Gardening: Need to get outside? Here are your jobs for the week ahead, with Brian Kidd

Our gardening expert sets you to work.
Freshly-dug carrots.Freshly-dug carrots.
Freshly-dug carrots.

• Early carrots can be sown outdoors now. Prepare the ground by digging over the soil but DON'T add manure or compost. Ten days before seed-sowing, rake in 2-3oz of blood, fish and bone fertiliser. Sow early varieties like Early Nantes and cover the row with insect barrier mesh. Hoops of plastic water piping two metres long with thin wood pushed into the ends of the piping makes a kind of tunnel. Cover the hoops with the mesh to stop carrot root fly laying eggs in the rows. Insect barrier mesh is available from Waterlooville allotment association at the trading hut in Forest End. It is less than £2 a yard and two yards wide. You must be a member but it is not expensive to join. Open on Sundays, 10-11.30am.

• Plant onion sets now. Before planting put the baby setts in a brown paper bag, add sulphur dust and shake the bag to cover them with the dust. A simple way of preventing onion rot.

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• Everyone seems to have a forsythia shrub, and very good they are too. Think ahead, All the wood which has finished flowering needs to be pruned off. Take a large branch and pull it towards you. Near the base there should be a strong shoot without any side shoots. This branch is pruned down to that strong shoot. Once done, pull back another shoot and prune this in the same way and repeat this all around the shrub. The result will be lots of new shoots and these will be full of flower in 11 months.

• It's more than likely the grass needs cutting. You did get the mower serviced of course but if it wasn't necessary, you started the mower (and the rotavator) up about once a month during the winter to make sure it would start when you needed to use it. The grass is quite wet so drag a stiff broom behind you all over the lawn, this will induce the drops of water on the leaves to fall on to the ground. Leave it for an hour and then mow the grass. It is quite pleasing to see the grass is easier to cut and this will transform the garden. The lawn is like a carpet in the home, if it looks good, the garden is enhanced. Try to cut the lawn regularly this year. Short grass takes less time to cut than long grass.

• Herbaceous plants are starting to grow so this is the time to divide the plants and weed the border. After forking through, apply a really good feed such as Vitax Q4 fertiliser using 4oz per square yard and fork this in around the plants.

• Support herbaceous plants in good time. Sprays of hazel pushed in around the outsides of all the clumps will support new growth. The appearance of the border doesn't look good but the plants grow so rapidly, in a month’s time the hazel sprays won't be seen. If you visit Wisley or Ventnor Botanic Gardens, you will see the gardeners there have already done this job.

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• Sow just 12 seeds of lettuce in the cold greenhouse. Be patient by sowing just one seed in single insert cells. These will be ready to plant outdoors in six weeks.

• Sow seeds in the same way for Brussels sprouts, choosing early varieties. Please try F1 hybrids if you have not been successful with other types. The F1 hybrid types don't ‘blow’ into open sprouts like older varieties.

• Buy seed of curly kale. This is the tastiest winter cabbage and looks good on the dinner plate because it is a lovely dark green (and it's good for you). Sow the seeds in two weeks’ time.

• Sow seed of beetroot, just a short row. These seeds can be sown at any time from now until the end of

June.

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