Its that time again – everything is burgeoning madly, the garden centers are full of blossoming plants and you’ve barely got the soil turned over in your own garden.

Relax – there’s plenty of time. Ok, your neighbour may be picking lettuce a couple of days before you but so what. Remember that the soil needs to be warm for seeds to be happy and grow healthily and that we actually had a real belter of a frost last week.

So lets just set down a couple of the basics.

1. Do get rid of the weeds before you start – pull them or fork them out and put them on the compost heap to turn back into plant food

2. Soil or compost needs to be dry enough to crumble easily, damp enough for the seeds  to absorb moisture and germinate, and if you can rake it so that its nice and fine then there will be good contact between seed and soil and your baby seedlings will be up all the quicker.

3. How deep to sow? seeds like to be covered by twice their own depth of soil so a tiny seed just needs a fine sprinkle while broad beans can go down a couple of inches.

4. If you haven’t done any gardening before always sow in straight lines -  then you’ll know which are your plants and which are the weeds and you can pull any weeds that have got mixed in as they come up

5. If the weather is dry water in the evening until your seedlings emerge

6. Protect your baby plants from slugs. You can put out beer traps, surround with copper strips, put down a layer of sharp fine gravel on the surface or – and this is what I find best – simply patrol every evening just after dusk with a torch and pick them up. The disposal process is up to you.

Different types of seeds need to be sown at different distances – look at the seed packet for this information. Remember that with vegetable seeds if you do sow them too close together you can always pull out the extra plants and either replant them somewhere else or put them in the salad.  Some vegetables you will deliberately sow close together and then in a couple of months you can move them to their permanent homes – that way you save time and space because you can grow something else first where their permanent position will be.

I like to use organic seeds – I find they are hardier and more reliable germinators. And I know I’m not importing poisonous seed coatings to my garden. I also like to plant heritage varieties. Heritage varieties are those which are open pollinated – which means you can save seed from them yourself for the future, and which have been around for a long time. There’s a reason for that – they’ve been around for a long time because they are usually a) reliable and b) tasty.

Once your seedlings are up then you need to control weeds. I use three methods – the one I like best is mulching with compost or lawn mowings which feeds the soil and thus the new plants. Onions mulched with lawn mowings have to be seen to be believed they grow so big and healthy. Number two on the list is hoeing – this cuts off the weed roots immediately below soil level so they die where they grew and the worms turn them into plant food. If all else fails then hand pulling is the fall back position. Try and do it when the soil isn’t too wet or you will pull up the seedlings along with the weeds. And then, as I said before, compost the weeds.

And you may, if your garden doesn’t have enough diversity, see other pests besides slugs. I just leave greenfly alone – birds and other insects will hear on the grapevine that there is a good food source and come along and munch them up. Score one for organic gardening. Carrot root fly can be a real problem if you  have things like cow parsley in local hedges. Cover with fleece or insect netting  to keep them out unless you want to find grubs  in your carrots. And as far as I know all species of Irish snail are edible – though some may be too small to bother with.

If peas fail to appear the problem is often mice which actually dig them up to eat them. The traditional method was to take out a shallow trench about and inch deep, soak it with water, scatter the peas thinly along it, cover with holly leaves and then put the soil back. It works quite well. If you have a really bad problem get an old length of guttering, fill it with compost and sow in that and then when your pea plants are about four inches high make that shallow trench and slide the contents of the gutter into it

© kathy marsh@ sonairte 2011