URBAN FARMER:It's been a long, icy winter but now, finally, spring is here and we can get gardening

SPRINGWATCHERS spotted it almost a month ago: a subtle change, both in the quality and intensity of the light and in the early morning birdsong, which was followed by the first tiny, tentative but very welcome signs of growth. For cautious gardeners, who wanted more definite proof, last week’s soft, southerly breezes and balmy, clear days were more obvious evidence that the long, icy winter was finally beginning to loosen its grip.

Now, all of a sudden (and despite the more recent return to cooler weather), there are small signs of spring everywhere – in the stubby, purple shoots that have begun to appear on chitting seed potatoes, in the vivid green leaves of garlic bulbs that have thrust themselves above ground, and in the crumpled scarlet stalks of the rhubarbs Victoria and Red Champagne that are unfurling in the OPW’s walled kitchen garden.

For OPW gardeners Meeda Downey and Brian Quinn, it’s been a long, long wait. “It’s great just to be working away in the garden again,” grinned Meeda happily as late last week she and Brian began to dig out broad drills or ridges in preparation for planting this year’s seed potatoes. Starting on one side of the large rectangular bed, and using a narrow, rigid length of wood pegged firmly into the ground as a guide (much better than string, which too easily breaks or snags on tools), the gardeners carefully marked out the first drill to a width of roughly 30 inches (75cm).

Then, using two sharp shovels, they dug out a narrow trench along the other side of the plank and exactly parallel to the drill, to a width and a depth of 7 inches (15.5cm). “Roughly the same as the length of a hand trowel”, is how Meeda describes it. The excavated soil was gently and loosely spread on top of the adjacent drill, creating a gently mounded ridge of soil that is some 12 inches (or 30cm) above the original soil level. “We’ll rake them over once we’ve got the lot dug, just to finish them off “, explained Brian, as he and Meeda paused briefly to take a breather from their heavy work.

But even when all of the potato ridges are dug, raked and ready to go, the OPW gardeners will still have to wait until around St Patrick’s Day to plant their chitted seed potatoes. And even then, they’ll only plant Orla and Colleen, both of which are what’s known as first-earlies and which go into the ground about a month before any maincrop potatoes.

That’s because the gardeners know all too well that despite last week’s lovely spring weather (where mean air temperatures were anywhere between 2.9°C to 4.3°C above normal for this time of year), there are still plenty of frosty nights ahead. In other words, while winter has definitely loosened its grip, there’s very little chance that it has fully released it. Planted too early outdoors, any tender young potato shoots that subsequently appear above ground will be all too vulnerable to such freezing night-time temperatures and the result will be a sudden setback to their growth. And while “earthing-up” or pulling loose soil over the young shoots just as they appear above ground is one way of protecting them against such late frosts, the gardeners would prefer to avoid that particular chore if possible.

Meanwhile, in an adjacent panel in the walled garden, Brian and Meeda have also just finished preparing and planting up a new strawberry bed, which will eventually replace the existing strawberry bed elsewhere in the garden. “You’re supposed to discard strawberry plants after about three or four years and replace them with disease-free certified plants in a new area of the garden – otherwise they begin to get viruses and become less vigorous and less productive”, explains Brian. “So after they’ve cropped this summer, we’ll lift the plants out of the old bed and destroy them.”

The walled garden’s new strawberry bed is also giving Meeda and Brian the opportunity to experiment with a variety that they’ve never grown before. Called Symphony, it’s a Scottish-

bred, late-season strawberry variety that the RHS honoured with an AGM (Award of Garden Merit) and which it describes as “a reliable and heavy-cropping summer bearer, cropping in late summer with good flavour”.

The walled garden’s original strawberry bed was planted up with three different mid-season varieties- Eros, El Santa and Cambridge Favourite – but the gardeners suspect that over the years the Cambridge Favourite variety has run rampant, to the point where there are very few of the other two varieties left growing in the bed. The biggest problem with this, as Meeda points out, is that “for two to three weeks, you have this sudden huge glut of strawberries, too many and all at once. Cambridge Favourite don’t store very well either, so the next-door Phoenix Cafe ended up turning a lot of the fruit into jam. By the middle of last summer, we had to stop picking them. We just couldn’t keep up.” Symphony, by comparison, produces a good firm fruit with a decent shelf-life.

