Your Garden in December 2023
Summer is official here, enjoy your garden or favourite green space!
The garden is a great place to while away a summer’s afternoon, or to celebrate the festive season with family and friends with a barbecue, picnic or game of backyard cricket.
This month, we’ve got advice on caring for and enjoying your garden in summer, along with ideas on what to plant, prune and how to protect your garden so it shines throughout the heat of summer.
Celebrating the festive season in your garden
If you have family or friends visiting your place this festive season, it’s time to whip the garden into shape. Make a list and work your way through it. Jobs that can give the garden a refresh include cleaning paving, and outdoor furniture and repainting areas such as the back fence.
In the weeks leading up to the arrival of visitors, concentrate on weeding, pruning and removing spent plants so the garden looks fresh and well cared for. As you weed, have mulch on hand to cover disturbed soil and take care not to spread weed seeds.
Make sure all parts of the weed are removed or it will just regrow. If weed infestation is too hard to control try an organic herbicide such as EarthCare Organic WeedKiller spray. It controls anything it encounters, so be careful around your favourite plants.
Prepare the garden for summer planting.
Pruning back plants after they’ve flowered encourages new growth, and brings on a new flush of flowers. After pruning, help plants recover by watering with Seasol.
Where annuals have been removed, improve the soil with homemade compost or aged manure and/or Seasol Super Compost before replanting seasonal colour that will provide flowers through until autumn.
To get a head start on growth, look for advanced potted colour at the local hardware and garden centres. Look at where there are dull areas or bare spots. These may be the ideal spot to pop in summer-flowering shrubs such as hydrangeas.
In the days before your outdoor event, mow the lawn high, trim the edges and make sure the barbecue is clean and ready to go.
Some like it hot – flowers for summer
Make your garden sparkle this summer with heat-loving flowers. Zinnias, portulaca and heat-tolerant salvias all relish summer’s warmth. Zinnias are quick growing, colourful and ideal for picking to use in a vase.
Portulaca is a low-growing succulent with small, rose-like flowers in bright colours like pink and orange. Grow it in a sunny garden as an edging or in a pot.
Salvias are large shrubs to add both colour and bulk to the summer garden. Many have fragrant foliage. Once established, salvias are drought tolerant. Lightly prune and liquid feed regularly every two weeks with PowerFeed PRO SERIES for Roses & Flowers to encourage flowers for many months.
Keep wisteria under the thumb
Wisteria is one of the most beautiful flowering climbers to grow in