Each month, award-winning landscape gardener Fern Alder from Rochester will be offering a few tips on how best to care for your garden, from attracting butterflies to growing your own vegetables. In the past, Fern, a graduate from the University of Greenwich, has created a wildlife-friendly garden for Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, a butterfly garden at The Natural History Museum, and won a gold Gardening for Wildlife Award from Medway Council.

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April

I’m thrilled that my Kaffir Lily (Clivia miniata), that won Best in Show at the Gillingham Horticultural Society Spring Show a few years ago, is back with more blooms than ever before. This year yielding nine huge heads, a truly dazzling display! For those of you who already have one of these plants, or who may aspire to own one, the secret is to feed and water it all through the growing season, and then stop absolutely all watering from October until February, then you start to water and feed it again – this way you will get a wonderful display of flowers through March and April.

Some of the flowers will set seed and you can leave these on the plant over the winter, until they turn bright red. In spring you can place them onto compost in a pot and they will easily germinate within a couple of weeks. Kaffir lilies enjoy being pot bound and don’t need repotting for several years.

For the last couple of weeks we have all been enjoying the most brilliant gardening weather and everything in the garden and vegetable patch is really showing it’s appreciation by putting on a massive growth spurt – that of course includes the weeds!

This week I have planted up my chitted ‘early’ potatoes, halfway down a large barrel, and just covered them with two inches of compost. The plan is to cover them with compost each time they show above the soil level, and hopefully give me a good crop right down the barrel.

I’ve sown copious numbers of both flower and vegetable seeds, and planted out my pea seedlings on the allotment. I’ve also found myself potting on many seedlings, sown over the last few weeks, that have quickly outgrown their seed trays – it is a very busy time of year, and I love it all!

This week is the start of set up for ‘Harry’s Garden’ – the charity garden I have designed to be part of the Future Gardens show at Butterfly World near St. Albans. All my efforts are going into getting ready for it’s construction and planting at the moment. I have designed the main structure of the garden to be formed by straw bales. These will be ‘primed’ over the next few weeks with water and fertiliser, they should then be ready, to be both seeded and planted into. This should provide a brilliant flowering display for the 120,000 visitors who are expected to come to the show this summer. This is the first time that I have tried this method, it is something of a challenge and I will keep you posted as to its success or otherwise over the summer.

I wish you all very happy Easter, as well as happy time in the garden, sowing and growing !