The Cut Flower Podcast

April Jobs for your Cutting Patch

• Roz Chandler • Season 1 • Episode 151

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0:00 | 13:05

Text Agony Aunt Roz with your Cutflower Questions.

Roz Chandler shares expert tips for successful flower gardening in April, covering soil preparation, sowing, planting, staking, and maintenance to ensure a thriving cutting patch.

Takeaways

  • Spend extra time on soil now to save weeks later.
  • Monitor soil temperature and moisture for successful sowing.
  • Sow seeds in small, staggered batches for continuous blooms.
  • Hardening off plants prevents cold damage.
  • Support sweet peas early to prevent flopping.
  • Plan succession sowing based on frost dates.
  • Maintain consistent watering and avoid overwatering.
  • Regularly check for pests and keep space tidy.


Rosalind Chandler (00:00)
Hello and welcome back to the Cut Flower Podcast. If you're listening in real time, here we are, in April and I always think this is a month where it all becomes come very real. Winter is planning, March is hopeful and we may have done some undercover sowing.

April is all about action. think personally that March and April are the busiest months in the year and this is where your cutting patch starts asking something of you. It's no longer just trays on windowsills and plans in notebooks or spreadsheets. Lots of people on lots of my courses have been doing spreadsheets. It's soil, it's space, it's timing and it's decision time. On the farm right now everything is waking up. Tulips are starting to show their colour. I've been out walking today and thinking right okay tulips are on their way, ranunculus are pushing on and the

weeds of course if things are growing, started to grow then you'll get the weeds as well and they're doing okay too. So today I wanted to go real deeper than I would normally and talk you through April jobs in the cutting patch Not just a list but what actually matters when people go wrong and what would generally make you more successful this season. We're going to cover direct sowing, moving plants out safely, sweet peas and how you establish them, staking, yes we're doing it now not later.

successional planting, soil and feeding, watering and get it right and plus a few things that people often forget. So if you're out in the garden in the greenhouse or just a moment with a cup of tea, come along with me.

So let's talk firstly about getting your soil right. It's really the foundation. This is where everything starts. And I think sometimes we rush this bit because we're desperate to get the plants in. But honestly, 10 extra minutes spent on soil now will save you weeks later on. What you were aiming for in the soil is light enough for the roots to move through it, rich enough to feed your plants, and

soil that holds moisture without becoming waterlogged. If your soil is heavy clay, don't panic, don't panic, we have clay streams too, but it does mean you need to work with it. You need to add compost, you need to break it down and you don't work with it when it's too wet. And if you're doing no dig or cardboard beds and lots of you are, April is still fine. Yes, ideally it's done in autumn, but we don't always live in an ideal world, do we? You may just need to water more initially to break down the cardboard because those top layers

can dry out quickly and one thing I always say is don't over complicate it. Plants want to grow that's what they're there for. Your job is to give them the best start you can and nothing needs to be perfect it never is. So let's talk about direct sowing and getting it done well.

So I want to go deeper here because this is where lot of frustration comes from. You sow and nothing happens or it's patchy or it's weak and it's usually down to three things. First, the temperature. April is good but soil temperature still matters. If it's cold and it's wet, seeds will just sit there.

It's fairly cold in the UK right now at the moment. We've had lovely warm spring temperatures and now the temperatures have dropped. So we really need to watch this temperature and it's the soil temperature which takes much longer to heat up than the air that we're interested in. Second moisture consistency. Now this is a big one. Seeds need consistent moisture to germinate. They don't want to be soaked.

They don't want to be dry. They just want to be in the middle. And what often happens is we sew, we water, and then we forget, or we overwater. So the main reason why direct sew doesn't work is because we've overwatered or we've underwatered. So we need to keep track of both of those things.

And the third real thing to watch is sowing depth. Most seeds are sown too deeply. If they're tiny, they need light, and if they're larger, we just need to cover them a little bit. And here's a tip I use on the farm. Sow and then gently press the soil down with your hand. That gives a good seed to soil contact, and that's what they need.

What to sew now? You've got your Hardy annuals of Nigella, Cornflowers, Ami, Calendula, Larkspur, but also thinking about second sewing of things you might have already done because succession is everything in a cutting patch.

If you sow everything at once you'll have a glut. If you remember, I don't know, with my grandad he grew lettuces and they always came at the same time. And that's the same with successional planting. You need to plant these three weeks apart. So don't plant everything at once, plant them three weeks apart to get successional sowing.

Planting out, this is where people get very nervous. Is it too early? Should I wait? And I understand nobody wants to lose plants they've nurtured over the winter or that they've grown under cover. But April is when many hardy annuals can go out. The key thing is hardening off properly. And we call this here the oaky-cokey. So we don't take our plants from a cozy little polytunnel and stick them into the wind and the cold nights. What we do is we move them outside for a few days and then at night time we move them back in again, hence the oaky-cokey.

and we let them adjust to the temperatures and then we plant them out when we're really confident that the soil has warmed up.

