April Gardening Diary ' Rain on Good Friday and Easter Day, a good year for grass and a bad one for hay.' Having survived the long gloom of Lent (though alas not for those of us who are undergoing the extended privations of Ramadan) gardeners will feel fitter from their abstentions and feel in good shape to get on in the garden, a good thing as April is a month of many tasks which will brook no delay. Growth is now so strong that it will soon be too late to prune or transplant many plants without risk of injury. Sown seeds should be checked and any that look doubtful should be re-sown now rather than delaying on the off-chance of improvement. There is truth in the old saying 'One for the pigeon and one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow.' April is a good month for planting Laurels, conifers, hollies and other evergreen shrubs and hedging plants. Any rose pruning should be finished off as soon as possible. Climbing roses may also have been tackled last month; the small side branches off the main stems cut back to two inches. Hybrid tea bush roses should be cut back to four or five outward facing buds. It will be worth feeding the roses now and later on in the summer to encourage the new displays. Spraying with a fungicide at fortnightly intervals until June will keep the leaves shiny and fresh. Evergreens such as laurel, cupressus, box and yew may also be pruned now as well as any overgrown ivy. Towards the end of the month we may plant dahlias, fairly deep to ensure the new shoots miss any late frosts. As Forsythias finish flowering they should be pruned, cutting out the stems that have just flowered and leaving the young shoots, which will give the best displays next year. Daffodils and other early flowering bulbs should be dead-headed and allowed to die down naturally. Many a tidy-minded gardener resents these untidy obstacles to their lawnmowers, but the bulbs must be given time to build up reserves for next spring. Lawn mowing starts in earnest this month. We may begin by finding our plastic grass rakes and sweep up those twigs and debris we have been ignoring all winter, maybe even locating our besoms to scatter worm casts, as these, when flattened by the mower make admirable sites for germinating weed seeds. The reader, having remembered to have the mower serviced, sharpened and oiled last autumn will now be ready to do the first mow of the season, the first cut taking off the top inch or so to tidy things up and as growth accelerates the blades may be lowered by degrees. Mowing being a job we could delegate to other family members, we might take this opportunity at the beginning of the season to tutor any of those under-employed youths and adolescents we have uncovered about the house in the art of mowing the lawn in straight lines and without losing digits or even whole limbs. Nothing could be more risible or ignominious in future life than having to admit to one's peers that we lost a big toe under the lawn mower. The vegetable garden: Potatoes, those who commune with the moon will know that root crops go in from the beginning of the waning gibbous to the new moon, April's full moon is on the 16th, thus we may set out our pre-chitted potato tubers from the 16th until the 30th.
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