Colin Evans

Spring bulbs are now showing just above the soil surface reminding us that spring in all its glory is just around the corner. 

My own garden is showing the first signs of colour with the pink blooms of the Viburnum Bodnantense adding colour to the dark corners of many of the borders.

Viburnum Bodnantense

This magnificent shrub waits for its leaves later in the spring but the stems are just covered with umbrellas of pink sweetly smelling flowers. Viburnums are cheap to buy and will grow in most conditions so I recommend you get one and find find a place in a border to plant now.

Digging over vegetable patches now will help to get the soil ready for planting later on as the frosts will break up any hard clods of soil and make cultivation easier.

Try cloches if you want to get vegetable crops sown earlier. Glass types are the best but are now hard to get hold of unless you go to a specialist supplier, but you can get in touch with them by looking down the classified lists in magazines like "BBC Gardeners World".

Daffodil

Alternatively most garden centres sell the plastic types and providing you buy the better made ones will do as good a job as the glass ones. Placed over an area of soil as winter gets underway the little cloches will dry out the soil and heat it up which means you can sow salads like lettuce and radishes and spring flowering bulbs.

This means you will get results much sooner, and into the bargain get earlier colour and maybe some salad during February and March.

Campanula can be sown any time from March through to the first week in June direct into garden soil where they are going to flower. One worth looking out for this year is Campanula ramosissima "Meteora" which is a quick growing annual bell flower.

It produces distinctively veined, upturned star shaped blue flowers 3-4 cm across with white centres that smother bushy, dwarf plants. this stunning flower will continue to bloom in sunny borders or pots and pathways all through the summer.

TOPICAL TIPS:

1: Get into the garden and cut some stems of early flowering shrubs
like Viburnum bodnantense, shrub honeysuckle and witch hazel and place in a vase indoors and fill the room with the most wonderful perfume. if you have shallow containers you will be able to create a display that looks very Japanese in its design. Fill the bases with either gravel or small pebbles or better still, some moss from the garden to complete the effect. Kept well watered, the stems will last for a few weeks indoors and once over they can be taken as cuttings and stood outdoors.

Tulips in the snow

2: With spring bulbs starting to make their presence known add a
little light mulch to borders where your your tulips and daffodils are appearing. This will give them a little protection from hard frosts as they are emerging and will help to keep the moisture around the bulbs.
Also add a good sprinkling of slow release granular fertilizer as flowering will take lots of valuable nutrients form the emerging bulbs.

Leeks

3: Leeks can be sown indoors towards the end of the month. Just
distribute the seeds onto pots of compost and sprinkle a this layer of compost to cover and stand somewhere warm and light so that the emerging seedling do not grow leggy. Once germinated and at the two or four leaf stage they should be pricked out into separate pots and left to make some growth before planting them out in late May.

Happy Gardening