April is a busy month in the garden. Even though spring is late this year, there are still signs of the season about to start in earnest. April is the month for planting, sowing, feeding and weeding, so make sure you spend as much time as you can preparing the garden for the season ahead.
April is the natural time to plant. Every keen gardener would agree that there is always room for a few more plants. A visit to the garden centre during April will reveal a wide choice of fabulous spring flowering trees and shrubs. These will have been grown in containers and although they can be planted almost all year round, it is much better to plant them in spring or autumn. Improve the planting soil with a quality planting compost, this will help the plant roots grow easily into the surrounding soil and provide essential drainage and nutrients to the roots. Water thoroughly after planting even if it has rained as this will settle the soil and compost around the roots and help your plant establish more quickly. After a week or so, top up the compost around the roots where it has settled and mulch the area with an appropriate mulch.
Give trees and shrubs a spring feed to support strong and healthy growth. Use a general balanced feed such as growmore, it's granular so can be sprinkled around the base of your plants. Organic gardeners can choose pelleted chicken manure, fish, blood & bone, seaweed meal or bone meal.
Weed around the base of trees and shrubs, removing any grass and perennial weeds that cover the root area. Then apply a thick mulch around the base after heavy rainfall to suppress weed growth, improve the soil moisture retention and insulate the roots from extremes of temperature.
Feed flowering shrubs and roses with a dedicated rose food to encourage plenty of rich green foliage and masses of wonderful flowers.
Keep a watch on early shoots for the first signs of pests. Many pests such as aphids coincide their lifecycles with the growth pattern of your plants, so as your roses and shrubs burst into growth this provides vital food for the first generations of this year's pests. Be vigilant and deal with them as soon as you see them.
If you want to garden organically, feed the birds to encourage them into the garden and plant plenty of brightly flowered annuals to attract beneficial insects into the garden.
Many shrubs can be pruned in April. Dogwoods (Cornus) respond particularly well to hard pruning, as this encourages plenty of fresh coloured stems to develop. Spring flowering shrubs such as forsythia, flowering currants, weigela, deutzia and early clematis should all be pruned after flowering as they all actually flower on stems made last year. If you remove these stems before the flowers have opened you will stop the plants from flowering this season.
Plants that flower on this year's stems should be pruned in early spring to encourage plenty of new growth and flowers this season, these include roses, the butterfly bush (buddleia), Hydrangea paniculata, and caryopteris. Feed after pruning.
For easy crops to grow in April choose a mixed salad seed that can be sown weekly in small pots of compost in a greenhouse, cold frame or even on a windowsill. You can easily grow enough for several family servings of salad from one packet of seed and you can't get it any fresher than home sown salad, simply pick it on demand.
In a cool greenhouse or propagator sow tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, courgettes, runner beans, French beans, sweetcorn and half-hardy annuals. Sow into small flowerpots full of good quality seed compost, or for large seeds such as sweet peas, beans and peas use Root Trainers that allow the roots to develop undisturbed until they are ready to plant out.
Outdoors, if the soil is crumbly and not stodgy, sow broad beans, leeks, summer cabbages, cauliflower, summer spinach, French beans, peas, celery, parsnip, and Brussels sprouts. Make a shall
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