We firm them in, we water them in and we give them a chance to establish. So a tougher start actually creates stronger plants, but you need to get this timing right. Do your okey-cokey. Sweet peas. Yes. Lots of questions on lots of groups. Can you put the sweet peas out now? And the answer is yes. The thing is that with sweet peas, and I did a podcast a while ago that some of you may have listened to with Roger Parsons. If you haven't perhaps go back and search on that one. He's an expert on

sweet peas and I learned that sweet peas are not very gentle at all even though they look at and they will take temperatures up to minus five but what they don't want is a cold vicious wind so you may need to protect them from that. If yours are ready and most will be then get them out. Don't let them sit in pots getting all tall and stressed and all leggy. Plant them deep, give them rich soil and get support in place first.

It's the support really, you really need to think about because otherwise they start to romp off and then they'll start flopping. So you can use netting and canes or hazel, whatever works for you, but do it upfront. Here on the farm, we're using Harris fencing, sort of like building material and the clings to the actual Harris fencing and we tie them in as they start to grow up. We're generally growing Spencer variety of sweet peas, which have long stems. And when they start and we grow them undercover and out

side and when they start to flower keep picking. The more you pick the more they'll produce they love it they love it. Staking. Now a lot of people leave staking till later on when things start to get taller. It's just I know staking is a pain and it's not glamorous but it's one of the biggest differences between a cutting patch that works and one that becomes chaos. So if you don't stake for instance your anti rhinos they will head for the ground. If you don't stake your gypsophilia it will become very dwarf and you need to do

early on so that you don't damage the stems, you don't lose quality and if you don't do it you'll end up getting really frustrated. So the thing to do is now. So set up your beds with netting or support now.

Think ahead things like Cosmos, Snapdragon, Zinnias, anything tall and productive, Delphiniums and just get it in place and you will be grateful later on. mean an idle system is one where you've got some netting and you can move it up as the plant grows with stakes on either end of it. That's the ideal.

Successional sowing and planning ahead. So April is also about thinking ahead. It's just not what you need now, but what you're gonna do in six, eight and 10 weeks. This is where successional sowing comes in. Do small batches regularly every two to three weeks. And that's how you get a continuous supply rather than peaks and gaps. So things like amy, cornflowers, nigella, scabious, this really matters even more if you're selling. But actually, even if you're growing for pleasure, you don't want a gap and you want consistency.

So plan that, look in your area of your first average frost date. So ours is the 16th of November here in sort of Milton Keynes right in middle of the country. And what we do for succession always we work back. know that a seed...

of an annual to actually getting it into a flower is about 12 weeks. So we work back from 16th to November by 12 weeks and we know that is the last time we can be planting. And we also know that the daylight hours are going to get shorter and it's going to get much harder. So maybe plan for 14 weeks, but that's what you're really looking at. It's a session of planting and you know, with lots of them like cornflowers and so on, you can get three lots in. Let's talk about watering. It's probably the hardest thing to get right.

You know, a simple version is seeds need consistent moisture. Seedlings don't want to be dried out. And established plants, they're deeper, they don't need as much water. Watch your environment. Wind dries everything out quickly and greenhouses warm everything up quickly.

It's about being observant and it's not just the top of the soil. You know, if you lift the pot up after you've watered it, feel how heavy that is. Then if you lift it up when it's really dry, feel how heavy that is. And so you'll know what you're aiming for. So with a few things that people have to forget in April, weeding. I say this all the time about weeding, but mainly perennial weeding, but you just got to get them out. Check for your pests. We've already started to see aphids in our tunnel.

And we know that slugs love young plants too, so we're trying to get on top of that. Labelling, you will forget what you've planted. God, so many times have I done some potting on or some labelling or so on and I don't do the labelling and I think I know what that is. It will look like a cosmos. And then to be honest, I don't. So all about labelling.

and tidying your space. It's almost like a spring clean, isn't it? I love this time of year. We go round, we tidy the area and a big one, spacing. Obviously don't cram plants in, but I also don't plant according to the seed packet too, because I'm growing commercially and I want them to close together. So it's a balance. I know it's tempting to cram them in, but I also know it's tempting to give them the space on the packet. Just give them enough airflow. That's everything. Healthy plants need a bit of space.

So yes, April is a busy month, but it's also a brilliant one. This is where your cutting patch really starts to come to life. And please, please, please, it doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be consistent, little and often. Just keep showing up, you know, 10, 15 minutes a day, half an hour, and remember why you're doing it. Because in a few months time, you'll be standing there with buckets of flowers, and will all absolutely, 100 % feel worthwhile.

So look at all of that, think about your watering, think about your staking, start to get things out, do your direct sowing, have a look at your soil, think about compost and mulching and that sort of thing and be really ready to see those flowers that are going to appear very soon.