Sarah Raven’s spring gardening tips

The way I garden is optimistic, uplifting and rewarding. Colour is a main theme, and lots of it, and I aim for some areas to be productive, so the colour can then come in from the garden and fill the house with the same volume of flowery or veggie abundance.  

My garden is my shop, stocked with as many of my favourite food and flowers as I can grow easily here. I love the process of selection, and then growing things from seed — it’s optimistic, future-looking and almost always rewarding. It’s proven too, gardening is good for us – for our health and our spirits. Growing gets you out there every day, noticing that seasonal shift from one week, and bout of weather to the next.  

I want as many people as possible to celebrate and rejoice in the joy our gardens bring us and our love of nature. Spring is the perfect time to make a new start.  

Here are some of my spring gardening tips, easy jobs you can do now for a summer garden full of colour, abundance and alive with bees and butterflies.  

Sow a wildflower meadow  

One of my favourite wildflower walks is in Cornwall. From Kynance Cove to The Lizard, running alongside the coast and Pentreath Beach: the blue of the sea to one side, and fields carpeted by Cornish wildflowers to the other. Growing your own wildflowers is fantastic for pollinators and gives great wow factor, from just one bag of seed.  

April is an ideal time to sow a wildflower meadow. They are brilliant for any sunny area that you’re not sure what to do with (and we have a mix for shade too). Our meadow and wildflower mixes come with full planting instructions, there’s tons for birds, butterflies and bees. And you can pick and pick to your heart’s content.  

Plant dahlias for a joyful late summer garden 

Dahlias are the backbone of my summer and autumn garden and incredibly easy to grow. They are a must-have for fabulous flowers in zingy, stained-glass colours.  

I love choosing the dahlias for our collections. From the eight dark and rich dahlias in our Venetian Dahlia Collection, a sumptuous combination in the garden or picked for the house. Or our Bathing Beauties Dahlia Collection, with dahlias that look like a gaggle of Miami beach lovelies from the 1950s, giving undiluted positivity and optimism. Choose from tubers you can pot yourself or our bushy 3L pots that just need planting out after the frosts.

Create a summer annual flower cutting patch  

At my garden, Perch Hill, as soon as clocks change in March, it is time for lots of seed sowing. Try half hardy annuals like cosmos for light, fluffy clouds of colour, with as much foliage as flowers. Sown now, they’ll be in flower in 10 weeks and will be covered in hundreds of buds and flowers from then until Guy Fawkes night. We give detailed sowing instructions with all our orders so you can grow a cutting garden from scratch, even from a windowsill.

It’s also the perfect time to plant out cut flower seedlings. If you didn’t get round to sowing any back in March, try our hardy annual seedlings, grown exclusively for us at our nursery in Lincolnshire. I’d recommend sweet peas for easy-to-grow buckets of beautiful, scented flowers.

Grow your own veg 

I love my veg garden, wandering outside to my carefully stocked personal greengrocer to harvest my lunch and supper.  

April is a good month for direct sowing some new salad leaves, beetroot, spinach and chard. Or try some quick growing half-hardy annuals, like courgettes, squash, and French beans. Courgettes are fantastic for beginners, with big, easy to sow seeds that germinate quickly and you will have crops to harvest within 6 weeks of planting out.  

If you want to grow your own tomatoes, after trialling lots of varieties at Perch Hill, I have chosen my must-haves. These come as seedlings ready to plant outside in late spring for delicious garden salads come the summer.  

Learn how to garden 

I host the podcast ‘grow, cook, eat, arrange’ with my friend and colleague, Arthur Parkinson. Our aim is to engage gardeners of all ages and levels of experience in the joy that gardening brings to the home and kitchen. We chat about the favourite flowers we are growing or what veg to sow and grow, and I give my recipes for using up all your delicious homegrown produce.  

Earlier this spring we released a new beginner’s guide series. This is a free back-to-basics course where we share our tips and advice on how to get started in the garden, explaining what gardening terms mean, and how to garden in containers. If you’ve never picked up a spade let alone sown a zinnia, this is the course for you! 

Seasalt customers can enjoy 20% off at sarahraven.com until the 31st May with code SEA22P  

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Photography © Jonathan Buckley