“We’re planting 11 rows of the new strawberry bed with the mid-season Elsanta and 12 with the late-season Symphony,” explains Brian, “The Symphony will come into fruit just as the El Santa is finishing and that way the walled garden will have a longer strawberry season without, hopefully, the problems of a sudden glut of fruit like last year.”

Those gardeners who are a little sniffy about Elsanta (and there are many) might be interested to know that the well-known food writer Nigel Slater is quite a fan. "An Elsanta that is allowed to ripen gradually and develop its true sweetness," opined Slater in his recent book Tender: Volume II, "will be a revelation to those who have written off the variety as the 'supermarket strawberry'". The OPW gardeners agree.

And so a total of 320 young strawberry plants, which arrived as bundles of bare-roots from English’s Fruit Nursery in Coonague, Co Wexford (englishsfruitnursery.ie), have been given their spot in the sunniest, south-facing end of the walled garden, where they have been planted about 40cm apart in narrow, raised drills (strawberry plants hate wet soil and so raised drills help with drainage). “Just for this year, we’ll also take off any runners (the baby plants that come off the parent plant) to encourage a good root system,” explains Meeda.

The OPW gardeners planted into bare soil, which will need to be regularly weeded until the plants develop their own dense leaf canopy over time. Other gardeners, might consider laying down weed-suppressant Mypex before planting (it’s best used on flat beds), which won’t look very pretty for a while but will save much time and energy down the line. Because it’s worth remembering that just as in life, good looks in a garden aren’t everything.

WHAT TO: sow, plant and do now

Sow(in a heated propagator, to plant out later into a greenhouse, tunnel or outside): Aubergines (Bonica is best), alpine strawberries, Globe artichokes (early in the month, then they'll still crop outside this year), French beans for cropping in pots inside (choose a disease- resistant variety suitable for early sowing), asparagus, celery, celeriac, tomatoes, chillis and peppers, physalis (Cape gooseberries). Also sow single tender flowers such as French marigolds, tagetes, etc, to attract beneficial insects which help with both pests and pollination.

Sow(in modules under cover without heat, covering with fleece on frosty nights, for later planting in the tunnel or outside): beetroot, broad beans, mangetout and early peas, late spring and summer cabbages, red cabbage, early Brussels sprouts, cauliflowers, calabrese and summer sprouting broccolis, carrots (direct in soil for early tunnel crop), onions and leeks, spring onions, lettuces, kohl rabi, Ragged Jack and Cavolo Nero kale for baby leaves, radishes, Swiss chard, summer spinach, white turnips, salad mixes, and "soft" herbs such as parsley, dill, fennel, greek oregano and coriander. Where you're not planting crops until May, it's also worth sowing quick-growing soft green manures such as red clover, lupins, fenugreek, mustard and phacelia to help improve the soil and feed the worms – make sure varieties fit into your rotation pattern as far as possible.

Sowing details courtesy of organic gardener Nicky Kyle, nickykylegardening.com

Do: Finish ordering seeds, hoe young weeds where soil is workable outdoors. Chit potatoes – and plant chitted early varieties in two-litre pots in or direct into greenhouse bed for an early crop (planting to crop about 10 weeks) Don't plant in soil where you're going to grow tomatoes later – better to grow in pots, which can be moved outside later as space gets tight.

* The OPW’s Victorian walled kitchen garden is in the grounds of the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre, beside the Phoenix Park Cafe and Ashtown Castle. The gardens are open daily from 10am to 4pm

* Next week Urban Farmer will feature the first ever Potato Day at Sonairte, the National Ecology Centre in Laytown Co Meath, which is being held this Sunday, 6th March from 12-5pm. The Potato Day will include a talk by David Langford on the history behind his collection of wonderful old heritage varieties of potato (plus tips on cultivation and cooking the perfect spud), and a demonstration of how to make an Aran lazy bed by Dermot Carey, former Head Gardener of Lissadell. Over 50 varieties of potato will be for sale from the most modern to some of the oldest, with white, gold, blue, purple and black skins, and white, yellow, blue and red flesh. Adult admission €3, children free.

Fionnuala Fallon is a garden designer and writer