LET’S face it – most of us have let our gardens ‘go’ over the wet season.
Our attention has been on home interiors, ensuring indoor plants are cared for and rugs, lamps and prints are on-point.
With spring finally here, now is the time to shift focus back onto the yard, ensuring our outdoors are ready for summer.
Get in front of tomorrow's news for FREE
Journalism for the curious Australian across politics, business, culture and opinion.
READ NOWCharlie Dawson from Dawson’s Garden World shares his top eight jobs for spring.
1. Feed roses – roses like regular fertilising, so feed every 4 to 5 weeks from now until mid May. Use a quality all-purpose fertiliser or specialist rose fertiliser and remember always water in well.
2. Lawn care – as days lengthen and gradually get warmer, all turf species will enter an active growth phase: this is an important time to feed your lawn.I suggest Eco Emerald: a low-phosphorous, river-friendly rock mineral-based fertiliser.
3. Control lawn weeds – use a selective lawn herbicide to rid the lawn of common weeds like bindii. The best time for bindii control is early spring before these plants flower and develop spiny seed capsules.
4. Prepare and plant summer vegetables – prepare your vegetable beds now for planting and try to get a lot of the planting done before the real heat arrives.
5. Begin fruit fly control – mediterranean fruit fly control in Perth is difficult, but not impossible. Trapping should continue all year, including winter.The best approach is probably a combination of trapping, some bait spraying/application and some exclusion.
6. Monitor roses for fungal infections – black spot is an environmental disease and troublesome when the nights are still cool and damp, like the period early in the season over September to late October. To control it, some preventative spraying is required. Spraying at 1-2 week intervals over susceptible periods is a good idea.
7. Control caterpillars – caterpillars are on the march in spring, targeting soft new foliage on a range of plants. As soon as damage is noticed, start control measures to protect your plants.
8. Spray to manage citrus leaf miner –the larvae produces wavy, snail-trail damage on citrus leaves and is most prevalent from spring to autumn. Combat the pest with oil sprays like Eco-Oil whenever the plants are pushing out new foliage.
