Five Tips For Gardening In Spring

With the days rapidly heating up, your yard is roaring back to life – but when it comes to the best practices for gardening in spring, where do you start?

For gardeners and plant enthusiasts all over our great nation, the feeling that spring is just around the corner usually brings a welcome sense of excitement. While gardening has long been a well known Australian pastime, the events of the past year have signalled a rapid uptake in this hobby as we spend more time at home than ever before. Not only is gardening good for us, but it’s also encouraging a new generation to embrace growing our own food.

With most of the frosts finally behind us, the days are starting to get longer – and warmer. For gardeners, this often signals that it’s time to get back into their veggie patches, flower beds and even dusting off their lawn mowers. However, if you want your garden to kickstart back to life, it’s going to need a little bit of help from you. 

The Basics For Gardening In Spring 

Depending on where you live and what the local climate is like, there’s a fair chance that your garden may appear to have hit the ‘pause’ button during the cooler months. However, our gardens are often the first to tell us that spring is on the way, with new growth on plants, a flurry of insect activity and the sudden need to mow your lawn usually being the primary hints. 

In theory, you should have started to prepare your garden for spring weeks ago by pruning, clearing up any debris, and paying special attention to mulch and compost. If you’re running slightly behind schedule it won’t make or break your veggie patch, but do ensure that things are looking reasonably spick and span before you get started. 

At this point in the year, one thing that many avid green thumbs tend to forget about is that summer is quite literally just around the corner. While most of us naturally associate spring with being the busiest month in your backyard, the simple fact of the matter is that you only have a month or two at most to get your garden acclimated to the upcoming summer heat. As such, make sure you use this time to start getting ready for the next season. 

Don’t Forget Your Lawn – Garden lawns are often forgotten about until the very last minute, which is why it’s often the first to indicate visual signs of a change of season. Brown and bare  lawns are symptoms of scalping, which means that you’re mowing your lawn too short. With the weather heating up, a slightly longer lawn also suppresses pesky pernicious weeds as well. 

Plant Appropriately – Many gardeners make the mistake of assuming that not much will be happening in their veggie patch over summer, but that couldn’t be further from the truth – there’s still plenty of summer crops available for you to harvest. However, it’s important to pay attention as to what grows best depending on your climate, so don’t make any assumptions. 

Mulch For Moisture – Particularly over the upcoming summer, it’s important that your plants are not just receiving water, but retaining it and distributing it accordingly – your plants will tell you if they need more water if they start drooping or the leaves are falling off. As such, mulch stops the top of the soil drying out, keeps it moist, and can reduce watering by up to 60%. 

Don’t Forget Pots – Many of us opt for terracotta pots as a cheap and aesthetically pleasing option to keep plants on our verandahs and balconies. However, come the summertime, these can easily overheat. Saucers of water encourage root rot and mosquitos, so try adding sand to the saucer and keep it moist as a healthier alternative.

Timing Is Everything – For many of us, warmer weather can easily dictate our schedules as we retreat from the heat levels during the middle of the day. Oddly enough, our garden is more or less the same, so aim to water your garden early in the morning or later in the afternoon to ensure maximum moisture absorbency and to avoid mildew and fungi growth. 

When it comes to gardening in spring, it’s also important to remember that your plants aren’t the only creatures springing back to life. The new growth can be somewhat of a smorgasbord to many critters looking for a snack, so regular checks for both pests and weeds should be made as your seedlings establish. 

However, gardeners who are fond of their spring veggie patch or herb garden should also be careful when selecting an insecticide to make sure that it is non-toxic, so that their crop is still safe to eat when it’s harvest time. Thankfully, organic and chemical free weed killers such as Bioweed can often provide a happy alternative to other traditional methods. 

Giving Your Garden A Boost For Spring

Do your plants – and yourself – a favour, and give them a head start by optimising your soil prior to planting. By adding a natural plant food like Biotic Booster, this will help your garden to: 

• Provide essential nutrients and microbes 
• Act as a liquid fertiliser to unlock your soil’s potential 
• Drought proof your plants and lower water consumption
• Increase and speed up the germination process
• Assist in protecting your plants from pests and diseases 
• Provide an organic solution that’s safe to use around your herbs, fruit and veggies

If you’re ready to take the leap into improving the health of your plants while minimising the use of chemical based fertilisers this Spring, then it may be time to try a plant food and plant probiotics. Our Ultimate Garden Health Pack includes our Biotic Booster, FP-60 Probiotic Spray and RE-250 Soil Energiser, plant food and plant probiotics. In each concentrated bottle, millions of natural bacterias are waiting to find a new home in your garden.

Here at Bioweed, we specialise in environmentally friendly gardening products, including herbicides, plant food and garden probiotics, and natural alternatives to traditional gardening solutions. Should you have any questions about how to improve the sustainability of your garden, get in touch with us today.