What to do in the garden in March

What to do in the garden in March:

The main question this month is where to start! Don’t worry - we’ve got it sorted with our list of the essential jobs to be getting on with over the next few weeks.

 

General tasks:

• Steep freshly-cut nettles in water for a few weeks and decant the rich brown liquid for a potent, nitrogen-rich plant food
• Start hoeing weekly to catch annual weeds the moment they appear so they never get big enough to bother you or your plants

 

Ornamental garden:

• Feed container plants weekly with general purpose liquid seaweed feed (available from our garden centre here in Co. Limerick)
• Start sowing hardy annual flowers including calendula, nasturtium, love-in-a-mist and alyssum in swathes through borders
• Deadhead daffodils then let the foliage die down naturally so it feeds the bulb and produces an even better display next year

 

Kitchen garden:

• Sow radish among your parsnip seeds to mark the rows: the radish come up much faster, so you remember where you sowed your parsnips
• Use junk mail CDs hung from strings on canes among cabbages so they wink in the sun and deter hungry pigeons
• Plant onion sets around 10cm apart, sinking the sets just below the soil’s surface