Start at the right time
Be careful not to be hasty! Indeed, even though spring officially begins on March 20, depending on the region in which you live, the weather can still play bad tricks and temperatures can continue to drop quite low, with night frosts still quite frequent until around mid-May, after the famous Ice Saints.
It is therefore advisable to be careful and wait until the soil is sufficiently warmed and excess water is well drained.
To know when this moment arrives, keep a vigilant eye on temperatures and weather forecasts, of course, but also on nature, because plants are a most reliable indicator : forsythias start to flower when the soil temperature is 6°C, daffodils at 12°C and lilacs at 15°C. But rest assured, before you start cultivating, there are other tasks to accomplish.
Remove mulch and green manure
If, before the bad days arrived, you had shown foresight and followed the recommendation which recommends do not leave the floors bare throughout the winter in order to prevent them from being mishandled and washed out by bad weather, as well as invaded by weeds, because nature abhors a vacuum, it is time to remove the mulch that you then put in place or cut green manure that you sowed.
To do this, you can use the mower. The crushed plants can simply be buried to continue to enrich the soil with nitrogen, among other things. Removing mulch now will allow the soil to warm up more quickly, but it is not a requirement. In fact, some gardeners prefer to leave them in place to continue to feed underground fauna, such as earthworms. It’s up to you to choose between warmer soil or well-fed and therefore more active earthworms!
Clean the vegetable garden
Then, in this month of March, it is important to clear the way for future plantings by cleaning your growing beds. This means devoting yourself to the following two tasks:
- Remove the last vegetables, like the last leeks, cabbages, etc. which are still in the ground in your plots.
- Pulling weeds which are starting to grow or which have grown over the winter if you had not protected the soil. The earth being rather humid, the task will be even simpler and quicker to carry out. It is much preferable to carry out manual weeding, making sure to tear out the roots, but you can also use the hoe and the weeder.
Work the soil
Now that the soil of your vegetable garden is free of mulch or green manures, as well as weeds, it is time to work it in order to decompact it and aerate it to allow it to warm up more quickly.
In addition, the soil being looser, you will soon be able to plant more easily. Depending on the nature of your soil, different options can be considered:
- If the soil in your vegetable garden tends to be heavyyou will be more efficient with a spade.
- If this earth is rather softfavor the grelinette, because it helps preserve underground fauna.
- If the soil in your vegetable garden is clayeytake advantage of this step to add sand.
After working the soil, break up the clods using a hook.
Enrich the soil
Once you have worked the soil of your vegetable garden well, it is important to enrich it, because most vegetable plants need a humus soil to grow well. As we saw previously, the use of green manures contributes greatly to this stage when they are buried in the earth.
But if you had not sown green manures, you can now nourish the soil of your vegetable garden by providing it with organic matter in the form of well-degraded compost or well-decomposed manurewhile taking care not to bury them too much.
Finalize
You can then take one last bite to integrate the compost or manure well into the soil and break up the last clumps. Finally, a rake will allow you to refine the soil and remove the few stones that may remain on the surface. If you don’t sow anything right away, install mulch to prevent unwanted weeds from growing and rain from undoing your work.
Sowing
The vegetable garden can be prepared not only outdoors, but also indoors or under cover with seedlings and planting bulbs:
- Throughout France, it is possible, in March, to proceed with planting bulbssuch as pink garlic, white onion and shallot, directly in the ground in well-drained soil.
- In regions where temperatures are milder, such as the south of France or the Atlantic coast, you can sow spinach, early carrots, turnips and certain varieties of radishes.
- In a heated greenhouse or in the house, you can prepare seedlings of melons, peppers, tomatoes, physalis, cardoons, eggplants. This will allow you to save time on growing them.
- Under cover, it’s time to sow lettuce, celeriac, cabbage, early cauliflower and leeks.