Read the ground before you touch it

Early spring in the vegetable patch is a tease. One afternoon the sun has real warmth in it, the blackbirds are belting out their territorial songs, and you itch to get the fork out. The next morning there is a hard white frost on the shed roof and the soil is claggy underfoot. The single most useful skill at this time of year is patience — specifically, patience about when to walk on the beds.

Clay soils in particular need to drain before they can be worked. Dig or tread on them while they are still wet and you will compress the structure into something closer to brick than tilth, and that damage takes a whole season to undo. The old test still holds: take a handful of soil from a spade's depth, squeeze it, and drop it onto the path. If it shatters, get going. If it sits there like a lump of putty, wait another week and tidy the shed instead.

Wake the soil gently

Once the ground is workable, the priority is preparing it without smashing it about. Fork over the top 20–25cm, breaking up the worst of the clods but leaving a reasonably lumpy surface — a fine, dusty tilth created too early just slumps and caps after the first heavy shower. If you have a rotavator, resist the temptation to run it over everything at speed; shallow passes are kinder than deep ones.

Spread well-rotted farmyard manure or garden compost on the hungry crops — courgettes, beans, potatoes, brassicas — at roughly a barrowload per square metre, and leave the root beds (carrots, parsnips, beetroot) unmanured, since fresh muck forks and splits them. A dusting of blood, fish and bone at the recommended rate gives a gentler start than anything stronger.

• Cover cleared beds with black polythene or fleece to warm them two or three weeks before sowing.
• Test the pH if you have not done so for a few years; most vegetables want 6.5–7.0.
• Lime only where brassicas are going, and never in the same year as manure.
• Repair raised-bed boards and refresh gravel paths before the weeds get their feet under the table.

Hardy crops to sow now

Under cover or in a sheltered, south-facing frame, early March is the moment for the tough customers. Broad beans go in direct, 5cm deep and 20cm apart, in double rows 25cm apart — they shrug off frost and give you pods before the blackfly arrive. Peas sown under cloche will beat the mice if you start them in guttering and transplant the whole row later.

Outside, with the soil warming, direct-sow parsnips (fresh seed only, they lose viability fast), early carrots under fleece, spinach, radish, salad leaves and spring onions. Leeks, onions and the slower brassicas are better started in modules in a cold frame or unheated greenhouse, where you can keep an eye on them. Chit your first early potatoes in a cool, bright room and get them in the ground once the risk of hard frost has passed and the shoots are short and green, not long and pale.

Sow little and often. A fortnightly pinch of salad seed gives you a continuous cut through spring and early summer, while one enormous sowing in March means a glut and then nothing.

Shelter for tender seedlings

Late frosts catch more growers than any pest. A clear night in mid-May can wipe out a tray of courgettes left out to harden off, so build protection into the plan rather than reaching for it in a panic.

• Horticultural fleece is worth its weight — 17gsm will give a few degrees of protection and doubles as a barrier against carrot fly and flea beetle.
• Cloches, whether glass, polythene or a cut-down water bottle, are ideal for individual plants.
• Harden off properly over seven to ten days, bringing plants in at night at first, then leaving them out under fleece.
• Water in the morning, not the evening, so foliage is dry going into a cold night.
• Keep a few spare plants in reserve for the gaps frost leaves behind.

Rotate with purpose

Before the beds fill up, sketch the rotation. Three or four groups work well on most plots: legumes, brassicas, roots, and potatoes with the miscellaneous crops. Move each group on by one bed each year. This starves soil-borne diseases such as clubroot and white rot of their hosts, balances what each bed takes out and puts back, and quietly solves the lime-and-manure clash, since the brassica bed gets the lime and the legume bed gets the compost.

Note what grew where last season, including any failures and where you had pests. It is surprising how quickly a good plan goes wrong when you cannot remember whether the onions followed the beans or the other way round.

Small jobs that pay off later

Mulch the fruit bushes and perennial beds while the soil is still damp, and give the rhubarb a bucket of water and a feed as it starts into growth. Fix netting over the strawberries before the birds notice them, sharpen your hoe and get it through the weeds on a dry morning while they are tiny. Wash out seed trays with hot soapy water, sort last year's seed packets and bin anything past its date except parsnip and onion, which are best bought fresh each year anyway.

Above all, keep a notebook. Early spring is the season of good intentions and quickly forgotten detail, and the gardener who writes things down is the one whose patch gets better every year.