripples in water - it works! We use collected rainwater but, if that’s not possible, leave a bucket of chlorinated water overnight and the chlorine will dissipate.

Green Manures

Around this time, it's good to start sowing your first green manure seeds as it’s so important to always have living roots in your soil; they are wonder seeds. Just sprinkle them directly onto your soil and rake them in. Tiny little seedlings will pop up, covering the soil in vibrant flowers that attract bees. Our favourites are phacelia, buckwheat, mustard and crimson clover. We leave some strips to flower and we hoe off others when they are tiny seedlings so we can plant out new cut flower or vegetable seedlings into the stubble.

Cut Flower and Vegetable Seeds

Now it comes to sowing your flowers and vegetables for the year ahead. Two of our favourite cut flower varieties are cosmos and sweet peas. Cosmos hate a frost, so try to sow them before Easter but no more than one month before the date of your last likely frost. Sweet peas are also easy to grow. We like to sow some under cover every three weeks from the beginning of February until April so we have a good source until autumn. Other favourites include Ammi majus (bishops flower) and visnaga.

As for vegetables, now is time to start sowing a few favourites under cover: flat leaf parsley, perpetual spinach, cavalo nero, rocket, Asian greens and early potatoes. If you haven't already sown broad beans, these can be planted directly in the garden.

Peonies and Roses

At this time of year, peonies are flying out of the ground. Don't feed them at this stage; wait until after they have flowered to encourage leaf growth, building vitality and energy for next year's blooms. It may not be too late to order and plant some for the year ahead. They really are one of the most amazing cut flowers.

Roses are another of our passions. It's time to prune them, if you haven't already, cutting out dead and crossing wood. Take them down by a third if they are English shrub roses and lower if they are hybrid teas. We are approaching the end of the season for planting bare root roses (end of March), but you can still plant roses all year round in pots.

Preparing pots

Finally, in spring you'll find us preparing old pots by knocking out around 5cm of old soil and topping up with new compost. Our favourite plants for pots include: frothing white Gaura lindheimeri, the tiny daisy Erigeron karvinskianus, and for height, the tall, purple-headed Verbena bonariensis.

We love herbs in pots, in particular mint, rosemary, bay and oregano and other scented plants including classic lavender and catmint. Evergreen camellias also work well in pots, as do figs, and now is the time to prune figs in the garden.

We also adore scented pelargoniums - but don’t put them outside until the fear of frost is over - as well as Lilium regale for their incredible scent in summer.

If you'd like to learn more from The Land Gardeners, we recommend taking one of their Create Academy courses. Slow Circle members can access an exclusive offer through our online platform.