If thoughts of balmy summer evenings, entertaining and showing off beautiful blooms are on your mind, now is the time to crack on to make your garden summer-ready.
If the weather’s fine, you could be sprucing up your garden furniture, sowing seeds, filling bare patches in the lawn or plugging gaps in your borders to make your garden the best it can be during the warmer months.
So, where do you start?
Clean up garden furniture
Don’t put it off any longer because you’ll want to be sitting outside soon enough. If you have hardwood furniture, such as teak, it shouldn’t need too much maintenance. Just remove algae and lichens with warm, soapy water and a soft brush. If you want to revitalise its original colour, you could apply teak protector when the weather is dry.
Softwood such as pine is less durable, so you’ll need to wash it down with warm, soapy water, gently rinse off and once dry treat it with a wood stain or preservative each year.
Metal garden furniture will need cleaning with warm soapy water and a soft brush or cloth and rinsing well. Check for rust, which you can sand and treat with rust-preventing paint.
Dirt can build up in the crevices of rattan furniture, so you may need to vacuum it before washing it gently with warm, soapy water and a soft brush or an old toothbrush for crevices, before rinsing it off with a hose and letting it air-dry.
Continue sowing seeds
It’s not too late to sow seeds of annuals and vegetables such as French beans, courgettes, aubergines and tomatoes, which won’t withstand frost so are best started off indoors until the end of May or beginning of June, when all danger of frost has passed and they can be planted out, for harvest this year.
For summer colour, sow easy annuals in pots indoors. Consider snapdragons, petunias, cosmos and zinnias, along with herbs such as parsley, basil and coriander.
If you want to impress guests with your home-grown produce this summer, sow radish, lettuce, rocket, beetroot, peas, spinach and spring onions outdoors now and in succession through the coming months for a constant supply.
Plant summer bulbs
Your spring bulbs may still be in bloom, but if you want some brilliant summer bulbs such as lilies, dahlias and cannas, plant them now. If you want summer bulbs on your patio, look for compact varieties such as patio dahlias and compact lily bulbs, which won’t grow too tall.
Fill gaps in borders
Hopefully you should have mulched and fed your borders with a sprinkling of general fertiliser, blood, fish and bone or chicken pellets, to boost the soil, but take a good look at your flowerbeds for gaps and fill them with summer-flowering perennials, making sure they are watered-in well and if the weather is dry, continue to water them regularly until the roots become established.
If you are using annuals on the patio or in borders, leave planting them out until all danger of frost has passed.
Put in plant supports
If you have tall plants which are going to need propping up in summer, put in the plant stakes and supports now while the soil is still soft before perennials produce too much leafy growth to make staking more difficult.
Create a wigwam for sweet peas, which can be planted out now.
Create container displays
It’s still a little early to plant your annual bedding for container displays, but if you want to make a head start on hanging baskets, make sure you keep them sheltered under cover – bringing them into the greenhouse or under a porch in the evening until all danger of frost has passed – and putting them outside again during the day when the weather is warmer, to help them harden off.
If you don’t have time to grow from seed, there are plenty of trays of annuals in garden centres now, but hang fire on planting them outside until the end of May, especially in cooler areas, otherwise you may lose some to a late frost.
Of course, you could grow perennials in containers, which should be ok to plant now and will hopefully come back year after year.
Boost your lawn
Spring is the time to feed your lawn so it will be at its best in summer. You can buy spring and summer lawn feeds which contain more nitrogen for leafier growth, but if you live in a very cold area you may want to wait until early May to do this.
If you’ve already given your lawn the first cut of the season and have noticed a thick layer of moss or weeds, remove the moss with a scarifier – if you’re careful and you haven’t treated it with moss killer, you may be able to line your hanging baskets with it.
Fix bare patches
If you have bare patches on your lawn, overseed them now before the hot, dry weather kicks in. Loosen the surface of compacted soil with a rake, then mix a handful of grass seed with some seed compost and sprinkle it thinly over the area, water it in well and make a boundary around it with string and pea sticks to stop people walking on it.
You can mow around the reseeded area but leave the newly seeded part until the grass has grown to about 4cm, at which point you could carefully give it a little haircut with shears, letting it establish for a bit longer before mowing as usual.
Clean the patio
Remove weeds from between paving with a knife, or you can buy wire-bristled brushes specifically designed to remove weeds, debris and moss from the grooves and crevices of block paving.
If you are averse to jet-washing your patio, for fear that you’ll remove the pointing as you go, there are products which claim to be able to clean paving and remove black spot and other debris – but check that they are compatible with the type of stone you have and do a little tester on a small area of paving before you start.
Also, make sure that any solution you use is animal-friendly.
National Gardening Week runs from Apr 27 to May 3.