Your Garden This Month: September

Yes, spring has arrived early this year! Some blossoms even started opening in mid-August. The trees now look beautiful.

As the weather warms up, so do the ground temperatures. As lawns and trees begin their nutrient uptake proper fertilising and soil conditioning should now be front of our mind.

It’s time to get into your garden and start the spring rejuvenation program…

GRASSES go dormant or semi-dormant through winter when much of the root energy is used just to stay alive. Then through spring a phenomenon known as ‘root shoot dominance’ occurs whereby the roots transfer most of the stored energy to the leaf tip so they can photosynthesize, ‘repaying’ the root system with new energy. It’s an amazing process of survival.

Our advice for your lawn:

• To restore and store up root energy you need to fertilise your lawn with a nitrogen rich fertiliser, to cause leaf tips to grow, these are your little energy factories.

• Feed the microbial life under your soil, this unlocks the valuable in the soil making them highly available to your lawn.

• Core your lawn, to allow oxygen to get under the root system and carbon dioxide to get out.

• Spray out the broadleaf weeds when they are small, before they compete for the soil nutrients.

FRUIT TREES expend a huge amount of energy this time of year, just think about the elements and soil nutrition that go into making that amazing blossom, and if isn’t enough to empty a load from the tree, it still has yet to produce leaf. It is no wonder your fruit trees beckon you to feed then at this most energy depleting time of the year.

Our advice for your fruit trees:

• Feed your fruit trees with a mineral rich organic product to feed your tree and your soil flora. Grow Life is perfect!

• Humate is very useful to feed the soil and improve nutrient uptake and can be used every 6 weeks, the importance is more about regularly feeding the soil, rather that large amounts dumped now and then. Remember your feeding an growing a family of billions of microbes and organisms that are waiting for the next feed.

• Another important way to help your tree and the soil is by mulching, this retains moisture around the tree’s root system protecting the soil flora, and keeping the tree roots cool. Just remember to keep it off the branch of the tree or you could end up with collar rot.

• Black aphid or peach aphid needs to be looked out for, as they particularly destructive to flowers and branch tips and will need to be controlled quickly and effectively if you enjoy your peaches. Spray them with long life pyrethrum, but do it in the evening so you don’t kill off your precious bees doing their wonderful work pollinating.

IRRIGATION SYSTEMS should be checked now while to see that they are working properly before the heat is upon us. Who was it that invented the 5Ps?

Perfect Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

If there was ever a subject you could most apply this to, it would have to be irrigation. Check your irrigation before it becomes more like a source or aggravation or irritation, through lost plants and brown lawn.

Our advice for maintenance of your irrigation system:

• Check your solenoid valve box and taps for leaking, the last thing you need is a massive water bill.

• Look for broken pipework or pipe damage in the garden where you have been digging recently.

• Check the irrigation controller is running both manually and automatically, sometimes it will run manually, but not automatically so make sure.

• Flush all drip line clean, if they don’t have flushing taps, fit them so they can be flushed. Then run the drippers for a decent length of time i.e. 30 minutes, and check for any dry areas, and fit new drippers where they are blocked.

• Check your pop-up sprinklers are all working and adjusted properly, and replace and damage or blocked ones.

• Cover exposed irrigation pipework with mulch while the weather is cool, this will avoid scalding your plants with hot water when the black pipe is exposed to the sun in the heat of summer.

Be prepared this spring and watch your garden flourish!