Gardening in March

Dearest Gentle Gardener,

This autumn it seems, Mother Nature is hosting the most sumptuous feast of the season. The basil has donned it’s signature flower spike above it’s sweeping green and frilly gown, tomatoes are trailing their colourful trains of baubles, and the sweetcorn is parading it’s expensive silks. Swelling orchestral music accompanies this author on every garden stroll, while the harvest basket gets piled high with good things for dinner. No member of the ton would want to miss this extravaganza.

March can be a very busy month for ardent home vegetable growers. With summer crops just past their peak and producing copiously, there’s plenty of harvesting to do. Some crops must be harvested regularly to keep them continuously producing, or to stop them from going to seed. Others are completing a long maturation process and producing all of their bounty at once. Either way, it’s time to figure out how to deal with the spectacular pile of the fruits of our labours. Can your household keep up with eating everything fresh? There’s only so much zucchini a person can take in one season, amiright? 

And so our aspirational homesteading thoughts turn to preserving. I will speak only to the quickest and easiest of preservation techniques today, as they are the most accessible. Pumpkins, potatoes and onions are easy enough to store – put them somewhere cool, dark and airy, and they’ll be good all winter long. Root vegetables such as carrots, parsnips and beetroot can (if you have the garden space) be safely left in the ground until the mid-winter soup pot calls them home. Even potatoes can be left in the ground, so long as they’re not diseased and are protected from freezing. They will still be edible if they do get a bit frosty, but the texture can become ‘glassy’ on the inside once they have thawed.

Then, of course, there’s the drying, canning and freezing options. These require a more involved process, done by people blessed with the requisite time, skills and equipment. If, like me, you grow more fresh food than you can possibly process alone, maybe March is the month to reach out to our wider community and team up with folks who might like to swap some of your produce for their preserving skills. Community resilience and social cohesion can be built one jar of pickles at a time!

Let’s wrap it up with some autumn planting inspiration. Everything that you plant in March will benefit from a lovely warm start to life, followed by a nice few months of relatively stable weather (usually) to get established before the winter slows everything right down. I’m planting beetroot, broccoli, coriander, salad greens, radish and turnip this month, as well as cover crops to feed the soil and prevent erosion during winter. Actually, I’m planting just as often as possible, because March has such lovely gardening weather!

May the rain fall softly on your fields, friends.

Leah Case runs The Great Green, a nursery and market garden in Westbury