What to Do in the Garden in April
Ranunculus blooming alongside my baby pepper plants on April 1.
For most garden zones, summer is full of abundance, with beans, melons, eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes flowing out of the backyard. In Texas, we’ve come to fear summer. Summer 2023 was especially brutal. If you live in such a place, be realistic about what you want to keep alive through the coming heat when plotting your April garden. But if you are willing to water it, a summer bounty can be yours.
“Will I really go outside to water these tomatoes when it’s 102°?” Are you traveling over the summer? Are you a creature of air-conditioning? (no shame). When you are planning your spring garden, consider your future self and plan accordingly.
Are you going on a long overdue summer vacation? If you don’t have a reliable friend or neighbor to tend your crops, or a timer/irrigation setup, either start making plans for that scenario, or plant things you can enjoy until you leave and then hope for the best on your return. Maybe it will rain a lot and you’ll get lucky. Also ask yourself if you have the willpower required to commit to watering outdoors in the heat. A lot of Texas gardeners take the summer off. It’s the worst time to be outdoors for long amounts of time as the summer heat is triple digit and it starts cranking up this month. Soaker hoses are great though. You can turn them on and then go back inside. Just set a timer on your phone so you don’t forget and rotate the watering around the garden on different days.
If you do think you may be traveling, you can always just scale down. Focus on a small area or just a few crops and some zinnias. I have a friend who wants to make his own hot sauce, so he’s growing nothing but pepper plants. I love that focus. I’m sure by the end of this season, he’ll be a pepper expert. If you are only growing one food crop, add some flowers, and/or a companion herb like basil or oregano, to add some beauty and attract pollinators.
Try to get your tomatoes planted by the first week of April.
After early April, you may not get any fruit until fall on what seem like perfectly healthy plants. Tomatoes take a timeout in the high heat and humidity of our Texas summers. Wait too long, and you get green tomatoes that never turn red on the vine, or plants that don’t produce any fruit at all. Planting cherry tomatoes or smaller varieties will increase your odds.
It will probably rain a lot this month, which makes watering tricky. You’ll be tempted to think, “It rained, I don’t need to water.” The reality is that maybe that rain only superficially impacted the soil.
Once during a downpour I took cover under my backyard loquat. I was shocked how few raindrops fell on me and realized I really needed to water the under-planted crops a lot more thoroughly. I cannot recommend highly enough getting a moisture gauge to see if you need to water or not. Nothing kills a plant faster than over-watering, especially in a pot. To that end, these are great to use on your houseplants as well.
Don’t bother getting the light & pH combo meters. The pH meter part almost immediately stops working. This simple device will save you so much heartache.
This is a great month to start your no-till beds.
This is a project that I urge you to take on this summer so if you haven’t already. Use cardboard to define where you want your future in-ground beds to go. If it’s where your containers are, great, put the cardboard under the containers. But as the summer goes on, add layers of organic matter on top of those boxes. Newspapers, vegan table scraps, wood chips, whatever. Just make sure it’s all non-toxic stuff, no glossy magazines. Water it all occasionally. Let it cook in the sun. By the time fall comes around, you can just add some soil (potentially the very same soil you are now using in your containers), and some fresh compost on top, and you’ll be good to go. No tilling, no hard work, no nothing. Just a garden bed full of the exact organic materials we’ve wanted for our soil all along. You can also just put newspaper down, build a bed on top of it , and fill it with dirt. That works too!
Swallowtail season begins! Consider getting a habitat for caterpillars. It’s a gratifying, if messy, endeavor. In the wild, only 1 in 100 make it all the way to butterfly. You can help! Plant lots of extra fennel (easy to do from seed) so that the hungry hungry hippos have lots to munch on. You will need to add fresh food to their habitat every day if you raise them and they only want to eat their host plant. Fennel doesn’t play well with other crops, so devote a space in the garden just for it.
April Garden Tasks:
Finish clearing all your beds, weeding, adding new compost and soil amendments for your new season. You don’t want to to be doing that when it’s hot.
