Garden Advice › Garden Tips of the Month
Garden Tips March 2015
March Tips from the Living Earth Staff Veggie Garden - Digger Dan is helping the Living Earth staff get their garden planted for autumn!
The Garden: It's been a scorcher summer and their veggie patch is running very wild with corn and pumpkins. Never fear they've got some exciting plans for redesigning their vegetable garden this autumn and winter, market garden style, to provide their family and friends with organic vegetables. But it all starts with building up the microbial goodness and organic matter in the soil…
Follow their lead in your garden; Together with the Living Earth staff, Digger is pulling ideas from permaculture, market gardens, cropping rotations, companion planting, traditional Maori gardening techniques and of course gleaning knowledge from the Living Earth Technical team.
In the veggie patch:
-
Time to pull out those weeds while the sun is still hot. The boys are getting ruthless in their make-over and are taking out old, tired-looking brassicas to prepare the beds for new rows.
-
Assess your soils - Digger is doing pH and soil observation tests. It's a great time to check in with your microbes and give them some food. Plant a green crop - lupins, mustard seeds - in areas where the soil could do with a nitrogen boost and some good structure. Or add Living Earth organic certified compost for added organic matter for a slow release and uptake of nutrients, the way nature intends! Can't mess with that. Fertilise any plants with our Organic Liquid Compost for an added boost of goods.
-
Autumn Vegetables: Plant your Chinese greens and brassicas such as cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage. It's a perfect now for spring onions and spinach. And the boys are getting a head start on propagating winter root vegetables such as beetroot, parsnip and carrots by planting into the Living Earth Garden Mix.
-
Something new: this autumn the garden will have a section that is planted according to traditional Maori gardening techniques with kumara, Maori potatoes and New Zealand spinach. Digger got inspired by the book 'A Tohunga's Natural World' based on AUT Professor Paul Moon's conversations with the late Hohepa Kereopa - one of New Zealand's few acknowledged Maori tohunga (expert healer).
-
Harvest - the staff garden has plenty of corn to harvest now and the aubergines are well on their way. This week the boys ate the last of their parsnip and carrots, which they put in last spring. The wild giant pumpkins are looking amazing and taking over a huge patch of the garden! Time to seed save those favorite varieties of tomatoes and other heirloom vegetables too.
General March Gardening
-
Mulch your garden with our compost-based BLACKGOLD Mulch for added nutrients and to lock in the moisture over the hot late summer. Weed first, water the garden deeply then apply the mulch at least 50mm thick around plants.
-
Trim hedges for a great crisp framework to the garden over the winter
-
Plant for autumn colour that complements the turning leaf colours - colourful orange heleniums, rudbeckias and cannas. Heucheras with their great foliage tones enhance autumn and grasses, particularly bronze forms of bronze carex, such as Carex testacea add excellent textural contrast.
-
Cut back overgrown lavenders, hebes and daisies - they'll develop great shape and may even surprise with another show of flowers!
-
Best time to buy bulb varieties such as daffodils, tulips and hyacinths. Chill in the fridge.
-
Follow Digger's work with the Living Earth staff vegetable garden on Living Earth blog, Facebook and Instagram!
Lawn Care:
With autumn around the corner and temperatures starting to cool down it is time to turn attention to your lawn. After a long hot summer even existing lawns need some TLC and the sooner you do this the better it will look for the autumn. This will able your lawn to go into the winter months looking lush and healthy. If your lawn is looking tired, yellow, and full of weeds or you are looking at putting in a new lawn, now is the perfect time.
Fertilise your lawn with Prolawn Gold and repair and seed any areas that you may have lost over summer. Make sure you choose the appropriate Prolawn Seed blend to best suit your site and situation. Your local Central Landscape store can assist you with this. Central has the professional range of Prolawn lawn care products and great Living Earth lawn mixes such as Ultra Lawn. Ask for the NEW Prolawn Lawn Guide at any of our yards for more information.
Garden Thought of the Month:
"A garden requires patient labour and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfil good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them." Liberty Hyde Bailey