Last week we had a frost.

This week, we have blazing blue sunshine and even the air is warm. Whilst April is the cruellest month (both hopes and cherry blossom may still be dashed) but I am throwing myself all in. Jobs for the month are therefore a little different. Scroll to the end if you have no soul.

Here are my suggestions for April:

Design your perfect breakfast spot. Make it outdoors. Unless you have a west facing garden when it is probably sundowners. However, my courtyard faces east and so it is bathed in full sun in the mornings, just as I want to enjoy my first (ok, second) cup of tea. Unfortunately, right now, the courtyard is full of pots, compost, wheelbarrows and a big bag of sand. The table is covered in planters of narcissi that have gone over and the benches of dahlias that I can’t quite commit to putting into the ground. Everything is covered with a fine layer of cement dust from the wall repairs last weekend. A haven this is not. Tomorrow, I am going to get busy with it and get it swept and organised, the dahlias are going into the ground, the over narcissi behind the potting shed, and the module trays of kohl rabi and leeks are going into the kitchen garden to take their chances. I’m not saying it’ll be insta-worthy in a day, but I can promise you that it will be a sanctuary and a haven for me to bask in this wonderful, life-giving sun. I strongly strongly recommend you do the same. Even a hard kitchen chair in a puddle of sunlight if that is what is available to you right now. A back step maybe. But if you have a potential tea spot in the garden, go and pimp it up.

Give it a name: Becca and I were chatting on our most recent podcast about the convention of taking everyday, domestic things and giving them fabulously pretentious names, Once you have made you morning tea spot lovely, name it. I might go for ‘The East Terrace’.

Visit someone else’s garden: If you stand and stare at your own garden, the chances are, in amongst the joy and the pleasure, there will be a little niggle. I have two niggles currently – ground elder and bindweed. Although the orchard feels dreamy (particularly in the morning light), and the flower field feels full of potential, and the grass is green and lush, my eye cannot help but pick up the jobs.

The solution? Now is the moment to pop out to go and have a look at the beautiful results of someone else’s labour. If you are in the UK, the yellow NGS book is your best friend.

I went to South Wood Farm which I appreciate is setting the bar quite high. Have a nose at what is around and make the most of the chance for tea and cake.

Pack away your boots & your winter coat: Oh ok, maybe too soon. But I’m still doing it as a gesture with the expectation that I will be digging them out again by Thursday.

Spread a blanket under a cherry tree: And stare up at the blossom. The Japanese have cherry blossom gazing parties. I have yet to find anyone to join me with gazing at my cherry blossom so I will be doing it solo, but if I can think of you doing it under a cherry blossom tree too, I think that it is almost the same. Also, the blanket matters. Now is the moment for a nice thick comfy one. The air might be warming but the ground still holds a bit of a chill.

Spring clean: I am a Cancerian and I care about the roof over my head in a way that means you need a crowbar to get me out of my cottage for more than a day and a night, but I am not one for housework. I’d much rather be hoeing or planting than hoovering. However, an hour or so with a broom and a bucket of soapy water and the spring light floods through my windows and illuminates, not dust and dog hair, but a huge urn of tulips and spring foliage in the kitchen table. Every day cleaning might be relentless drudgery delegated to women by the patriarchy (and often policed by other women) to keep our souls from reaching their full potential of joy, but a spring clean can be a tonic.

But if your soul is fine, and you still would rather be out doing gardening jobs under a big blue sky, here you go.

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Roses

I have quite a few of the taller, longer roses. I have lost track of what is a climber and what a rambler, or indeed what is just a shrub rose with ambition (that’ll be Claire Austin, but I forgive her because of the incredible cupped blooms) but anything with a long, thorny cable is getting the Niff Barnes treatment. By which I mean twirled and circled and tied back on itself. I am starting with the easiest, a long but well-behaved white rose on the studio. It was a gift from someone via Joshua Sparkes and therefore, characteristic of the chaos of the genius that is Mr Sparkes, arrived without a label. It may be Félicité-Perpétue, it may not be. Either way, now is the time to start either twirling new rose growth into interesting shapes, or tying it in to hazel domes, depending on how you grow your roses.

If they are really putting on growth, give them a good mulch and a feed. If you are lucky enough to have comfrey in abundance, a scattering of that at their feet never goes amiss. I might finally listen to Sarah Raven who swears by underplanting them with Salvias, but mostly because I have loads of S. uliginosa cuttings that don’t fit with any of my other colour schemes.