Fertilize and mulch perennials to prep them for spring and to help them conserve water into summer. Certain perennials are later than others in coming back. Banana plants and Pride of Barbados are usually the latest in my garden.
If you have spent in-ground spring bulbs, don’t cut back the leaves until they turn brown. Then either mark where they are planted so you don’t forget, or dig them up and replant them next year. You want to make sure the plant is dormant though before you do anything.
Freeze damage is ongoing: Sago palms are still struggling. If the fronds are green at the base and are still structurally sound, the plant is still alive. If the fronds have all fallen and you can easily pull them out of the base of the plant with your hand, your plant is dead or on its way there. It’s okay to finally give up and cut all the fronds away.
Pillbugs have been an issue the last few springs. If you are inundated with roly polys and are discovering that they do actually eat your plants, remove any wood mulch in problem areas. That is what they are most attracted to and is the most effective way to make them go elsewhere.
If you’re getting impatient with your nigella or giant poppies to bloom, it usually happens around the third week of April. It can be frustrating when you need the space to plant new crops. The blooms are worth the wait though, I promise.
Shop for native pollinator plants to add to your landscape! In Texas, I recommend Mexican bush sage (which won’t make it through the winter if you plant a seedling in the fall,) rock rose, gregg’s mistflower, turk’s cap, blackfoot daisy, blue sage, Autumn sage, and, of course, Texas sage. Build some infrastructure into that garden so that you have less work to do and visual interest lasts through the seasons.
What to plant in April:
Flower Seeds:
Alyssum
Coleus
Cosmos
Gomphrena
Morning Glory
Moonflowers
Sunflowers
Mexican Sunflowers (Tithonia)
Ornamental Basils
Celosia
Gomphrena
Hyacinth Bean
Borage
Zinnias
Vegetable Seeds:
Swiss chard
Corn
Collards
Endive
Heat-resistant varieties of lettuces & greens
Cucumber
Summer & winter squash*
Pumpkin
Cantaloupe
Watermelon
Okra
Black-eyed peas
Herb Seeds: Culinary basil and fennel both grow easily from seed. For most herbs though, at this point, go with transplants. Way easier. Basil I love to grow from seed, because I can never have enough.
Vegetables Transplants: Chard, corn, cucumber, eggplant, Malabar spinach (which is a big vine and a great thing to grow on an ugly fence), peppers, pumpkin, summer & winter squash, tomatillos (you need at least two), tomatoes (until April 10th!), beans (not Fava— it’s not their time— but we should all be bean farmers now, try snap or lima), cantaloupe, amaranth. Thai chili, chili pequin, okra
Herb Transplants: Basically, anything you want. Keep mint and lemon balm in containers or wild areas so they don’t take over your whole garden. Now is the perfect time for pretty much every herb, annual or perennial. Catnip/catmint, chives, horseradish, peppermint, lemongrass (gorgeous in a big container), Thai basil. I urge you to plant woody perennial herbs in the ground if you can, even if you are a renter. You can always dig them up and take them with you later. Rosemary especially is good planted by a door your dog uses a lot. Every time it runs through it, it will transfer that wonderful rosemary smell over the baked dog sweat smell I’m sure every Texas dog owner is very familiar with. Those herbs are: oregano, thyme, rosemary, and Mexican mint marigold (also known as Mexican Tarragon). Maybe you’re excited to entertain again. What herbs do you want to infuse in your simple syrups? What flowers do you want to freeze into ice cubes or sprinkle onto salads? You’re a wizard, Harry. Use your gardening powers.
*You can plant summer squash, just don't get attached to it. Plant early, harvest as much as you can and accept that the SVB will claim it unless you grow it in a tunnel. Winter squash has even less of a chance.
Later in the month, it will be time to start planting sweet potato slips. If you can get your hands on organic sweet potatoes, you can start prepping them for planting just like you did in elementary school: another fun activity for kiddo garden assistants. A faster way is to put a whole sweet potato in a shallow pan with drainage (can be an aluminum roasting pan with holes poked in it, I like to use lids from fruit containers), fill it up halfway with soil, and then set it on a heating pad that you’d use to start your seeds. It speeds the process up considerably.
