Garden tips for December

The fruit and vegetable garden

• Assisting eggplant flowers to pollinate – use a small paintbrush to transfer pollen between flowers. Eggplant flowers are pale mauve and droop downwards, so they’re often overlooked by the bees.
• A regular squirt of water over the bean plants is said to increase bean production. Picking regularly also encourages a bumper crop.
• It’s all in the staking – plants such as beans, tomatoes and cucumbers benefit from good climbing supports through the summer.
• Find out if your potatoes are ready by gently excavating from the edge of the mound. Early cropping potatoes are generally ready from now onwards.
• Young citrus tree leaves curling up? An infestation of aphids on the backs of leaves can dealt with by manually wiping them off, or by spraying with a fish-based oil spray such as Aquaticus ‘Glow’.
• Leek plants are available in seedling punnets or bundles. Separate them carefully, then plant each one in a 10cm deep hole (use a pencil to create the hole). Don’t fill with soil, regularly watering will gradually fill it in.

• Weeding is a great way to tidy the garden up for summer, giving space for plants to grow and for mulch to be spread.
• Avoid clipping plants like hedges and topiaries from now on as freshly exposed foliage will burn in the summer sun.
• Flowering agapanthus should not be left to go to seed. These plants colonise easily in Auckland at the expense of other more desirable options.
• Summer prune the wisteria, rambling roses and jasmine to maintain control as they grow extensively in the heat.
• Plant carpet thymes, prostrate muehlenbeckias and coprosmas as hardy groundcovers to keep the weeds at bay.
• Heading away? Move pots and baskets into shadier areas to reduce their water consumption.
• The scent of summer – climbing star jasmine, bushes of philadelphus and michelia – or add a favourite rose - these all offer wafts of perfume around the summer garden.