IF you’ve been a little on the slack side and have let your veggie garden go, don’t fret … there’s help on the horizon.
Our friends at Forest Heart Eco Nursery in Maleny are running a session on restoring your tired vegetable garden. It’s a one hour practical on rebuilding soil, restoring productivity, and creating a manageable and abundant food garden.
It’s a ticketed event, but they’re only $15 – just go to www.events.humanitix.com/veggie-garden-restoration and follow the link to set aside your spot for the morning session.
• It’s a good time to fertilise and prune hibiscus so they develop a bushy habit and produce lots of flowers in summer.
• And it’s a good time to lightly fertilise your lawns to give them a boost into spring.
• If you have a veggie garden, don’t forget to water it once or twice a week. Although it’s cooler, the drier winter winds will drain the moisture from the soil.
• If you’re growing pineapples, give them a side dressing of complete fertiliser in late August. They like acid soils, so avoid using lime or dolomite.
• Spray the flowers of your mango tree with a copper-based spray to fight anthracnose disease.
• Plant your new roses now. Bagged and bare-rooted roses are in plentiful supply.
• Fertilise your existing rose bushes by mulching around them with cow manure.
• Keep your strawberries fruiting with a fortnightly feed of fish and seaweed solutions.
• Repot any cymbidium orchids that have been in the same pot for a couple of years immediately after they have finished flowering.
• Harvest the last of your winter veggies and dig over the bed, adding compost and organic matter in preparation for summer planting.
• August is a good time to plant perennial food plants such as yacon, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, waterchestnuts, ginger, turmeric, galangal and chokos.
• If your peach or nectarine trees had peach-leaf curl last year, they will need to be sprayed with lime sulphur before the buds swell. Once fruit have formed, thin fruit to one peach per node and bag the fruit, to protect from fruit fly.
• Make sure fruit fly traps are in place by late August. Use a mix of types to make sure you have a broad range of control happening.
• Plant potatoes and sweet potatoes in the vegetable garden. Mound up soil around potatoes which are already growing.
• Prune any untidy geraniums and use the cuttings to strike new plants to use or give away.
