Are you overwhelmed with all the possibilities that you want? Well, keep reading from my hand-picked list of just five great plants to grow in March. Not just edibles, flowers, or seeds; this is the ultimate list so that it does all the thinking for you.
I believe that having lots of variety reduces confusion; you don’t need to be growing loads of different things. But at the same time, it can be tricky to decide what to grow.
Follow along, and as the months go by, I’m going to help you build your own collection of brilliant plants that will give you everything you could ever imagine in the of month of March: color, scent, flavor, and more recommendations.
Right, let’s match to March with what I think is an unmissable group of seeds—not a single seed, not easy to grow, not affordable, but they will save you a lot of money.
(1) Lettuces:
An easy grow annual salad leaves and salad mixes grow in cooler, damper climates, in the spring, particularly if you live in a climate similar to mine, like here in Ireland, March is the perfect time to get them growing. It’s not too hot, but equally, the cold of the winter has passed, and the salad leaves aren’t going to bolt.
What I do is successively sow, about once a month, small numbers of modules in about 20 modules, get them growing with some little salad leaves, and keep doing that month after month. That way, you can keep harvesting those lovely fresh baby leaves.
(2) The Humble Potato:
Everyone knows and loves to eat potatoes, and I think they are just one of the best value crops that you can start to think about planting towards the middle or end of March. I think the potato gives you so much, and it asks for a little in return.
One of my absolute favorite things about potatoes is that when it comes to growing them, you can’t get quite complicated, things like chitting (chitting is a process for getting potatoes or other tubers ready for planting). The seed potatoes are spread out in a tray, frequently in an egg carton, in a bright, cool location that is protected from the sun.
You might have seen escalated growth stated on your potatoes.
If they were stored slightly too warm, and they started to wake up, that’s not an issue, just knock them off. If you don’t want to worry about chitting or getting complicated, all you have to do is stick them in the ground. There are lots of different methods that you can go no-dig with.
You can get fancy, but round them into the ground. If you give them about 30 cm between each potato and 60 cm or maybe a little bit more for main crop between each row, you will have a superb harvest.
Potatoes want full sun and a fair bit of water throughout their main growing season, but less expected benefits of potatoes is that if you’ve got some kind of ground broken up or some compacted soil, potatoes will definitely ending breaking up that ground.
Their roots are really strong, and as they grow the tubers, they will loosen up that soil and potentially make it much nicer for the rest of your growing season or maybe into the next few years.
Read More: May Plant Guide: 15 Beautiful Plants to Grow in May
Potatoes can easily take space and expand, you can grow them in containers like 30-litre pots deep, and there are so many different varieties.
If you put them in the ground, with good feed and a little bit of all-purpose fertilizer, watch out for pest and the ever-threated blight. It should be in for a week with joyous harvest, is taking up potatoes at your hands list and lots of food. I am not missing out on growing potatoes this year, and in fact, I’m going to be growing three varieties of the first early that’s called Solist, a second early called Nicola, and a main crop variety called Pink Fair Apple. Three absolute faves. Try them for yourself, ’cause I think you’ll love them.
I’ve come into my conservatory where I bring on so many of my little baby plants, and that’s because the next recommendation is going to be for something you can grow it outside, does really well if you grow it in a conservatory, greenhouse, poly tunnel etcetera.
(3) Humble Tomato:
I’m going to argue that I actually don’t think it’s about being humble, and there are a lot of very good reasons why so many people grow it and why you should grow it if you haven’t tried it before.
They’re really easy to grow. You can start them earlier than now, but my recommendation is not to start your tomatoes too early, but if your climate is similar to here in Ireland, then definitely March is the time to start.
They will start growing, also the weather is going to start warming up and that means you don’t have to struggle too hard to keep them going. Once they do get going, you will definitely get seriously abundant harvests.
Grow loads more, and you’re going to have so many tomatoes you need to give them away, or freeze them and turn them into something later in the winter, like passata, tomato sauces, and also cooking them into dishes.
And then let’s talk about their sheer selection. You can plant black tomatoes, red tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, white tomatoes, cherry bush-type tomatoes. You can get plum tomatoes, green tomatoes and many more.
So my recommendation is to go and find a few really cool varieties and try them. Every year I grow a couple of stalwart favorites, which for me are sungold, and rainbow blend. I love those flavor, and they always perform really well for me, and then treat yourself to a couple of unusual varieties, whether it’s something that looks a bit odd, maybe has a different flavor profile, with this you can slowly build your profile and gain knowledge of what’s going to work, both in terms of how you grow them and what you like to eat.
My next recommendation is a little seed and this plant called calendula.
(4) Calendula:
This is fantastic plants. So, they are commonly known as pot marigolds, and they are super easy to grow. Once you’ve got a packet of seeds, you’re always going to have them in the garden, but one of the things I really like about calendula is that they’ll proliferate and produce a huge number of seeds, which means that next year, you don’t
have to save them, because they’re going to be around your garden, grow safety, grow somewhere you don’t want them, you can retransplant them somewhere else.
Whereas the ones I’ve got are a deep, bright orange. So, I’ve got a range of colors, which I love, but you can also get single and double forms. Not only is calendula great for attracting pollinators into the garden, but you can also remove the petals and substitute them for saffron in rice dishes or stews, and they give it a really gentle flavor and a very subtle color. It’s super cheap in comparison to saffron.
(5) Lily Bulb:
Just like spring, bulbs are really easy to grow, and reliable. So far, summer flowering bulbs and, in particular, lily bulbs. Before we go any further though, I just want to warn you, there are poisonous lily bulbs, put that in mind when you are making your growing choices, they might not be for you, but I really think they should.
There’s great about growing bulbs, as well seeds, and plants, because they give you a level of certainty.
When you buy them, they’re ready to stick in the ground. I mean the soil, and they’re going to sleep brilliantly, what love about lily, they give that really bright head of color.
My actual practice is to grow them in a container and later move them to the field for proper germination.
Buying bulbs is a little bit more expensive and possibly a little bit of investment. If you treat them well, and it started flowering, I assure you it’s going to give you years of enjoyment and benefits.
If you want to know exactly how to grow them, there are three easy ways. I made a dedicated video last year, check this video, and it’ll show you exactly how to get accurate successful in this little might bulbs.
