February.
In February, the young gardener will find much to do. In the flower-garden, he may finish planting the remainder of the bulbous roots, such as the star of Bethlehem, fritillarias, narcissuses, and gladioluses, in beds or borders, all for flowering the same year. Some may be planted in pots to flower in the house, or they may be placed in the hot-bed for early flowering. Some of the hardy annual flower-seeds may now be sown.
In the kitchen-garden, if we may so call it, a little crop of turnips may be sown to come in early. Cabbage-plants may be set in rows; and a little lettuce-seed may be sown under the frame in the hot-bed. This frame should be well covered at night, and slightly raised in the day time, when the weather is mild, to give the plants within it light and air.
March.
In the flower-garden, the gardener may begin to sow in beds, borders and pots, larkspurs, candy-tuft, lupines, sweet-peas, Venus's looking-glass, pansies, stocks, sweet-scabius, and many others.
In the culinary department, now is the time to sow a little bed of onions in a well-manured bed. A bed for carrots may also be prepared, and the seed sown and well trodden down. A bed of parsnips should also be prepared in the same way; and another crop of peas of the marrow-fat kind may be planted in drills in the same manner as the former. And now, perhaps, the cabbages will require the earth to be drawn to their stems; and, if the little gardener has room, he may plant three or four rows of early potatoes. They should be the cuttings of large ones, with not more than two eyes in each piece, and should be planted with manure in rows, about two feet and a half apart and about a foot distant from each other.
April.
Now is the time to begin sowing the more tender annual flower seeds. Some should be sown in the hot-bed; such as African and French marigolds, Indian pinks, China-asters, yellow-sultanas; and many others of the hardy kind, wall-flowers, Canterbury-bells, French honey-suckles, mignonette, pinks, and daises may be planted.
In the kitchen department, kidney-beans may be sown, and at the latter end of the month scarlet-runners and French-beans may be planted. It is not a bad plan to raise a few scarlet-runners in the hot-bed, and to plant them out when they have formed roots, and two or three leaves at the head. But as these kinds of beans are very tender, they should be carefully watched, and covered with straw on the sudden appearance of frost, which often takes place in this month.