March is an exciting time in the garden. There is so much to do and so much hope and promise for the future! Little Sprouts Preschool Garden is in Eastern Oklahoma, so we are zone 7. Your USDA hardiness zone tells you when your last average frost date is. That is important because your last frost date tells you when it’s time to get your seeds and plants in the ground. Click on the picture below to find your zone.
The first thing you should do now that spring is coming if you didn’t do it in the fall, is top off your raised beds with extra soil or compost, amend your in ground beds with compost, or make sure new beds are built. This will ensure your growing season will be full of success with the nutrients your plants need added to the soil with the compost.
If you haven’t already ordered seeds to grow, now is a great time to do that. Getting all your plans mapped out so you can make sure you have plenty of what you love growing is a great idea. We use a little spread sheet and I try to stick to it as much as I can, but we all do get a little excited now and then and lose track of the strict guidelines we start out with.
If you are growing your own seedlings inside with a light, you should have already planted your cold hardy seeds such as broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, and lettuces and now is the time to transplant them outside in the garden. If you aren’t growing your own seedlings, you can go to the garden store and pick some up.
March is also time to get your cold hardy seeds in the ground such as carrots, radishes, lettuce, peas, spinach, swiss chard, onions and potatoes.
In March you should also be planting your seeds indoors for warm season crops such as peppers and tomatoes if you didn’t get them planted in February and you don’t plan to get them from the garden store.
Early spring is time to plant new fruit trees and bushes as well. We put in a blueberry patch this year and our blueberries came ready to plant this month.
March is also the time to get any of your fall crops harvested that wintered over. We are harvesting Brussels sprouts, herbs, and carrots from the fall garden. We also have some cabbage and kale that are still growing that we can harvest in the next few weeks to make room for more planting.
It’s a good idea to mulch everything really well to prevent weeds and keep moisture in the soil as well as preventing it from washing away when you water or get spring rains. We use straw or leaves to mulch our gardens. We just pull the mulch over to the side when we need to plant something. When the plants get about 4-5 inches tall, we put the mulch back around the plant.
This is a sweet little picture that hangs on my wall from many years ago. It’s one of my favorite pictures because the boys were so enthralled with the lettuce we were growing in that pot. I love the looks on their faces. It was at the beginning of the years I really wanted to teach the kids to grow food before I learned really HOW to do it. If you want to read about the beginning of our success, you can click here. We recently did a remake of this photo behind the same fence, with the same boys who are teenagers now. These boys have their own gardens at home and still love growing things. It makes my heart happy.
March is full of fun in the garden, the kids and I have been having a ball getting our hands in the dirt again now that it has finally stopped snowing! If you’ve been thinking about gardening this year, it’s not too late, jump in there and do it.
What have you been doing in your garden?
