Top Gardening Tips from the Barnsdale Team

Top Gardening Tips from the Barnsdale Team: Spring is stretching, the soil is waking up, and it’s time to get your hands delightfully dirty! At Barnsdale Gardens, Britain’s largest collection of individually designed gardens in the beautiful East Midlands, the team are thrilled to share their top gardening tips with you this month.

March is one of the most exciting moments in the gardening calendar, the grand warm-up act before the main growing season bursts onto the stage. A little effort now will set your garden up for a spectacular show in the months ahead. So grab your gloves, dust off the secateurs, and let’s get growing!

Feed Asparagus

This isn’t a heavy-feeding plant, so simply apply a fairly thin layer of compost over the asparagus crowns each year before they begin to shoot. Combined with allowing the feathery foliage to photosynthesise from midsummer onwards, this will provide plenty of nourishment for a strong crop of tender, juicy spears.

Dig up Rhus suckers

As beautiful as these shrubs are, they require ample space, as they enthusiastically produce suckers. When maintaining your borders, you’ll need to dig these out regularly; otherwise, they can quickly take over. Remove them as close to the parent plant as possible.

Start Pruning Prunus

If you need to remove any shoots from fruiting trees, such as cherries, plums, peaches, nectarines, damsons, or apricots, now is the ideal time, as they are actively growing. At Barnsdale, we usually prune flowering cherries after they finish blooming, but if a tree is encroaching on a pathway, it’s fine to cut it back once it has started shooting. Pruning these trees during active growth also helps reduce the risk of silver-leaf disease.

Heel in Snowdrops

As the flowers start to fade and turn brown, it’s the ideal time to lift, divide, and replant them. Because drying bulbs can be detrimental, it’s much safer to buy snowdrops ‘in the green’, which almost guarantees that they will return and bloom next year.

If you got a little carried away and lifted or bought your snowdrops before the planting area is ready, don’t worry, they can be ‘heeled in’ temporarily. Simply dig a hole or trench, depending on how many bulbs you have, place the snowdrops in a clump at the same depth they were originally planted, and backfill with soil. Firm them gently with your boot, and they’ll remain healthy for several weeks until you’re ready to plant them properly.

There’s plenty to see and do all year round at Barnsdale Gardens!

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