What to do in the garden in April:

It's spring! This is the month when all gardeners have a bounce to their stride. It's hard to go indoors when the sun is shining, the birds are singing and the garden is alive with the year's first flowers. Enjoy!

General tasks:

• Watch out for frosts and keep horticultural fleece handy to throw over any plants vulnerable to damage
• Trim back climbers threatening to invade your guttering and eaves, always cutting back to a pair of buds

Ornamental garden:

• Prune forsythia as soon as flowering finishes, removing about one in five of the oldest stems
• Cut back old growth on ferns to make room for the new shoots and show them off as they unfurl
• Put up wigwams for climbers like sweetpeas and clematis, sinking four or five canes in a circle and tying together securely at the top.

 

Kitchen garden:

• Sow spinach seed direct into the ground, spacing the easy-to-handle seeds about 5cm apart in shallow drills.
• Inspect fruit tree branches for woolly aphid, like white fluff on the bark; blast off with a jet of water if you spot them
• Plant asparagus in trenches, making mounds in the bottom to sit the spidery crowns on before back-filling with soil.