• We had a cold snap around the same time last year although we do not recall it being quite as cold as last Sunday and Monday. But this is why you don’t rush out to plant tender vegetables such as tomatoes, aubergines, capsicums, kumara and the like for another two weeks or so.
• On a freezing cold jaunt around a few garden centres last Sunday morning, we noticed deciduous azaleas (azalea mollis) in stock. These are not always easy to find so if you have been wanting some, don’t delay – get out and buy them while they are available. Deciduous azaleas are more tolerant of poorer soil conditions than their aristocratic rhododendron cousins (they will even take quite wet conditions in heavy soils) and will smother themselves in flowers before any sign of leaves. Some, but not all, are the most outrageous colours in shades of burnt orange, cerise, saffron yellow and tangerine. Others are more demure but have wonderful fragrance.
• If you have formal hedges, now is the time to get out and give them a light prune to keep sharp lines. The hedge clipping expert here (which is neither of us) uses a string line to keep even short lengths of hedges straight. He has also just clipped our one surviving yew tree. Yew are the classic clipping plant in England but, like flowering cherries, they find our rainfall levels too high and develop root problems which are nearly always terminal. If you are after the longevity and class of the English yew tree in this area, plant our native totara or miro instead.
• Deadhead hellebores to stop aphids from setting up camp in the spent blooms. Sometimes even whitefly will join the gatherings and because the flowers face downwards, you may not notice the assembling hordes until you have a real problem. Removing the host is a pre-emptive move. If you are saving hellebore seed, sow it straight away. It doesn’t last long before it gets considerably more difficult to germinate.
• Sow seeds of basil in pots or a tray for planting out in a few weeks but keep them somewhere warm and sheltered. If you want to grow melons of the rock, water or cantaloupe types, it pays to start these in pots as early as possible. They need a long, hot growing season and you want to make the most of every day if you want a good crop in our marginal conditions.
• Most people will need to spray potatoes with copper from time to time, starting now. Taties are vulnerable to blight (the cause of the Irish potato famine) and if you get a bad case of it, the whole crop will succumb. Some modern varieties are a great deal more resistant and do not believe the myth that heirloom or heritage potatoes are by definition healthier and more resistance. This does not apply to potatoes (ask the Irish). We have a touch of blight showing here on the Jersey Bennes but Liseta is looking clean.
• Plant Florence fennel, climbing and dwarf beans, carrots, peas, cauli, broc, beetroot, spinach and salad veg. These can all go directly into the garden as seeds or plants. If you want to hurry them along, use a cloche.

• We did warn that the magical dry and early spring was unlikely to continue. The chillier temperatures this week are a reminder of why not to rush out too early planting cucumbers, tomatoes, aubergines and their summer companions. By all means sow seed of them into pots and keep them under cover, or buy baby plants from the garden centre and pot them on to get a jump start in a few week’s time. But you won’t gain anything by rushing to get them planted out too early. You are more likely to lose the plants.
• If you have a cloche, you can use it like a mini glasshouse in situ. We are enjoying fresh greens (lettuce and leafy greens) from under our cloche and one big advantage at this time of the year is that the leaves are very clean – free of both mud splash and insect damage. Apparently cloches are incompatible with dogs which are accustomed to agility work and to racing through the training tunnels. We merely have to keep the cat out as she is inclined to think that Mark has just made her a nice, dry and private toilet area.
• If you have planted peas, you will have to stake them. We often use relocatable frames which consist of two hardwood posts with some netting stretched between. They can be rolled up when not needed. You can weave quaint structures which are more ornamental, but the peas don’t mind either way. At least they twine and hold themselves up.
• One of the key skills in the vegetable garden is keeping a succession of crops coming, to ensure continued supply. Lettuces, beans, brassicas and green leafy crops such as spinach are all best sown or planted in small numbers each fortnight.
• As deciduous fruit trees come into first leaf, a copper spray is timely and will reduce many fungal and bacterial problems. You can often get away without doing anything further to the trees this season but that first application of copper is beneficial and justified.
• Time is running out for hard pruning of trees and shrubs. You really want this done before the plant has put on its main spring growth. You can keep giving plants the hairdresser’s trim any time but radical restyles (as in hard pruning) need to be timed well.
• It is the optimum feeding time for the ornamental garden. Some people feed their entire garden every year. We target our use of fertiliser a great deal more selectively but we do ladle on the home made compost, using it as mulch. Key beds will get mulched every year.

