As we move into April and bid winter adieu, there’s no better time to start cultivating your garden than now! This guide to sprucing up your flower beds and creating greener scenery should aid your horticultural ventures this spring and the coming months.
This month calls for warmer temperatures, so why not start anew in preparation for the heat by clearing your soil of any excess weeds and creating extra space for new flowers to thrive and bloom? By doing this, you can go onto plotting fresh beds by layering a thick layer of compost over your soil and cultivating the ground to a minimum of 10 inches deep. Clearance is an important step as it’s very easy to unintentionally allow overgrowth, especially during the winter. Promote a healthy season for your plants by preparing beforehand.
Continuing with the theme of clearance and renewal, another preparation task for those with bird feeders/baths would be to clean them sufficiently. All sorts of wildlife will be emerging in your garden during the post hibernation months, and the lack of interaction has most likely left those feeders a little worse for wear. Revitalise them by disinfecting before cleaning, using either a weak bleach solution or, as the RSPB state, cleaning them with a 5% disinfectant solution. By doing this, you’re saving birds and other wildlife from being infected due to poor maintenance of feeders/general negligence.
It’s a new season, so a big objective is most likely planting appropriate plants that will really benefit and thrive from the change of weather. Quite a few cool weather plants are listed in this Martha Stewart article, and she also recommends planting these on a cool, cloudy day. This is due to the fact that a bright sunny day has a wider temperature range, whilst an overcast day has a much smaller temperature range and is familiar territory for a plant that may have been growing in a greenhouse, where the conditions are a lot more regulated.
There are plenty of other tips and tricks to be found in the ‘gardening’ tag of this blog, as well as on Hochanda.com where you can catch a variety of shows in relation to gardening. Visit the gardening section of our website for a variety of gardening and outdoor products.
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