GardenAdvice.co.uk Gardening calendar 4th week March 2025 ( Audio Available )
Get time to start sowing some basil in small pots and re sow every 6 weeks
The main focus for the GardenAdvice gardening calendar this week is to get you ready for the expected early season attack by slugs in your garden especially as plants such as young vegetable seedlings and perennial plants such as hostas start to grow
Click here to download the audio file ( .wav ) or Click Here to listen as a podcast
Slug Control Preparation
With warmer weather approaching, it’s essential to prepare for slug control:
- Inspect garden areas and remove any debris where slugs may shelter.
- Encourage slug predators such as hedgehogs, frogs, and birds by creating habitats, such as compost heaps or placing upturned terracotta pots in shady spots in the garden especially useful for toads.
- Your first line of defence should be natural slug control methods such as beer traps or copper band barriers.
- Slug pellets, which can harm wildlife, are best replaced with nematodes as a control method as they do not affect the wildlife food chain.
Watering Fruit Trees
As fruit blossoms appear and fruit begins to set, it’s important to water fruit trees, particularly apple trees especially this year as it shows signs of being a dry spring.
- Provide watering around the base of fruit trees as the fruit sets to reduce fruit drop during dry periods.
- Sow nasturtiums and calendula seeds around the base of fruit trees as companion plants.
- Mulch around the base of trees with compost or bark to retain moisture.
Vegetable Seed Sowing
- Now is an excellent time to sow individual vegetable seeds such as tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers in peat-based or paper-based pots such as used paper toilet roll or kitchen holders/tubes. If you are sowing in a cold glasshouse make sure you have some fleece ready to protect from frosts
- Keep palter and peat pots consistently moist to allow roots to grow through and avoid plant stress or ‘checks which occur when paper or peat pits dry out.
- When transplanting vegetable seedlings into larger pots or directly into the ground, completely bury the peat or paper pots to prevent drying out and reduce transplant shock.
Additional Gardening Tasks
- Feed bulbs, camellias and magnolias with a high-potash fertilizer to enhance flowering and plant vitality.
- Check variegated shrubs regularly for shoots reverting to a green form and prune them immediately to maintain their desired appearance.
- Begin sowing hardy herbs such as parsley, coriander, chives, dill and basil in containers or directly into prepared beds outdoors under cloches.
GardenAdvice Team Gardeners: Recent Activities With Our Clients And Members
This past week, our GardenAdvice.co.uk gardeners have been busy: Click Here to see some short videos of the garden we are helping to develop
- Setting up vegetable gardens and demonstrating effective use of cloches for early crop establishment.
- Assisting gardeners to create low-maintenance gardens by mulching over cardboard or plastic sheeting with wood chips and topping with bark.
- Creating hotbeds using horse manure topped with soil and protected by plastic or glass frames for early germination and growth of salad crops. These beds will later host courgettes, marrows, and pumpkins as the season progresses.
- Helping gardeners in London deter foxes from gardens using humane methods like detector-triggered sprays and lion manure.
- Providing extensive houseplant care advice, recommending John Innes compost and clay pots to increase humidity and combat dry indoor air conditions.
- Advising GArdenAdvice member gardeners on replacing conifer hedges suffering dieback with climate-resilient alternatives such as Griselinia and Taxus (yew)
