Tasks for April

Earth up container-grown potatoes to keep them growing on strongly for your earliest-ever crops. Potatoes form tubers along their roots underground, so the more root the plant grows, the bigger your harvest. Adding more compost as they grow also keeps tubers buried deep underground: if they form too close to the surface and light reaches them they'll turn green and [...]

Split up your herbs to keep them young, healthy and productive for many years to come. All clump-forming herbs including marjoram, mint and lemon balm tend to sprawl and die out in the middle as they get older, leaving you with an unsightly mess and making the plants less productive, too. To keep your plants healthy and promote lots of [...]

Now is the time to prune buddleja - and you can be really brutal. Cut it right back and you'll encourage loads of fresh growth to explode from the base this spring, and since buddlejas flower on this year's new branches that means lots of flowers. Best known as the 'butterfly bush' the buddleja is a must-have for wildlife gardens, [...]

The plant of the month for April is the rhododendron, coming into full and spectacular flower from this month onwards. It's a great time of year to go garden visiting and enjoy some of the country's most famous displays: among the best are at Bodnant, in Conwy, Wales, Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire; Exbury Gardens in Hampshire and Caerhays Castle in [...]

It's spring! This is the month when all gardeners have a bounce to their stride. It's hard to go indoors when the sun is shining, the birds are singing and the garden is alive with the year's first flowers. Enjoy! General tasks: Watch out for frosts and keep horticultural fleece handy to throw over any plants vulnerable to damage Trim [...]

Give your herbs a haircut to keep them producing lots of fragrant fresh pickings for the kitchen and to keep them nice and neat. You'll find many varieties of evergreen herbs like bay, lavender and rosemary on sale now in our garden centre here in %locations% and they make fantastic value for the herb garden, lasting year after year. One [...]

Get supports in place for climbing beans and peas before they get too big, and for taller perennials like delphiniums and shasta daisies while they're still clumps of greenery. You'll find lots of different plant options in our garden centre. Wigwams of hazel or willow are great for peas, including sweetpeas, but for big, hefty runner bean plants you'll need [...]

Repair damaged lawns now while they're just bursting into growth and they'll recover so quickly you'll never even know there was a problem. To repair crumbled lawn edges, cut a square of turf to include the damaged part and turn it around by 180 degrees so that the hole is in the body of the lawn. Then top it up [...]