What to do now - March
It's that time of year...
March is a crucial month for allotment gardening: it’s starting to warm up, making it the perfect time to prepare soil, plant early crops outdoors and under cover, and prepare for the months ahead.
Key jobs include weeding, sowing seeds and planting out. Only plant out when it is warm, and the ground is not waterlogged. Ensure any indoor seedlings have been hardened off by exposing them to outside conditions for a week or two before planting them outside. Pre-warming the soil with cloches or clear plastic sheeting can enable you to plant crops sooner.
Dealing with perennial weeds now will make help you to keep on top of them later in the year, and its time to hoe regularly to slow down the growth of any new weeds.
Slugs and snails can be a problem in warm, wet weather, so protect your plants by applying grit, broken eggshells, copper tape and slug pellets around vulnerable seedlings (but don’t expect to beat them!).
For meal ideas for the time of year see our Seasonal Recipes.
Allotment tasks
Sow Now
Outdoors - broad beans, peas, early chitted seed potatoes, onions, shallots and garlic.
Under cover - root and stem vegetable, cabbages and cauliflowers, lettuce and salad crops
Seasonal Recipes
Longcroft Allotment Association's Seasonal Recipes web page
Jobs
Prune berries, prepare frames, cloches and fleece covers. Weed, remove large stones, rake seedbeds, and apply fertilisers. Dig bean trenches.
Harvest
Early rhubarb, kale, sprouting broccoli, leeks and spring onions.
Crops to Fill the ‘Hungry Gap’ (January – May)
Parsnips, Brussels sprouts, Kale, Chard, Leeks, Cauliflower and Winter Cabbage – harvest from January.
Rhubarb – harvest forced rhubarb from January, outdoor crops from March.
Purple Sprouting Broccoli – harvest from March to May.
Spring Greens, Salad Leaves, Spring Onions – harvest from March.
New potatoes, Radishes – harvest from April.
Asparagus – harvest From end April.
Leaf Salad Crops
Salad crops develop quickly, and there are a wide variety – sorrel, lettuce, endive, kale, radicchio and mustard leaves - to suit various conditions.
They can be grown in seed drills, broadcast over an area of ground or grown in containers. Either way, they offer a fresh and tasty alternative to bags of supermarket salads.
As salad crops can outgrow weeds, watering and pests are the main concerns for salad growers. Watering every two days may be necessary during long dry spells if salad crops are grown in compost rich beds (daily watering may be necessary if they are grown in small pots).
Slugs are the main pest, and can be treated with pellets, nematodes, or regular picking off. Ants and aphids can also be a problem – ants can be kept in check if the surrounding soil is kept moist. Aphids can be squashed by hand if they are not tackled by ladybirds or beetles.
Regular collect leaves when they are ready to harvest. If leaves start to sag after harvesting they can be recovered by soaking in cold water.
Protect Winter Brassicas
A well planned plot will have some well-developed brassicas as we head towards winter: various types of kale, cabbage, sprouts and broccoli. Give them a helping hand by:
- Fitting mesh or netting to protect them from pigeons
- Stake out taller Brussels sprouts and broccoli plants
- Remove any yellow leaves to discourage white fly and improve air circulation
- Apply soft soap solutions to help protect against pests the following spring
Chitting Potatoes
February is time to prepare seed potatoes for planting by ‘chitting’ them – storing them in such a way that they start to sprout before being planted in the ground.
The potatoes should be spread out over a single layer in a cool, dry place which is free from the risk of frost. Large, unused egg boxes are ideal for this, allowing air circulation between each seed potato.
Ideally the storage area should be bright but the seed potatoes should be out of direct sunlight. After a few days the potatoes will then grow short stubby shoots which will help the potato plants to grow when they are planted out to get them off to a fast start when planted out. St Patrick’s Day is the traditional day of the year to plant potatoes.
There is some evidence that you can grow larger potatoes by breaking off the weaker shoots just before planting, leaving only the three or four stronger shoots to grow.