Dahlia tubers

I thought I had enough dahlias. But one must always hedge ones bets with dahlias because there is the risk of losing them in a long wet winter. I fear the ones I left in the ground may be gone forever, although they have surprised me before. The second consequence of such a wet season so far is that there are slugs everywhere and when the tubers first shoot, there can be a perfect balance between the rate of growth on a dahlia and the rate at which a slug can consume it. They sit there looking like they aren’t doing anything, but they are. As the soil gets warmer and the sun grows stronger, the dahlias win the battle of attrition and burst into bushy growth. Right now, that’s the thing I am hoping for. I may be waiting in vain.

And so I bought some more. Despite the focus on seeds and drought-tolerant, low maintenance perennials, I cannot resist a dahlia tuber. Some tubers intended for cutting arrived from Halls of Heddon last week, with a promise that the rooted cuttings will follow. I feel so indulgent, I dig out the old seed I saved from Bryn Terfel last year, because Philippa of Just Dahlias inspired me to try my own dahlia breeding. And then I shuffle through the seed box until I find the packet of seeds from Chilterns, ‘Sunny Reggae’ because Arthur Parkinson keeps telling me that the big ruffled dinnerplate dahlias to which I am addicted are no good for the bees. What with all of the extra seedlings I am expecting, I had better turn over a few more beds to the dahlias.

Some of my tubers I started early on heat so that I can start some cuttings. I did a how to last year if you fancy a go. Remember the grit. It’s not negotiable.

Water

Although it has absolutely poured with rain all March, pots and containers can get be surprisingly dry, especially for those stuffed with flowering spring bulbs. My toffee apple tree has started to look very wilty indeed in the recent sunshine. Water and, in the case of tulips, give a fortnightly feed.

Also, if you have a greenhouse, do not forget to water daily. It seems so counter-intuitive to think about watering when it is pouring with rain but I have lost more plants than I care to admit to this way.

Weed

Keeping the soil covered is key, even if what is covering it is not something you would have chosen. At this stage, soft annual weeds might be a good thing but bindweed never is. Pull it out.

There are some lessons that you have to learn over and over again and mine is mulching. I have some beds that I cleared last autumn and they were full of weed seed and they have been an absolutely pain to get back on top of. My least favourite weeding is where grasses have started to take hold. The smaller clumps will hoe off, leaving the soil undisturbed, but where you have to pull out the roots, it leaves a horrible hole. Blissfully, the beds that are full of weeds are very much a minority because I mulched the absolute socks off everything else. The kitchen garden is covered in old thatch, and the perennial borders with woodchip. Apart from the edges where it is thinner or the odd bit of cleaver that has come through and easily whipped out, it is all looking amazing. And ready to plant with the hundreds and hundreds of seedlings that are bursting out of the greenhouse.

We are only two days into this warm dry spell, and already I have heard the thrum of a lawnmower in the village. The churchyard is done every fortnight whether it is January or July, so that has punctuated the winter, regardless of conditions. However, I will give it one or two more days before I attempt a mow. The only grassed area I have now is the orchard, and I don’t mow it for recreational purposes, I want the grass. It is absolute rocket fuel for the compost heap. Keep turning (and cover if it has got too wet with all this rain) and keep adding to it. I have a lot of fresh growth weeds that I am piling on it at the moment so keep some woodchip or cardboard to mix through to balance it out.

Start getting everything into the ground

Plant out any autumn-sown hardy annuals and any young perennials that you kept under cover for safety over the winter. Check the weather forecast for any really cold nights before you commit to putting them in the ground, and maybe ease them into the transition by having days outdoors and then nights back under glass for a week or so. If you are planning any shrubs, buy them now and get them in over the next few weeks to get the longest growing season possible. You might not notice a difference this year, but getting a good long summer to establish will mean that they thrive in the future.

Sweet peas

Plant out your sweet peas. They might be starting to put on spring growth so increase watering. A bit of manure or a good rich home-made compost will give them a boost, although mine sulk for a fortnight however I plant them out. Plant them slightly deeper than you might think, you want those roots to go down and down and then point where the stem meets the root can be quite fragile.

I am mixing twigs and mild steel this year. Expect a how to, when I have worked out how to…