How to avoid a fool’s errand
and slice their fingers open. My advice if it happens to you regularly is use snips in future.
Statistically speaking the top garden accident is poking yourself in the eye with a garden cane. It’s easily done if you bend over to do a spot of deadheading or weeding too close to a plant that’s supported by a stick.
Wearing glasses in the garden helps, otherwise give up bamboo and split canes in favour of green-coated wire frames or metal grids that you stand over the top of potentially floppy plants. Or if you must use canes impale a cork on the top or buy cane toppers to minimise the risk.
Foolish accidents are bad enough but foolish mistakes come a close second. One place people regularly go wrong is in trying to clear an overgrown garden by hiring a rotavator to turn all the undergrowth tidily in.
An afternoon’s work and there you are, job done… or so they think. But when the ground is full of persistent bindweed, ground elder, horsetail, creeping thistle and couch grass, all you are actually doing is propagating the stuff by chopping up the creeping underground parts into millions of tiny root cuttings and every bit grows, I promise.
Those who buy their bedding plants too early in the season are living in a fool’s paradise too. It’s easy to blame garden centres and nurseries for putting them on sale from Easter onwards but a savvy gardener knows they need keeping in a greenhouse or cold frame till after the last frost. For anyone without the facilities it’s safer not to buy them until planting time in mid May.
Those few weeks’ wait can mean the difference between a dazzling summer display or beds full of blackened mush that leave you out of pocket with a mucky clear-up job to do.
A lot of gardening problems are simply due to people not reading the small print when buying new plants.
It’s amazing how much vital information is condensed on to the backs of the labels so there’s really no excuse for planting them in the wrong soil or situation, or neglecting to notice that the little green job you’ve just shoehorned into a gap at the front of a border will, in five years, reach 8ft tall.
Unfortunately a lot of perfectly good plants have to be rooted out for that reason alone. It’s a dreadful waste. So don’t be a fool: on April 1 or at any other time a few basic precautions can help you to have a lovelier garden.
…AND NOT END UP COMING A CROPPER
WHEN the spring gardening urge strikes it’s easy to be swept away in a flood of enthusiasm and make rookie mistakes that end up setting your gardening season back weeks, so here are my top start-of-season pitfalls to avoid.
Don’t sow large seeds such as peas and broad beans straight into cold wet ground as they’ll just rot. Wait till the conditions are better or start them in pots under cover. If pigeons are a problem, cover newly sown seeds or young plants with cloches or fleece or they’ll vanish overnight.
Don’t cut corners when making a new lawn. Before you lay turf or sow grass seed prepare the ground really well. Rake it over several times and firm it evenly all over then rake again – a pain but easier done now than trying to level a bumpy lawn later.
Don’t be in too much of a hurry to feed lawns, hedges or borders. The sudden rush of nutrients makes plants grow vigorously just in time for the soft new growth of normally hardy plants to be clobbered by a late frost, so leave it until the middle of April at least. Don’t leave winter and early spring jobs any longer or you’ll soon be snowed under. Finish any winter digging as soon as the soil is in a workable condition, prune hybrid tea and floribunda roses if you’ve not done so already and finish winter pruning of fruit and planting of hedging fruit trees or bushes. Also catch up with weeding and mulching.
Don’t expect to make an easy flower bed by scattering hardy annual seeds over bare ground and raking them in or you’ll fight a losing battle with weeds.
Sow them in pots and plant them out later or sow in rows to transplant, except for poppies. Sow these in clumps where you want them to flower and weed around them. SNAIL TRAIL: Pest control alert
Don’t start the gardening season without a major assault on slugs and snails. Despite a few hard frosts, years of mild winters mean there are more of the little blighters around than ever and the first thing they do when they emerge from their winter resting places is look for something to eat.
That will be your young flower seedlings, veg plants or newly emerged perennials, so clear out potential hiding places now, tidy up rubbish and set to work with organic remedies.