A friend who shall remain anonymous felt a little short changed by the recent TV programme which promised to show him how to grow his own drugs at home. I think he was hoping for something a little more risqué than a home cure for athlete’s foot (aloe vera and lavender, was it?) Being responsible gardeners, we will not be alerting readers as to what they can grow at home that is legal, but we will comment that there is not a wide range and there are good reasons why they have not been a runaway success in the drug world. Mostly they are highly unpalatable. Some are inclined to result in death.

• It is an early spring this year and as yet the season is showing no sign that it will slow down and average out. For gardeners this means heeding the warnings. Summer may arrive correspondingly early. Don’t delay on getting woody trees and shrubs planted. Get mulches onto garden beds to protect against drying out. Get any lifting and dividing of clumping plants done as soon as you can. Plant hedges without delay so the plants can settle in and get some fresh roots out before summer. Get fruit trees planted.
• If you use hormone sprays (Tordon Gold for lawns is a common one, as is Grazon in the farming sector) put them away for the next month. Plants coming into growth are vulnerable to hormone sprays, particularly magnolias, grapes and kiwifruit. It is bad enough to affect your own plants but when your spray drift invisibly and imperceptibly descends upon your neighbours, most will be too polite to tell you what they think of you, but it won’t be good.
• If you are growing strawberries, pinch off the first white flowers of the season which may be appearing. You want the plant to put its energy into growing larger and getting stronger before it exhausts itself setting fruit for you to eat.
• Kumaras are one vegetable which needs maximum growing time to get a good crop. It is too early to put them in the ground yet, but you can be laying out the tubers in a warm, dark place to encourage them to start sprouting.
• Yams can also be prepared now for planting soon. You can usually get away with using tubers from the fruit and veg section of the supermarket but sprout them first. What we grow as a yam in this country is a member of the dreaded oxalis family but they are not too keen on dry, sandy soil which heats up and burns the fleshy stems. Plant yams where they have some space to clump and spread a little and do not expect to confine them to tidy rows and get a good harvest.
• We have been gently harvesting sapotes (the near tropical fruit from Central America with soft white flesh resembling warm icecream) and bamboo shoots. The latter we assume to be phyllostachys edulis and once they have been blanched in boiling salted water, they are pretty much identical to the ones you buy tinned. We are still eating our Hass avocados, as we have been since January. Unlike the hard avocado fruit you currently see in the supermarket where the coppery sheen tells you it has been picked too early and it will never ripen properly, ours are still from last season and taste just as they should. If you like avos, you live in a coastal area and are warm enough, this is a tree that will pay for itself as soon as it starts cropping. Just buy a grafted, named variety and don’t waste your time with a seedling.

