Spring Jobs for a Productive Kitchen Garden

Make a Start with Hardy Salads

By early March the light is returning and the urge to sow something is hard to ignore. Resist the temptation to fill a whole bed with tender crops; instead, begin with the hardy leaves that shrug off a cold snap and give you something to cut within weeks. A small packet of seed and a little shelter will reward you long before the garden centre has anything interesting on its benches.

Rocket, mizuna, corn salad, land cress, mustard greens and a crisp winter lettuce such as 'Winter Density' or 'Arctic King' are all excellent starting points. They germinate at lower temperatures than summer varieties and will take a light frost, especially with a cloche or a sheet of fleece over them at night.

• Sow thinly in shallow drills about 1cm deep and 15cm apart, once the soil is dry enough to crumble in your hand.
• Cover with fleece or a cloche and water gently; most will germinate in seven to fourteen days.
• Sow a small pinch every fortnight rather than one long row, so you never face a glut followed by a gap.
• Cut outer leaves with scissors and the plants will keep cropping for weeks.

If your ground is still cold and claggy, sow into modules in a cold frame and plant out later. It costs you a fortnight in sowing time but gains you far healthier roots.

Get the Beds Ready Before You Sow

Soil that is too wet to work will compact into hard clods and set like concrete, undoing a winter's worth of worm activity. Test a handful before you touch it: if it forms a ball that will not crumble when you press it with your thumb, give it another week. Working wet ground is the most common spring mistake in a kitchen garden.

When the soil is ready, fork over the top 15cm, teasing out the roots of perennial weeds such as couch grass and bindweed, then spread 5–8cm of well-rotted compost or mushroom compost across the surface. Let the worms pull it down rather than digging it in. A soil thermometer is a genuinely useful investment — push it in to 10cm and leave it a few minutes.

• Most vegetable seed germinates reliably once the soil reaches about 7°C at that depth.
• Broad beans, parsnips and spinach will sprout a touch cooler; carrots, beetroot and lettuce prefer it warmer.
• Do not lime or add fresh manure immediately before sowing — leave at least a few weeks between the two.

Prune Fruit Bushes While They Are Still Dormant

Early spring is your last comfortable window to prune fruit bushes before the sap rises and the buds break. Get it right and you will be picking from stronger, healthier wood all summer.

Blackcurrants crop best on young stems, so cut out up to a third of the oldest wood at ground level each year, taking the darkest, thickest stems and leaving the paler new growth to replace them. Redcurrants and gooseberries are different creatures — they fruit on older spurs, so only remove branches that droop towards the soil, plus any dead, damaged or crossing wood. Blueberries need barely anything beyond a tidy of weak shoots.

Raspberries confuse many growers, so remember it by fruiting time:

• Summer-fruiting canes: cut the canes that fruited last year down to the ground now, and tie in the new green canes about 15cm apart.
• Autumn-fruiting canes: cut every cane to ground level in late February or early March, as they will fruit on this year's fresh growth.
• Either way: clear the prunings away rather than leaving them beneath the bush, then mulch.

Finish with a feed of sulphate of potash, roughly 30g per square metre, scratched into the surface around the drip line rather than piled against the stems.

Plant, Feed and Mulch for the Season Ahead

As the soil warms there is a satisfying list of things that can go in. Plant onion sets and shallots with the tips just showing, put in early potatoes that have been chitting in a cool, bright room, and settle new strawberry plants with the crown sitting level with the soil surface. Rhubarb crowns and asparagus beds benefit from a generous mulch now, before the spears push through.

Mulching is the quiet hero of spring. A 5cm layer of compost or well-rotted manure around fruit bushes, rhubarb and perennial herbs locks in moisture, suppresses weeds and feeds the soil life beneath. Keep it a hand's width clear of stems and trunks to avoid rotting them.

A Garden That Welcomes Wildlife

A productive plot and a wildlife-friendly one are the same thing. Resist the urge to tidy every corner: dandelions, primroses and pulmonaria are lifelines for the first bees of the year, and a patch of nettles left standing will support peacock and small tortoiseshell butterflies later on.

Hoverflies, ladybirds and lacewings will do much of your aphid control for you if you avoid spraying and leave a few umbellifer flowers such as fennel and dill to run to seed. Put up a bird box or two, leave a 13cm gap under a fence panel so hedgehogs can pass through, and keep a shallow dish of water topped up with a few pebbles in it for insects to land on. You will still need to net brassicas and soft fruit against pigeons and bullfinches, but the garden will feel far more alive for the company.

Keep Sowing Little and Often

The secret of a kitchen garden that feeds you steadily rather than in one overwhelming week is succession. Sow small quantities of carrots, beetroot, radish and spring onions every three weeks from now until midsummer, and you will harvest continuously instead of facing a wheelbarrow of bolting radishes in June.

Harden off anything raised indoors over the course of a week, bringing plants out by day and in by night, and keep fleece to hand until late May — a late frost can undo months of care in a single night. Ten minutes of walking the plot each morning, checking for slugs, aphids and drying soil, is worth more than any amount of frantic catching up later. Spring rewards the attentive gardener generously, so enjoy it.