We all want a vibrant, colourful garden but Gardeners’ World star Monty Don recommends we hold our horses to make doubly sure the soil is actually ready before getting stuck into the task
Spring is finally here – and millions of UK gardeners rejoice as they prepare to get some serious planting done.
But while we all want a vibrant, colourful garden, Gardeners’ World star Monty Don recommends we hold our horses to make doubly sure the soil is actually ready before getting stuck into the task. The British horticulturist and broadcaster told readers of his March blog that before you get your hands on any seeds, you’ve got to make sure your soil is warm enough for them to sprout.
He says if you attempt to plant when the soil is still too cold to allow for germination, you may not achieve the beautiful flowers or fruit and veg you had envisaged. So how do you go about checking if your soil is ready to take any planting? It’s actually very easy – you can tell just by touching it.
If you grab a handful of earth and it feels clammy and cold, then your plants’ roots simply won’t grow. However, if the soil feels pleasantly warm then it’s ideal. But you also need to check that a) the earth holds together when you squeeze it and b) it is still soft enough to crumble. If the answer to both of these is ‘yes’ then your soil is ready.
In his blog, the 68-year-old spoke of how ‘miserably wet’ this February had been for us Brits, and laid the blame squarely on climate change. He also bemoaned the inevitability of climate change, saying it is ‘clearly something that we are going to have to live with’.
‘In practise this opens a whole new set of horticultural situations to deal with,’ he added.
‘The newest is that we are now going to have to encourage plants in our gardens that can cope with both extreme wet and extreme drought. Until now we always considered either one of those two positions but never both,’ said Monty.
Monty, who has been sharing his green-fingered tips on TV since 1989, also discussed that we have to work out how we’re going to deal with excess rain, and consider how best to store this water in a practical way that can help us in the event of a dry summer.
Monty says that occasionally using a water butt – essentially a big outside storage unit that catches rainwater – was not sufficient.
