All you fellow allotment-y, garden-y sorts will know that March is a pretty exciting, yet also mildly terrifying month. After a winter of pottering about, doing odd repair and preparation jobs and gazing sorrowfully over your barren plot dreaming of summer colour, all of a sudden March comes in and… BOOM! It’s action time. Everything needs to be done – there’s seeds to sow (if you need some and don’t have time to scour seed catalogues, buy a seasonal seed pack from the London Herb Garden to get you started), nettles to weed, beds to prepare, potatoes to chit, bare root trees to plant etc. etc.
Typically, at LHIT HQ, precisely when we need all our free time for allotmenteering, we – in a bout of unprecedented wisdom – have booked up all our weekends until mid-April with various trips, conferences and engagement shoots; are hugely busy preparing and stocking our new shop; and are in the heady stages of wedding preparations. Oops.
Nevertheless, I *think* we’re currently on track – this weekend I planted up an asparagus bed with 1yr crowns (which means two years ’til our first crops) and adopted a rhubarb plant from one of my National Trust volunteering buddies. The Winston seed potatoes are merrily chitting away on the windowsill next to my sweet pea and morning glory seedlings, and tiny green shoots are starting to emerge from my first ever sowing of annual cut flower seeds. Hey there, little fellas!
A lot of intelligent flower growing folks recommend waiting until April to sow most annual flower seeds, as starting them too early can result in weaker, more leggy plants that won’t perform as well. However, as it is my first time growing, and because I desperately need some successful plants to use at the wedding, I decided to do a modest sowing now – more as an educational exercise than anything else – and then I’ll repeat sow in April. Hedging my bets, I believe the phrase goes… I’m currently trying Cosmos (a half-hardy annual), Cornflower, Nigella, Ammi Majus and Bupleurum (get seeds here) using Jiffy 7′s in a windowsill propagator.
In addition to planting activities, we’ve also been clearing huge amounts of brambles from areas of the farm that will play key roles in the wedding. We have a small woodland area that we plan to lead our guests through on their way to the ceremony location and the ground was littered with deadwood, newly-emerging nettles and ivy. On Sunday afternoon, as I was cleaning up some beautiful wooden decorator’s ladders for the shop, the farm manager Claire showed up and ushered me round to the wood with a huge beaming smile on her face. Here’s what she had done:
She had come in to work, on a Sunday, to clear the woodland floor and mark out a winding pathway for our guests to use (with help from resident hens, of course!). How sweet?! I’m very fortunate to have her on ‘team wedding’, she is a complete dream. I can’t wait to see how everything transforms once the trees regain their leaves and the bluebells emerge, it’s going to be perfect 
Green-fingered love,
