How to get your garden ready for spring, according to King Charles's gardener

With winter nearly behind us and spring just around the corner, there’s no better time to start preparing your garden for the warmer months.

When it comes to gardening a lot of time, effort, and love goes into creating a carefully crafted landscape. And, according to King Charles's senior gardener Jack Stooks, there are a few simple steps that you can follow to ensure your garden is in top condition for when you’re ready to venture outside again.

From rose pruning to garden borders, Jack—who has worked in the royal gardens at Highgrove for more than 20 years—shares his expert knowledge when it comes to transforming your outdoor space into a blooming paradise.

Sharing his expertise with Betway, Jack reveals which vegetables to prioritise in the upcoming months, how to bring roses back to life, and why it's important to get organised ahead of the warmer months. 

If you haven’t already, cut back all your herbaceous perennial or dead plants from the winter. If there are any weeds that are obvious, you can dig all those weeds out and cover the garden with a really thick mulch. Mulch is often used prior to the winter in order to protect plants, however, If you haven’t done it, a really good mulch of the borders or some sort of feeding will need to be used ahead of spring.

Now might also be a good time to focus on rose pruning. Cut back your roses to where you want them to go from, take back the deceased and dying flowers, clear the borders out, then give them a manure feed using a well rotted-manure. If you’ve got really big rose beds, it’s definitely worth putting some well-rotted manure on them.

It’s always good to ensure any garden furniture or glass houses are cleaned ahead of spring and summer. If you have a glass house, it’s worth getting the jet washer out to make sure the glass is clean and ready for early vegetables and select potatoes.

If you’ve got the jet washer out, you could also do your paths, driveways and even mental benches or chairs, anything that’s gotten slippery over the winter. When you can go and sit out in the garden in the warmer months, you don't want to be sitting and getting green and mucky from the dirt that’s been lingering over winter!

If you’ve got your own compost area, you might want to get that out and use it now, as well as any branches that need to be put through the shredder. After they’ve been put through the shredder, it's a good time to start laying the branches on any borders or around bigger trees.

Now is also a good time to make a start on early vegetables. As the weather is getting warm, you might want to go to your garden centre and see what tomatoes you like, or make a start on early onions and potatoes. It’s still slightly early, but once you’ve got everything organised, it will be about time to get those things in. Potatoes don’t come around until late February, so now is the perfect time to get organising.

Garden centres will start getting their new flowers around this time. Most of them will have started to bloom, so if people haven’t already bought their bulbs and put them into the ground, they’ll get to see exactly what you’re buying. This is the joy of the garden centres in the UK—they provide and sell the plants that people are wanting as they’re coming up and coming into season.

Once the spring plants start shooting up, then you will see if there’s gaps you might want to start filling. This is also a good opportunity to rearrange plants whenever you might want them positioned.

As well as plants, it’s always a good opportunity to get down to the garden centre to see what tools are available or on offer. You may have broken your rake last year and need it replaced.

Another really good thing to look out for at the moment is bird seed. It’s always a joy to see what birds are coming into your garden, while coming into the nice summer weather. There’s nothing better than sitting outside and seeing those flashes of life in the garden.