Gardening Advice & Tips for Irish Gardeners

Early Maintenance of My Seedlings We’ve had a rare taste of Summer over the past week and with that the need to keep plants and seedling watered as kept me busy in the garden. It’s been 3 weeks since I sowed my vegetable raised beds and my carrots, beetroot, garlic and onions have come on a lot.

The dry weather increases the amount of maintenance required on raised beds as they can dry out fairly quickly. It's only April and I have been watering my young seedlings twice a week now. The Onions have really started to move and so watering at this stage is essential. The carrots have fared well despite the cold nights and will need thinning out next weekend. My beetroot appears to have suffered slightly at the hands of my dog and the rows are looking a bit sparse. So, to get my rows back into some order it might require some delicate transplanting work.

Early maintenance so far has involved weeding and watering. I have made sure to keep my rows moist at all times. So if it doesn’t rain for 2 days then I go out with a watering can and lightly soak the rows. I like to avoid watering between the rows as I don’t want to encourage weeds.

Weeding itself is easy as I go out often and only for 10 minutes and pull the young weed seedlings. Getting them at this early stage means they don’t have a chance to settle and establish deep roots. This makes weeding easier, prevents disturbance to my seedlings when pulling the weeds and also doesn’t give the weeds a chance to complete or interfere with my young vegetables. When weeding I am glad that I took the time to ensure neat and even rows. This has allowed me to run the hoe up between the rows of veg without fear of causing any damage.

Lastly, this week I started to feed my vegetables. I had planned on using a general liquid feed such as Bio Organic Plant Food. But I had an old pack of grow more granular feed and thought this would give a steady flow of nutrients to my crops over the coming weeks.

The frost has passed and we have been averaging daytime temps of around 12 degrees which should make for good growing conditions. But my protective fleece still sits over my rows of carrots. The fleece is there to add additional frost protection but more importantly, to provide a barrier against the carrot fly. This fly is active in April and May so now is an important time to protect against them. For that the fleece needs to remain over the crop at all times. Keeping the fleece in place seems crazy on warm Spring days but if I remove it I know the pesky fly won’t be far away. The fleece can be removed in June as the carrot fly is not around then.