Gayton-based gardener Jamie Marsh reveals what you can start sowing in March

Published: 06:00, 09 March 2024

In his weekly Jamie’s Little Allotment column, gardener Jamie Marsh talks about what you can start sowing now…

Things are starting to stir in the garden now. The evenings are pulling out, the sun is up before the alarm goes off and the birds are singing their dawn chorus louder every morning. The jobs in the garden, allotment and greenhouse are beginning to pop up.

March is not only, in my opinion, one of the busiest months in the gardening calendar but also one of the most exciting.

We’ve all been staring out of the window at the gale-force winds and torrential rain, longing for this day to arrive, and now it’s here, let’s get to it.

You might remember that back in the autumn I mulched all of the raised beds in the allotment with compost mulch for a couple of reasons, the compost adds depleted nutrients and also keeps the weeds at bay.

So that’s one job that needs to be done this week, luckily because I did mulch, the weeds that are there aren’t very deep at all, and pull out, roots and all extremely easily.

So once the weeds are all banished to the compost heap, it’s time for the beds to be top-dressed.

Top dressing is just literally covering your beds with an inch or two of your chosen growing medium, homemade compost or topsoil, ready to sow and plant into.

Here in Norfolk our last chance of a frost is May, so we have to be really careful about what we plant.

There are lots of things we can start to think about getting into the ground.

The ground is still really quite cold, so a good trick to warm the soil up is to cover the soil where you want to put your early sowings with some clear polythene sheets.

This will act like a greenhouse and trap the heat from the sun underneath and in turn warm the soil ready to help the new seeds and small plants get underway.

Some of the seeds I want to sow under my polythene covers grown are broad beans. Just make a hole in the compost with a dibber or even your finger roughly 5cm deep and around 20cm apart but staggered in a zig-zag pattern, so the adult plant will help to support each other.

Then pop a bean in and cover it over. Also, I really like to get some leeks going early, leeks are great because they are a vegetable that can be eaten at any part of its growing life, from tiny pencil-thin baby leeks to big full-grown beauties.

Sowing lots of leeks at different times throughout the season will give you a great choice.

Just pull a very shallow drill in your soil, only About 1-2 cm deep, and sow quite sparingly, then cover over.

Chard is another one of those veggies you can eat when very small and also when it’s fully grown.

As with the leeks, make a drill 2cm deep and place a seed in at about 30cm intervals, the chard seed is bigger than the leeks, so it is easier to be more precise.

One more crop which really benefits from having warm soil to start in is potatoes.

I’m going to grow mine in a couple of different ways this year, the main bulk is going to be grown in hessian sacks but I’ll tell you about that in a couple of weeks.

You may remember Several weeks ago after I bought all my seed potatoes. I placed them on a sunny windowsill in egg boxes to start the growing process.

This is called chitting It’s just where the eyes start to sprout, the same as if you lose one at the back of the vegetable cupboard.

Decide where your potatoes are going to grow, remembering they need quite a bit of space and lots of sunlight.