March Garden Chores

Y’all!!! Spring is here! Well, that depends on which meteorological or astronomical seasons. But regardless, spring is either here or coming up soon! Can you tell I’m excited? The spring garden doesn’t usually do well for us here in the Southeastern US. But there is still a ton of stuff to do and I’m here to give you my March garden chores so that you can prepare your garden.

March Garden Chores

March starts the crazy season for us on the homestead. But the March garden chores can be broken down into 3 main categories: seeding the garden, cultivating the beds, and building the garden. This is also the same time that I am still gathering any tools that I may need that I didn’t get in February. While that may seem kind of lame after I just said it’s a crazy season, but keep reading and I’ll explain.

Seeding The Garden

This is hands down the most time consuming thing when it comes to the garden. Not only does it take a lot of time, it also takes a lot of mental energy. You’ve got to figure out how many seeds you are going to start, how many cups you have, how much space you have, etc.

For me, I use Seedtime to help me figure out exactly how many seeds to plant and when to start them. Seedtime has definitely made my weekly garden task list easier to manage and less of a guessing game. The garden planning feature is great on it’s own, but I tend to throw my plan out the window during the height of planting….. It’s something I’m working on.

The other big part about seeding the garden is making sure that I actually have plenty of stuff to start seeds. This year, we are selling plant starts, so not only am I starting all of our seeds for our family and farmer’s market produce, but I’m also starting seeds for plant sales.

That means I need to make sure that I have plenty of pots, trays, seeds, soil, and compost. I use these seed trays, these pots, and these carry trays from Bootstrap Farmer for our personal plants and farmer’s market produce. I use these pots from Grower’s Solution for all of our plant starts that we are selling.

Cultivating Garden Beds

This is going to look different from year to year depending on your own beds. This year, we completely changed our big garden. We are installing raised beds throughout the garden to help build the soil faster. There were a lot of reasons that went into building raised beds, but at the end of the day, we now have to cultivate them.

What is cultivating? In short, it’s just preparing the beds for planting. That may look like breaking the soil just enough to be able to get your plants in there, pulling weeds, or amending beds.

In the kitchen garden, cultivating looks like taking a couple loads of goat bedding and soil to each bed and filling them up a bit more.

In the big garden, we won’t start cultivating beds until closer to April. This is mostly due to the fact that we haven’t gotten them built yet…. oops.

But the biggest part about cultivating is making sure that all the weeds are out, leaves from fall are moved to the compost pile, and you are ready to plant.

Building The Garden

If you are in March, your garden should already be built. BUT if you’re anything like us, you are probably still building your garden because the timeline got pushed until the breaking point. In our defense, we both work full time jobs, homeschool and February-April is kidding season. So we are slammed trying to get everything done.

We start planting our gardens around April 15th, pending a frost free 10 day forecast, which means every single bed must be built, filled and prepped by April 1st. If we are not building beds, like in our kitchen garden, it looks like repairs, cleaning up, adding compost, soil, or animal bedding.

Building the garden also looks like fencing, gates, seating areas, trellising, and other supports. So even if you aren’t building beds, you may need to be thinking about and sourcing these items. We may not be able to get the gates installed, so we will end up falling back on using pallets. That means that I need to get ahold of pallets and gate hardware. Or figuring out how to get cattle panels to the farm and then up up for trellising.

Our big garden is also getting a gazebo/ pergola this year. In fact, we can’t even finish building the back left side of the garden until the gazebo is built. We are doing this to make sure that we have PLENTY of space between beds and aren’t trying to squeeze things where they don’t fit.

Gathering Tools

Everyone is different when it comes to their planting times. That means that you may not be ready to start seeds yet. But you still need to start gathering up any tools, pots, soil, compost, seeds, etc. If you are a new gardener, you may not know exactly what tools you need. Or maybe you’re not ready to start your own seeds. That’s totally cool.

The main tools that you will need are a good set of pruners (I prefer Fiskars brand). There are a ton of different kinds of pruners, but getting a small and larger set will get you started. I would also suggest getting at least two… you will lose them.

I would also suggest a good set of hand tools. I’m not saying you should get this set, but I would suggest that you get at least the hand trowel, cultivator and large trowel.

March Garden Chores: Planting!

For us, we are usually able to start planting stuff in March. I’ll be planting carrots, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower around the first of the month. Hopefully, our cool nights will allow us to actually get a harvest….

What are your March garden chores?

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