by Frances Laing

Created on: February 19, 2009   Last Updated: March 23, 2011

Ten Tips to Early Spring Vegetable Garden Preparation

- If you're a newbie, don't be over-ambitious. It's better to grow a few items well, rather than take on more than you can manage.

- Get yourself a perpetual vegetable and fruit growing calender to hang on your wall. You need one that suits your climate zone, with pages that you can flip over each month and space for notes. You're going to use it to jog your memory about the tasks you'll need to do in the coming year.

- Check your calender for sowing, planting and harvesting times, both under cover in the greenhouse and outside and plan your sowings and plantings accordingly. Growing fruit and vegetables successfully is all about timing. If you miss your planting window - you'll be struggling uphill as your plants may not get the daylight they need to grow strongly. Some people use a spreadsheet, and you can even get hold of veg planting calender software these days.

- Don't skimp on preparation of your vegetable beds. Take the weeds out and in autumn make sure your beds get a top dressing of well-rotted compost or manure. 

- Construct several compost heaps for your weeds. If you're ahead of the game, you will have set these up last autumn to save time.

- Rake the beds over and refer to sowing times and instructions when the time is right to put your seeds or plug plants in. - Plug plants are good for beginners. You can raise them yourself or buy them in. If you raise plug plants yourself when you come to planting out your seedlings should be growing strongly and you won't have so many losses due to slugs and snails.

- Work smart not hard. Once the weeds are out you can adopt the 'no-dig' method of fruit and veg gardening. Check out Charles Dowding's work. Charles is a market gardener. His book 'Salad Leaves for all Seasons' won a BBC gardening prize this year and he's been using no-dig methods successfully for twenty five years.

- Succession sowing is a very useful technique which helps you avoid a glut of one particular crop. You sow a small amount of seed every two weeks, say, so that not all your vegetables are ready at once.

- Remember to refer to your wall calender or diary regularly for sowing, planting and harvesting times a) Under cover or in a greenhouse b) outside.

- Next year - don't wait until Spring to begin preparations. Jobs like tidying out the shed, and constructing compost heaps can be done outside of the main growing season - work steadily throughout the year - little and often is better than making a huge effort for two months a year and then losing interest. 

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