Wipe the cobwebs off your fork, oil your secateurs and kick last year's mud off your boots, it's time get back out in the edible garden. Caroline Foley author of the best-selling Allotment Handbook gives you her allotment agenda for March...
1. Chit potatoes. The traditional time to plant potatoes is Good Friday - the first holiday since Christmas for the 'labouring poor'. Prepare them by putting certified disease-free seed potatoes in egg boxes, 'eyes' up. They are ready to plant when the shoots are about 7.5 (3ins) high about four weeks later.
2. Warm the soil for a couple of weeks before sowing seed by covering seedbeds with clear polythene held down by stones. This will have the added advantage of encouraging dormant weeds to grow so you can pull them out to give your seed a head start.3. Seize the moment after a heavy rain to fork on a thick layer of well-rotted manure or compost on weeded beds. It will keep the moisture in, shade out weeds and feed the soil.
4. This is the last chance to sow garlic and onion sets as they need a period of cold. Buy the first garlic bulb for planting from a garden centre as it will have been bred for this climate. In the following years keep some of your own cloves back for planting.
5. If you have young nettles on your plot, make them into free high-nitrogen fertilizer. Tie them up in a bag and suspend them in a barrel of water (apx.1k nettles:10L water). After a couple of weeks when the brew has stopped foaming it can be diluted 50:50. Excellent, though not for the alkaline soils or the fastidious as it stinks.
6. Invest in some enviromesh. It's a life-saver for the organic gardener. It protects against flying pests, birds, rabbits, wind and hail and lasts for years.
7. Keep an eye on the soil temperature. Don't rush to sow even the hardiest vegetables - e.g. cabbage, spinach and beet - outside until the soil temperature is at least 7C/46F - the minimum for germination.
8. Before the growing season gets underway, test the pH of the soil. If it is too acid, you can adjust it with lime. If it's too alkaline, pile on more compost and manure. Potatoes and legumes (peas and beans) do best in slightly acid soil. Roots (the carrot family) and brassicas (leafy veg.) prosper in alkaline soil.
9. Put up nesting boxes and bird food out of the way of cats and squirrels.
10. Add some flower seed in your seed order. Nasturtiums, marigolds (Tagetes spp.), the poached egg plant (Limnanthes dounglassii) and sunflowers are particularly good at drawing in predatory insects to deal with pests.
11. Add a source of water, however small, to draw in useful wildlife.
12. Start to collect 5L water bottles. They make great cloches with the bottoms sawn off and the tops open.
All photographs by Howard Sooley
Caroline Foley is the author of Practical Allotment Gardening, 2002, £12.99; The Allotment Handbook, 2004. £12.99; The A - Z of Allotment Vegetables, 2006, £12.99 and to be published this May: How to Plant Your Allotment, 2007, £9.99. All published by New Holland.
