Reap benefits of good groundwork
Start spuds now for Christmas
If you followed last month’s advice, your chitted potatoes should be ready to plant, and you can do so as soon as you’re sure the risk of frost has passed. Keep the frost cloth handy if your region experiences unpredictable late frosts.
If you didn’t get around to chitting your spuds last month, you can do so now, or plant seed potatoes without sprouting them first. Chitted potatoes should be up in two or three weeks, and non-chitted spuds will take about a month to appear above ground.
Early spuds like swift and rocket take 70-90 days from when the foliage first appears to harvest so plant them this month to guarantee you’ll have them ready for your festive potato salad and new spuds with mint!
Grow mint in containers
Mint is a must-have herb for spring and it’s dead easy to grow – so easy, in fact, it can become a bit of a pest that can take over vege beds. The way around this problem is to grow mint in pots. That way its creeping roots are kept contained and you can keep the pot close to the house for easier access and harvesting.
The simplest way to grow mint is to buy a young plant from the garden centre, but you can also strike cuttings easily. Place the cut stems into a jar of water and they will sprout roots within a couple of weeks. They can be planted out soon afterwards.
Established mint plants will also be bursting back into leaf now so if you haven’t yet tidied up your clumps and removed the dead or straggly winter growth, do it now so there will be plenty to flavour your new potatoes.
Top tips for wildflower meadows
1. Get rid of weeds first. If new weeds come up while you’re preparing your beds, spray or rake them out.
2. Beds must be free-draining. If not, bring in a combo of pumice and garden mix and lay a 100mm seedbed.
3. Measure the bed and mix seeds with 3mm pumice in a 1:20 ratio. Use a seed spreader to sow 1g seed per square metre. Go around once, go crossways, then lightly rake over.
4. It could be six to eight days before seeds start to germinate; if you get to 20 and don’t see anything, or you just see weeds coming up, you may need to sow again. Sometimes you have to be patient because with 17-21 varieties in one mix not all the seeds come up at once. Some of those seeds come up two to four months later for the next round.
5. A good wildflower bed can go for five months, re-flowering about three times, usually pastels, alyssum and poppies at first. Then you get the slightly stronger colours of coreopsis and cosmos towards summer, and then the really strong colours in late autumn and into winter. Wildflower seed mixes are available from Wildflower World, Kings Seeds and Egmont Seeds.
Grow mint in a pot so the runners don’t invade the rest of the garden.