The 3 Most Important Gardening Jobs in April
April is full of essential gardening jobs for decorative gardens as well as kitchen gardens. Here, you can see the three most important tasks at a glance.
4
Minutes
In April, there’s always plenty to do in the garden. Sowing, planting up and maintenance: with such a long list of gardening jobs, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. To make sure you don’t forget any essential jobs in your decorative or kitchen garden, we’ve come up with a summary of the three most important things for you.
As soon as the daffodils are in full flower, the titlelawn has begun to grow again. At the beginning of the season, you should first feed it with a little lawn fertilizer and mow it back to a moderate height (around 1.57 inches). Two to three weeks after fertilization, it is advisable to mow the grass short (around 0.79 inches) and scarify the lawn. What’s the benefit of this? The scarifier’s blades remove moss and thatch, restoring a sufficient supply of oxygen to the grass roots. Immediately after scarifying, additional grass seed should be sown into any bald spots in the green carpet. This makes sure that your lawn will stay full of life and great to look at in the new season.
When the soil warms up a bit in April, you can really start sowing seeds in the vegetable garden. Among the vegetables that you can sow in the vegetable patch this month are cauliflower, peas, carrots, radishes, spinach and lettuce. The best way to pull the rows is to first stretch strings and pull the hoe along them. When you place the seeds in the grooves, be sure to follow the recommended sowing depth and the specified row spacing for each vegetable variety. For an overview, see our April sowing and planting calendar. You can also put pre-pulled seedlings of kohlrabi, chard or leeks outdoors now.
April is also the ideal month for planting many decorative plants out into the garden. Planting out evergreen shrubs such as rhododendron, decorative grasses like Chinese silver grass and groundcover such as crane’s-bill are among the jobs on spring’s “to do list”. To ensure they successfully grow on, good soil preparation is key. Thoroughly loosen the soil, remove any weeds and work some compost in if required. Loamy soil can be loosened with coarse sand, making it more permeable.
Rhododendrons, for example, love it when soil has been improved with leaf compost and bark humus before planting. The root ball should also protrude about an inch out of the soil. Regardless of whether you’re planting bushes, grasses or perennials, make sure to consider the individual needs of plants before choosing a location. Keep enough distance between neighbors and water your new pride and joy well after planting out.
