Fantastic flowers

Get stuck in during March for your competition garden with these tips from Mike Wells

Always wanted to enter The Chronicle Garden Competition but unsure where to start?

This year, Style magazine is bringing you a series of articles each month alongside entrant liaison and renowned gardener Mike Wells with tips and tricks on making your garden competition-ready –and it’s not as daunting as it may initially seem!

March is the perfect month to start preparing your garden for planting and getting an idea of what you want to put in the beds in the coming months.

Here are Mike’s top six tips:

1. Make space for your spring flowering annuals, bulbs and perennials by removing summer annuals, and pruning shrubs and trees for planting areas and extra light. Why not get the entire family out in the garden one weekend for some sunshine and pruning?

2. Improve your soil by adding quality compost and biochar. This will improve moisture retention, microbial activity and nutrient availability.

3. Pre-prepare for those summer heatwaves and busy days where getting to watering the garden seems impossible by installing a drip irrigation system before putting down mulch.

4. Mulch your soil with your chosen materials – sugar cane, lucerne, pea straw or chunkier barks and wood chips.

5. Get ready for planting by checking online bulb suppliers every couple of days, as they’ll be ramping up their supplies of spring-flowering bulbs around this time.

Bulbs you might like to consider for September flowering include tulips, anemones, ranunculus, hyacinths, freesias, Dutch iris, and some daffodils and jonquils.

6. Work out where your annual flowers will be planted and how many you’ll need, if you haven’t ordered with seedling suppliers already. The best planting time for annuals is April to June, depending on how warm your garden is.