As the temperature begins to drop, Autumn is an excellent time to get out into the garden. The scorching heat of Summer has gone, so it’s the perfect time to take advantage of bright sunny days and milder weather to get your garden back under control, ready for winter and well prepared for the return of spring. Bittern Garden Supplies is the local choice for all your landscaping and gardening needs servicing Hastings, Mornington and the surrounding Mornington Peninsula. While there’s many things green-thumbs can do in Autumn, here’s our top 5 jobs for Autumn gardening.
Give Your Garden a Post-Summer Tidy-Up
Before you can get your garden ready for the cooler months, you need to get rid of the remnants of summer, which is another way of saying that your garden probably needs a good tidy! This includes pruning, raking, sweeping, clipping back and ripping out. This will neaten up your garden and give you a great start for winter preparation, and it will also deter pests and provide a good supply of material for the compost heap.
Fertilise to Improve the Health of Your Soil
Enriching your soil with fertilisers will help to prepare garden beds for planting spring flowering bulbs. Choose a well-balanced fertiliser, one that has equal ratios of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and contains calcium. This will encourage plant cells to thicken, making plants more resilient to fungus and disease during the cold and wet of winter.
Look After Your Lawn
Autumn is the ideal time to help your lawn recover from the summer heat, and to prepare it for the wetter and colder months ahead. You can start a new lawn from seed or rolls of turf. It’s also important to get lawn weeds under control and give the lawn a feed to promote healthy green growth before the cold winter weather arrives. Ideally you want a lower nitrogen content fertiliser than what you use in spring and summer. The right fertiliser will help repair damaged areas by promoting new growth as well as promote new root growth before soil temperatures drop. Also remember to regularly remove fallen leaves from your lawn as these can deprive the lawn of light, causing it to die off and create brown patches.
Plan Your Veggie Garden
Autumn is the perfect time to plant cool season veggies like baby leaf spinach, silverbeet, baby beetroot, onions, broad beans, spring onions, kale, lettuce and cauliflower. Fragrant and versatile herbs including coriander, rocket, Italian parsley and chives will also thrive in the cooler temperatures.
Mulch Your Garden Beds
While you might not be losing as much water from the soil surface as you would in summer, in many areas, autumn can be pretty dry, so give your garden a good long soak and then apply an even layer of organic mulch. Mulch acts as a weed deterrent in milder climates where weeds persist, and it keeps the soil warmer in areas of frost. It also gradually breaks down, adding lots of organic matter to the soil.
Other Handy Autumn Gardening Hints
- Take care around the base of shrubs and trees to limit the build-up of mulch and other garden matter around the stem or trunk region, particularly in high rainfall areas. This helps prevent collar rot and other fungal attack.
- Get stuck into pruning, to shape your trees or encourage more fruit production.
- Trim your hedges before the onset of winter to keep them compact and bushy at ground-level.
Autumn is a great time to get out into your garden and prepare it for the cold winter months. For high quality gardening supplies or for expert advice from a team of gardening specialists, visit Bittern Garden Supplies today or give us a call on 5983 9779. .
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