April can be a mixed bag of weather and often unpredictable, making visits to the allotment difficult if you don’t have a shed or greenhouse in which to retreat. Nights are chilly and frosts are still troublesome so don’t risk planting out anything tender. There’s plenty to be getting on with this month, such as sowing or planting hardy crops outside. If it’s particularly chilly where you are, cover areas of soil you want to sow with cloches, warm soil increases germination success. Keep a roll of horticultural fleece to hand, you never know when you may need it.
Jobs that can be carried out this month, depending on weather conditions:
- Begin harvesting established asparagus spears
- Plant asparagus crowns
- Keep harvesting early sprouting broccoli to keep plants productive
- Get areas of soil ready for sowing by covering with cloches
- Erect climbing bean poles
- Plant second early or main crop potatoes
- Pot on tomato and chilli seedlings sown earlier in the year
- Keep the hoe busy!
- Make the bees happy – sow wildflower seed mix direct where they are to flower
- Harvest established early rhubarb for those warming crumbles
- Plant out onion sets
- Sow some flowers such as sunflowers and cosmos undercover
Some vegetable seeds to sow this month:
- Tomatoes on a warm sunny windowsill or heat mat
- Early peas in lengths of guttering, modules under cover or direct if the soil is warm enough
- Beetroot direct under a cloche or multi sow in modules under cover to plant out as clumps of seedlings
- Celeriac under cover
- Carrots direct, under fleece or tunnel cloches
- Lettuce and radish
- Summer and winter cabbages under cover or direct under cloches
- Early purple sprouting broccoli and Brussels sprouts under cover or direct under cloches
- Leeks
- Parsnip direct if the soil and weather is warm, use a tunnel cloche to aid germination
Allotment Haven 
I’ll be sowing some carrots and lots of flower seeds, then mostly hoeing and weeding. xx
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