Spring gardening guide 3 - October

This is the busiest time of the year in your garden as more than two thirds of the yearly food supplies are grown during the spring and summer months. Over the next few weeks you should be getting both your flower and vegetable gardens planted up with all the types of flowers and vegetables that you wish to grow over the summer months.

To get the most out of your plants in terms of health and productivity, start a crop rotation system now, and keep track of it so you know what to plant in what bed each season. For more on this see the resources section of MyGarden.

Early potting up of tomatoes or planting out may mean you can have some ripe fruit by Christmas, most likely the smaller cherry type tomatoes. Just watch out for frosts.

If you plant peas in now you can probably harvest them on Christmas morning. For peas use a good compost as a light mulch to cover the seeds. Birds sometimes nip off the pea shoots as they appear through the soil because they mistake them for worms.

While potting mix is good for seed raising and indoor plants, in outdoor pots they dry out too quickly, are hard to water and there is only minimal nutrients. The cheaper priced composts are better as long as they are friable and not too heavy. Add a little top soil to the compost in the pot as this will introduce more microbes and help the plants grow naturally.

Add generous amounts of compost into the soil prior to planting for most summer crops. Just be careful about adding too much compost for carrots as your carrots may start to fork as they grow.

Soils are warming up therefore soil moisture conservation is important. Generally, wet soils are cold, so mulching them too soon will slow the warming process. Also, late frosts occur more easily over mulched soils. So watch frost sensitive areas of garden carefully, as mulched crops will be at special risk from frost damage.

Clear out the weeds and unwanted plants from your garden now to minimise competition in the coming growing months and hoe regularly to prevent weeds. It's best to hoe "little and often" to keep things in check.

For what to plant see the MyGarden planting calendar under the gardening resources section.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• growing vegetables
• spring gardening
• gardening

[jihadacadien]

yeah good info!

[kulmuck]

good info...5 stars from me