Whether your garden is a balcony or acreage, Easter is a wonderful time to enjoy harvesting, pruning, planning and planting. In case you need an excuse to spend some balmy-weather days with your plants, here are some essential tasks.
1. Pruning. Trim hedges, but leave most shrubs and flowering trees until late winter, to encourage strong growth and blooms next season. Prune shoots on climbing roses and ‘dead-head’ flowers.
2. Collect those glorious fallen leaves and add them to the compost bin. If there are too many, fill a few hessian bags, add some Dynamic Lifter then park them out of the rain until next spring. Alternatively, allow the pile to dry then get the kids to jump in it to break them down before strewing them around as mulch.
3. Feed lawns with slow-release fertiliser and water in well. Add topsoil and sprinkle lawn seed where necessary, to repair bare patches.
4. Transplanting. If you’ve been wanting to re-arrange your garden, the cooler weather makes this the perfect season to transplant small shrubs and herbs such as lavender or rosemary. Feed with liquid fertiliser to help them get established.
5. Plant winter vegetables – onions, leeks, shallots, silver beet, peas, broccoli, lettuce and rocket.
6. Sow and plant flowers now for winter, spring and summer displays and tend to any perennial bulbs that will be starting to re-remerge from under the soil. Plant new bulbs, adding compost and manure to encourage growth.
