Garden Works: A gardeners to-do list for the month of March

March is always the time to spring into action in the garden.

It may still look fairly bleak outside, but plants will be stirring into life, which means cutting back old stems on herbaceous plants to make way for new growth, getting back to the weeding and maybe even mowing the lawn if the weather is mild.

There tends to be a lot of bare soil this month, before flower beds fill out and as winter vegetable crops are finished off, which provides a great opportunity to apply a thick mulch of compost. This helps suppress weed growth, holds in moisture and improves the structure of any type of soil. The other joy of mulching is that the worms do the hard work of incorporating the compost for you. I only usually dig compost into the soil before I plant up a new bed. Give plants in pots a boost too by repotting them into larger containers or replacing a few centimetres of old compost from the surface each year.

Unless the weather is really cold, March is perfect for getting all kinds of plants into the ground. Both evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs can be planted and moved now. There is not much to see of herbaceous perennials at the moment, which makes them easy to lift with a fork and divide into sections containing healthy roots and shoots for replanting. I have a big new bed to fill along the back of my house, but adding good-sized clumps split from favourite plants elsewhere in the garden will help reduce the number of plants I need to buy and fill the bed faster. Whatever you are planting, do some research and plan for year-round interest, because it’s amazingly easy to create a spectacular display in the month that you shopped for plants, with nothing to show for the rest of the season.

Plant early potatoes in the vegetable garden this month, and sow salads, along with peas, parsnips, beetroot, carrots, spring onions and broad beans outdoors as the soil warms up. Horticultural fleece is really useful to protect these early crops from frost during cold spells. Also sow tomatoes, chillies, peppers and aubergines on a warm windowsill indoors early in the month, to transfer into the greenhouse later.

An unexpected visit from my neighbour’s pet rabbits has made me resolve to pre-empt at least the more predictable pest problems as green shoots emerge. Set beer traps to attract slugs and snails, cover crops with netting where pigeons are a problem, fortify seed beds against cats and your chances of a successful spring will definitely be improved.