• We were shocked by the infestation of onion weed on the local Lepperton roadsides, spread we suspect by road works. Onion weed is a thug and not easy to get rid of. Any small bulblets that you leave will respond with renewed vigour and the most common weedkiller spray, glyphosate, doesn’t touch it in our experience. If it is a small patch in your garden, you can dig it (and then let it heat and rot in a black plastic rubbish bag left in the sun). If you are not averse to using sprays or if you have a massive swathe, try treating it like wandering jew – which usually means spraying with Amitrol. Add a surfactant to encourage it to stick to the shiny leaves.
• With asparagus season starting, if you covet your own patch remember that asparagus is a permanent crop and grows from underground crowns which are best left undisturbed. To establish a few plants, dig the area really well, then dig it a second time and dig deeper than usual and add plenty of compost and humus. Do not harvest anything for the first couple of years because you want the crown to build up strength and size. Asparagus is a long term commitment. While bare root divisions were sold earlier in winter, what is available now will be more expensive potted crowns. You may well have more success with buying potted crowns than smaller bare root divisions.
• Strawberries are still available and these are a cheap and cheerful crop to try with children. Planted right now, they will crop later in early summer so it is a quick turn around. If you have ever been to a PYO place, you will know that they want full sun, well tilled soil and if you plant them on a little mound, it improves the drainage and heats up faster for early growth. However it isn’t necessary to mound and it does increase drying out later. Laying some straw beneath the plants later will help keep the fruit clean and reduce disease caused by splashing. Pine needles work equally well as a mulch.
• If you go to the garden centre and get tempted to buy little pots of tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, courgettes, cucumbers or similar, don’t be too fast to plant them out in the open. You won’t gain anything and you are more likely to lose them when we get a cold, wet spell (which we will – it is still only early spring). Labour Weekend is the traditional time for getting these crops into the ground. Experienced gardeners may put them in earlier but usually only under a cloche (plastic or glass covers). If you have already planted them, you can salvage the situation by cutting the bottom off a 2 litre plastic bottle for an individual cloche (clear plastic or opaque will work). If you are looking at the little pots still waiting to be planted, pot them on instead to larger sized pots and keep them in a sheltered, warm spot on your verandah for a few more weeks.
• If you feel they need it, the usual time to feed bulbs is immediately after flowering. However, many bulbs come from poor, impoverished natural environments so to be honest, we don’t feed them here as a matter of course. If you have bulbs which failed to flower this year, it may be that they are badly overcrowded and need thinning, or that their position has become too shaded.
• Resist the temptation to tie bulb foliage into tidy knots after flowering. Nothing shouts out your ignorance more. Tying them in knots greatly reduces the bulb’s ability to store away energy through its foliage to keep its strength up, forcing it into early dormancy. If you are trying to tidy up and the foliage looks untidy, make a mini fence out of twigs or short pieces of bamboo.

• We are getting quite dry here although there is rain forecast. Keep an eye on container plants which can dry out while your back is turned. If you have permanent plants in tubs, troughs, containers or pots and you haven’t done anything with them for ages, get onto any repotting straight away if you want them to survive summer. Today’s Outdoor Classroom is on this topic. If you don’t plan to repot them, give them a feed.
• It is countdown on digging and dividing clumping perennials. Most of these are in growth now and will make a speedy recovery from being divided but it is best not to delay.
• Daphnes and luculias can be pruned now. The Himalayan Daphne bholua can get pretty scruffy and will take hard pruning but go easy on the more common odora types. A light trim or thinning is more advisable for them. Look for fresh shoots or buds on the luculias and trim back to these without delay. Dichroas (related to hydrangeas but evergreen and often with a flower for the better part of the year) can be pruned back to a pair of leaf buds.
• If you have a glasshouse, be very cautious with its ventilation now because temperatures can soar and it would be disappointing to fry the treasures you are housing so carefully.
• Get onto planting out annuals if you want a display in spring. Leave it any longer and they will be a summer display instead.
• The advice in my column last week on copper sprays was not a complete veto on their use, but a warning bell on their over use. There are times copper sprays are enormously useful and one of those times is to combat leaf and fruit drop on citrus trees.
• Wandering jew (tradescantia) is on the move. Do not let this weed get away on you. If you use sprays, Amitrol, Grazon or Tordon Gold should deal to it. Glyphosate doesn’t touch it. If you shun sprays, there is no alternative to hand pulling every last skerrick of it and putting it to rot inside a black plastic rubbish bag in the sun. Any piece you will miss will grow again.
• If you still plan to plant fruit trees this season, stop talking about it and do it right now. Full sun is the rule for fruit trees.
• In the vegetable garden, it is full steam ahead with pretty well everything. Hardy crops and root crops can be sown from seed directly into the garden – peas, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, lettuce, spinach and silver beet. You may want to try a late crop of broad beans sown now. Slightly more tender crops are started in pots or trays for planting out in six weeks time. These include corn, cucurbits, most beans, tomatoes and all the summer vegetable delights. In warm, protected, coastal areas or under a cloche, you can start direct sowing dwarf beans.