4. .. April

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:

• beetroot
• brassica
• broad beans
• carrot
• coriander
• khol rabi
• leeks
• lettuce
• parsley
• parsnip
• peas
• radish
• spinach
• spring onions
• swiss chard
• summer cauliflower
• turnip

• 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

• Divide and replant herbaceous perennials.

 

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.