Dec 23, 2010
Gardening Tips and Jobs for January
Gardening Tips and Jobs for January. A monthly gardening guide, with easy to follow subtiltes and bulleted easy to follow instructions. Written by Heather Tait and compiled by Bridget Bryant
Vegetables:
• It’s been wet, so spray powdery mildew with Yates’ Nature’s Way Fungus Spray
• Holidays at home with the children: they can have fun sowing, sunflowers, dwarf beans and radishes. Get them to taste all of the ripening garden produce, so they get a taste for it
• Stake corn, as it’s growing quickly, as well as tomatoes and scarlet runner beans.
• If you’re going away and worried about the watering, layer on a mulch of pea straw, but spread a bit of blood and bone first.
• Tomato fruit worm is getting into the tomatoes before we do – use Yates’ Success
• Black aphids are appearing on chives, spring onions and beans – if they are still there after all the rain, then spray with pyrethrum
Fruit
• Citrus trees with yellowing along the veins of their leaves have a magnesium deficiency – feed with citrus fertilizer – water in well, or Sulphate of Iron.
• Young fruit trees don’t necessarily set much fruit in the first year or two, so don’t fret – they just need to get their roots down
• Passionfruit vines can come under attack from aphid and whitefly –pyrethrum is a natural effective spray.
Flower Garden
• Deadhead and water regularly the summer flowerers – roses, hydrangeas and summer flowering perennials
• A summer spray around the garden with Success will stop the caterpillar damage spreading – leaf-rollers on camellias, munching of leaves and flowers on dahlias etc.
• Thickly mulch new plantings and the water hungry, such as ferns and hostas.
• Summer pruning is okay for once-flowering roses and wisterias
Lawns
• Try not to mow too low (scalp the lawn). If you do, the lawn dries more quickly and allows stronger weed species to establish.
• Sowing new lawn is not recommended, but if you have to use a thin layer of our Living Earth Lawn Mix and topdress with seed, irrigating twice daily if it fails to rain.
• Don’t fertilize lawns now – leave it until March.