4. .. April

Garlic patch & broken fork border. 12 April 2020.

22 April marks the UN’s International Mother Earth Day

30 April marks International Jazz Day.

Kitchen Garden

Watch out for late frosts: protect tender plants with fleece.
Tidy borders. Weed ‘defensively’ by pulling up weeds before they flower.
Keep pests off brassica and carrots by covering crops with horticultural fleece.
Look out for early aphid attack. Prompt treatment prevents colonies establishing.
Feed with a general–purpose fertiliser like bone or fish meal.
Apply mulch and put up supports for perennials.
Remove flowers from strawberry plants planted after September last year.
Formative pruning of plum & cherry trees can start once leaf buds open.
Plant out pot-grown broad beans 6-9 inches (15-23 cm) apart, after hardening them off. Space rows 18 inches (45cm) apart.

Sow Directly

April is ideal to sow a wide range seeded crops directly into prepared drills, including:

Plant ‘softneck’ garlic such as ‘Picardy Wight’ up to the end of April. Soft-neck garlic have no flower spikes and often have more cloves to a bulb than ‘hard-neck’ types.
Finish planting onion and shallot sets by mid-April.
Plant chitted potato tubers in April, starting with first earlies through to main crops at the end of the month. Continue planting potatoes; plant second early potatoes early in the month, and main cropping potatoes towards the end of the month.

Throughout April continue direct-sowing seeded vegetables as listed above.
Towards the end of April watch out for the caterpillar-like larvae of gooseberry sawfly, which can defoliate gooseberry and red and white currant bushes.

Sow Indoors / Under Glass

Sow indoors early April: tomatoes, cucumber, celery and celeriac
Sow indoors late April: zucchini, marrow, squashes and pumpkins & runner and French beans.
Pot tomato seedlings into individual pots when the first true leaves appear.
Sow leeks and brassica.
Sow chard, coriander, parsley in a cold greenhouse to plant out later.
Sow tender vegetables indoors, such as

Harvest

In late March/ early April 2020 we harvested: swiss chard, spinach, parsley (flat & curly), garlic chives, and rhubarb.

Flower / Ornamental Garden

Remove faded daffodil and tulip flowers, leaving leaves to die back naturally.
Trim lavender: take out old flower stems and shorten stems by 1 inch (2.5 cm) if not done in the autumn.
To ensure good flowering, feed and fertilise roses. Inspect roses for black spot; remove affected leaves; use fungicide (RHS, The Garden, April 2013, p.29)
Spray new foliage of roses against rose mildew using products with a physical action, such as ‘SB Plant Invigorator’ (RHS, The Garden, April 2015, p.29)
Prune forsythia after flowering has finished.
Remove frost-damaged growth from shrubs.
Plant wildflower plugs like cowslip and primrose into unfertilised ground for naturalising.

Sow Outdoors

Direct-sow annuals such as sunflowers, California poppies, poached egg plants and pot marigolds.
Plant summer-flowering bulbs such as lilies, cannas, dahlias, gladiola, nerines etc
Sweet peas can be direct-sown in April.

Division & Cuttings

Wild Things

Look out for new life. Mammals (squirrels, rabbits, foxes, mice etc) as well as frogs, birds and insects are busy breeding and nesting at this time of year.
Warm sunshine brings out butterflies such as brimstone and comma butterflies.
In evenings young fox cubs may be spotted.
Bats emerge from hibernation when night temperatures rise about 5 degrees C.
Migrant birds from Africa to the UK can now be heard in the dawn chorus, including house martin and swift.
Cuckoos and swallows are due back in Britain in late April or early May.