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Mow the lawn ( yes…)

Mow your lawn now and you’ll enjoy a greener, denser and harder-wearing patch throughout the summer. Whether you want a bowling-green lawn or just a bit of grass for the kids to play on, regular mowing will improve the appearance of your lawn and help keep it looking its best.

Takes just 30 minutes

Or just a little longer if you have to remove all the snow in order to do it…

Trim photinia

Cut back one in three branches of photinia to just above a leaf, to encourage new red shoots. Choose an ‘outward-facing’ leaf, as you would a rose.

What Photinia?? You got any? I haven’t got any…No- sorry: I have! Forgot – it must be 30 feet tall. Prune it??? You what???

Spring prep

Thoroughly weed and spring clean borders, loosening any compacted soil. Then apply a general fertiliser around each herbaceous clump and mulch

Well, I don’t know about you (or the snow) but I have four acres full of beds and borders (don’t ask me what the difference is..) and I’d have to take out a mortgage to scatter general fertiliser round all that lot. Never have, never will, it all does ok..

Give a potash feed to winter pansies and early-birds such as wallflowers, and perennials such as ‘Bowles’s Mauve’.

More feeding with feed I can’t afford and heartily dislike  of plants I don’t possess.

Shear violets

Straggly shoots of perennial violas should be trimmed back, leaving just a central boss of new shoots. Choose “outward-facing” leaves in each case.

And err.. what violas?? They well hidden, they are, in the big freeze..(do people really have time for all this fiddling about, anyway??)

Watch for the arrival of plug plants ordered by post, and pot them up on arrival. If you don’t have time, unpack them straight away, soak them if they seem dry, and space them out on a windowsill.

Well I didn’t – did you? Love the idea of doing an Eleanor Rigby and sitting there watching out the window for the plug plants arriving…(and do you have windowsill space sitting there waiting for them??!!)

Plant chitted (pre-sprouted) tubers of early potatoes in well-prepared soil in a sheltered part of the veg patch and protect them with fleece.

Not those chitted potatoes again! Gives you something to do with those that are sprouting away and going wrinkly in the kitchen though..

Plant canna lilies in pots

Won’t!

Plant out onion sets in rows

So the sparrows can pull them out. If they don’t you may find that little onions become a bit bigger, sitting there in the soil. Life is so amazingly exciting, isn’t it?

Put slug barrier products around the tender new shoots

This is called the Slug Olympics! See them skim the gravel! Rush the copper wire! (no idea what other slug barrier products there may be…)

Sow peas in lengths of guttering under cover

I have loads of spare guttering lying round the house, don’t we all? Keep it under the sofa…

Visit garden centres to buy young bedding plants

I don’t like bedding plants! And where they going to go? Not in my bed!

Sow strawberry seeds, including alpine varieties

Heard of strawberry runners??? And why do I have to sow alpine varieties – they grow as weeds in the garden as it is..

Sigh…… XXXX  Anne

Hellebore, Veddw copyright Anne Wareham

Shivering Hellebore, Veddw

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