Coastal gardens are generous in some ways and ruthless in others. Light levels are often brilliant, frost arrives later and leaves earlier than it does a few miles inland, and spring can start a fortnight sooner. But the wind rarely stops, salt comes with every gale, and mild winters push soft growth upwards just in time for a cold easterly to cut it back. These spring jobs make the biggest difference on a windy, salty plot.

Read the microclimate before you do anything else

Spend a couple of breezy mornings working out how wind moves through your garden before spending money on plants. There are usually two or three places where it funnels and accelerates: gaps between buildings, the mouth of a driveway, the corner of a fence, the space between a shed and a hedge. Those are the spots that will burn, shred and flatten anything tender.

Look for evidence of salt damage from winter gales as well. Browning and scorched leaf edges on the seaward side of evergreens such as euonymus, escallonia and holly tell you exactly where the salt lands. Distance from the shore matters enormously: a garden 300 metres inland on rising ground will be noticeably kinder than one on the front, even on the same street.

Finally, check the soil. Most coastal plots are thin, free-draining and either sandy or stony, sometimes sitting over shell sand and therefore alkaline. That suits a great many native coastal plants, but it means moisture and nutrients vanish quickly.

Shelter first, planting second

Nothing you do later in the season will matter as much as getting shelter right in spring. Aim for roughly half-permeable barriers rather than solid ones. A solid fence or wall pushes wind over the top and creates damaging turbulence on the leeward side, whereas a woven hurdle, slatted screen or mesh netting filters it down to a breeze.

• Erect woven hazel or willow hurdles around the most exposed corner of the plot.
• Stretch windbreak mesh to about 1.2 metres on a simple timber frame around vegetable beds and young fruit.
• Plant a mixed native hedge on the windward boundary: hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, wild privet, dog rose and guelder rose all cope well and give shelter, blossom and berries.
• Plant bare-root hedging before the end of March while the soil is still cool and damp.

Protect new growth from late gales

Around the coast, the riskiest weeks are usually late March to mid-May, the period old gardeners call the blackthorn winter. Frost is rarely the problem; wind and salt are. Tender new shoots that have grown away in a mild spell can be stripped in an afternoon.

• Keep fleece or a cloche to hand for early potatoes, lettuce and newly planted annuals, and weight it down properly.
• Stake and support perennials as they emerge rather than waiting until they flop. Grow-through supports and pea sticks placed early are invisible by June.
• Avoid high-nitrogen feeds in early spring. They push soft, sappy growth that burns in salt wind. Wait until growth has hardened.
• After a gale, rinse salt off foliage with a can of rainwater, ideally early in the day so leaves dry before evening.

Feed the soil and mulch

Free-draining soil loses organic matter fast, so spring mulching is not a luxury on the coast. Spread five to eight centimetres of well-rotted compost, leaf mould or manure over beds after weeding, keeping it clear of stems and crowns. It holds moisture, buffers temperature and slowly improves the soil's ability to hold nutrients.

Seaweed is the coastal gardener's traditional mulch. Use only loose material from the strandline rather than cutting it from rocks, and check local byelaws before collecting. Fresh seaweed is salty, so rinse it if you are spreading it around young plants, or compost it first and use it the following year. Around plants that resent rich soil, sharp horticultural grit is a better top dressing than compost.

Sow hardy annuals and early crops

Once the soil is workable and has begun to warm, direct sowing is far easier than raising everything in modules. Sow in shallow drills and protect the rows from wind-blown sand and hungry birds.

• Hardy annuals: cornflower, corn marigold, pot marigold, nigella, candytuft, corn poppy and love-in-a-mist. Most will self-seed happily in sandy ground.
• Native and coastal wildflowers: viper's bugloss, yellow horned poppy, sea campion and wild carrot. Sow thinly and resist the urge to enrich the ground.
• Vegetables: broad beans, early peas, beetroot, chard, carrots, radish and cut-and-come-again salad leaves.
• Sea kale is worth sowing in modules now. It grows into a handsome grey-leaved mound and its young shoots blanch beautifully the following spring.

Plant, divide and let the wildlife settle

Spring is the moment to plant the natives that make a coastal garden feel rooted in its place. Sea thrift, sea campion, kidney vetch, bird's-foot trefoil, wild thyme, sea lavender and sea holly all thrive in free-draining, windy ground and ask for nothing once established. Plant them in groups rather than singly, so they knit together and shelter one another.

Divide overcrowded perennials while new shoots are just showing, water them in well and mulch around, not over, the crowns. Keep feeding light on wildflower areas; richness encourages coarse grasses that smother the flowers you want.

Finally, hold off on hedge trimming. Birds nest from March through to late summer, so leave hedges, climbers and long grass alone until the end of August. A shallow dish of water, a few bare patches of ground for solitary bees, and a little tolerated untidiness will do more for your garden's resilience than any spray or feed.