April, Generous and Impatient

April is generous and impatient in equal measure — everything wants to grow, but a late frost can still catch you out. Keep half an eye on the forecast even as the rest of you wants to sow everything at once.

Sow now (indoors)

Squash, pumpkins, sweetcorn, and French/runner beans — all frost-tender, best started under cover for a head start.

Sow now (outdoors)

Carrots, beetroot, chard, lettuce, spinach, peas, and most hardy annual flowers can all go direct now. Successional sowing of salad leaves is worth starting this month and keeping up every few weeks.

Plant out

Second early and maincrop potatoes. Hardened-off brassica seedlings if you started them earlier. Summer bedding can go out toward the end of the month in milder areas — but hold back in colder regions.

Harvest

Purple sprouting broccoli’s last hurrah. Early rhubarb. The first spring salad leaves if you sowed in March.

Prune

Spring-flowering shrubs once they’ve finished flowering. Deadhead early daffodils (leave the foliage to die back naturally).

General jobs

Start hardening off anything raised indoors — a week or two of daytime-outside, night-time-in before it goes in the ground for good. Keep hoeing; weeds grow as fast as everything else this month. Watch soil moisture as things warm up. If you’ve got an alpine bed, check it for slug and snail damage — soft new growth is far more vulnerable than the established plant. And if you have a pond, this is the month to divide and thin any oxygenating or marginal plants that got congested last year, before they crowd the water out.

This weekend

Start a rolling batch of salad leaves — sow a short row every couple of weeks from now through summer, rather than all at once, and you’ll never run out.

Timing shifts by region — the North, Scotland, and Northern Ireland typically lag 2–3 weeks behind the South.