April Jobs on the Allotment

Vegetables

• Sow onions, beet and winter cabbage outdoors.
• Sow your first carrots.
• Finish planting of late potatoes and earth up earlies.
• If frost is forecast, protect tender young early potato shoots. Earth them up or cover with newspaper, net curtain or horticultural fleece overnight.
• At the end of the month plant cauliflowers.
• Start successional sowing of peas, beans, lettuce, courgettes, squash, sweetcorn, outdoor tomatoes, leeks, Brussels sprouts, sprouting brocolli, kale, calabrese, cauliflowers, radish and tender herbs such as coriander and basil.
• Plant Jerusalem artichoke tubers.
• Plant asparagus crowns.
• Plant out onions sown from seed earlier in the spring.
• Pot up tomato seedlings when they develop true leaves above the more rounded seed leaves.
• Support your peas! Peas sown last year or earlier this year need to be supported by either pea netting or twiggy sticks.
• Prepare runner bean supports, this will save you time later in the year.
• Shade seedlings in the greenhouse or on windowsill on sunny days. Tender young seedlings can quickly wilt and die.
• Continue to prick out seedlings before they become straggly.
• Dig in overwintered green manures,  3-4 weeks before you want to use the ground, or before the plants start to become tough, or begin to flower. Using a sharp spade, turn the plants back into the soil, chopping them up as you go.

Fruit

• There's still time to feed fruit, hungry feeders such as blackcurrants, plums, cherries, pears and cooking apples can all be fed with sulphate of ammonia.
• Ventilate strawberries under cloches and add straw manure.
•  Spray peaches with water to help fruit set.
•  Cut back newly planted raspberries. 
•  Keep an eye out for pests.

General care

• Support pea plants with sticks, twigs, green support mesh, or wire netting.
• Thin out rows of seedlings as soon as they are large enough to be handled.
• Protect early outdoor sowings from frost with fleece and polythene.
• Continue to force chicory and seakale.
• Dig up selected chicory roots, pot them up, and position them in a dark warm place (10-13°C; 50-55°F), with an upturned pot over them.
• Prepare runner bean supports and trenches for sowing (in May) or planting out (in June).