It doesn't matter if your garden is merely ornamental or you use it to grow your own fruits and vegetables - for a healthy garden this spring, you need to be making the necessary preparations now. But where to start? Well, reading this step-by-step guide towards growing a healthier and more attractive spring garden is as good a place as any! Put your green-fingers to good use now and reap the rewards next year of what you sow today.

Give The Garden A Tidy

Garden debris can collect and mount up over November, December and January, so scoop up old leaves and stray branches with a fan rake to avoid damaging perennials in the soil or any young shoots above the ground. Grass, plants, fruits and vegetables will now grow free from obstruction and your garden will look a lot more welcoming!

Compost: The Secret To A Healthy Garden

The role of compost cannot be underestimated when planning your spring garden. It encourages earth worms and other helpful garden creatures to come and aerate the soil, which in turn will fight off the kind of fungi and weeds that can turn a garden into a plant graveyard!

There are many ready-prepared brands of compost available at your local and online gardening centres. If you fancy complimenting this with some homemade compost, follow this recipe:

1 part organic matter

1 part top soil

1 part peat moss

A handful of sand

Mix it up in a bucket or wheelbarrow using a pitchfork or your hands, whichever is preferable and then place it in your compost bin (if you don't have one, it's highly recommended you build or buy one to speed up the fertilisation of a good compost). You can get compost bins from almost any garden centre in the country or an online garden centre if you prefer to do your shopping from home.

For really rich compost, why not try adding some of the old leaves you scooped up earlier, as well as some old banana skins and used coffee grounds? Together these will add moistness, mould and organic matter to the mixture as they decompose - all good things for a plant-supercharging compost.

Be Generous With Your Compost

Once you've got a large quantity of rich compost ready, it's time to spread it across your garden and over all the bulbs and seeds you've planted.

It's really important that you aren't stingy, as plants can never get enough of good compost and will grow to be much stronger and healthier as a result. A sprinkled layer between two and four inches mixed vigorously into the soil will ensure the nutrients get embedded in the garden.

Weeds: The Gardener's Nemesis

The saying goes 'When the cat's away, the mice will play'. The same applies to gardeners and weeds. While you're spending time indoors and away from your garden and allotment, perennial weeds like couch grass, dandelions, chickweed and other pests will be settling in, so make sure you remove them by their roots as soon as you're back in the garden to ensure they don't return in spring (at least for a little while).

It's a never-ending battle against weeds and other garden pests, but if you put in the legwork now, your spring garden will thank you for it later.

These four steps are the foundations of growing a great spring garden. All of the equipment can be bought from local and online garden centres easily, and the methods are not difficult to apply, just good gardening practice. The most important thing to remember is: all the hard work you're putting in now will be rewarded by the time your spring garden comes to bloom.