Top tips to prepare your garden for Spring

Spring is on its way and you’ll soon be caught up in a frenzy of seed sowing, growing, and nurturing your garden as it comes back to life. Organise your thoughts and get a head start on the new gardening year. Read our useful guide for top tips on how to prepare you garden for spring.

Order summer-flowering bulbs and seeds

deciduous grasses and herbaceous perennials now, although, if you’d like to be wildlife friendly, it’s best to leave these until early spring. Winter is a great time to move any deciduous shrubs, as they’ll still be dormant. Move shrubs on a still day to prevent the wind from drying out the roots.

Dig a circular trench around the shrub, giving it a wide berth. Try to take as much of the root ball as possible so it can re-establish itself in its new location as quickly as possible. When you replant your shrub in its new position, place it at the same level it was previously in the soil, and remember to water in well afterwards.

Order summer-flowering bulbs and seeds now - it’s the perfect task for a wet and windy winter’s day. Flowers like lilies, gladioli and ranunculi can all be ordered in the winter for early-spring planting.

Tidy up flower beds and borders

Clear borders and beds back to bare soil. Put the dead organic matter you’ve cleared away into your compost pile or bin to break down. Remove any weeds you can see and either burn them or put them in your brown bin. Don’t compost them as the seeds will germinate and cause you more problems later on.

If your soil is workable, dig a 5cm layer of organic matter - such as well-rotted manure, compost or recycled green waste - into empty garden borders.

Have a general tidy up, removing leaves and other debris from flower beds and borders. You can cut back the old dead growth of

Hunt down and remove garden pests

Clean and sharpen gardening tools

Hunt down and remove hibernating pests now - it will save you a lot of trouble come spring and summer. Take a closer look at the crowns of your perennial plants and check for any slugs, snails and aphid colonies sheltering for the winter.

If you still haven’t cleared last year’s pots of summer bedding then do so now, checking for white-vine-weevil larvae, which live in the compost and feed on plant roots. Destroy any larvae that you find and be prepared to treat for vine weevils this year, using parasitic nematodes or chemical drenches.

Maintain fences, gates and trellis

Give your tools a clean and a sharpen during the winter months. Maintaining your garden tools will help preserve them, saving you money in the long run and helping prevent the spread of disease. Dirty secateurs are notorious for introducing bacteria and fungi to fresh pruning wounds.

Use strong detergent, hot water and a scourer to give bladed tools a thorough clean. Sharpening your tools will also improve their performance; they’ll be easier to work with and will give cleaner pruning cuts. Once sharpened, apply some oil or WD40 to blades and hinges.

Hand tools, including spades, hoes, trowels and rakes will also benefit from a good clean and oiling.

Create a composting area www.thompson-morgan.com

Winter is the ideal time of year to get those niggly little maintenance jobs out of the way. Check fence panels, gates and trellis for any sign of weather damage or decay. Fixing any broken structures now will give you more time to spend in the garden during the spring and summer. Replace any broken segments or structures.

Next, clean fence panels and gates with a power washer to remove dirt, moss and mildew. Use a stiff brush to help remove stubborn grime. Let the wood dry completely before applying two coats of stain, paint or wood preservative on a dry day.

If you haven’t already, now’s a great time to set up a compost area in your garden. This could be as simple as buying a ready-made compost bin or you could build your own using spare wood.

A compost area provides somewhere to put all your organic waste. Once it has broken down, you’ll get a lovely, rich compost your plants will thrive on. Make sure you have a good mixture of grass clippings, vegetable peelings, paper and woody prunings. And to help the process along you’ll need to turn your compost with a garden fork each month to keep it aerated.

As you can see, there’s plenty to be getting on with this winter! Work your way through the list and you’ll hit the ground running when spring finally arrives.

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Hashtag United Getting to know the ‘oneof-a-kind’ football club

With over 1.5m followers across social media, CommunityAd had the pleasure of catching up with local football club

Hashtag United’s CEO Spencer Owen who told us more about his wonderful club and the incredible 7-year journey it has been on since it was first founded…

Can you give readers a background into your own football career as a whole from your junior days to now as founder and player of Hashtag United?

I started playing in my early teenage years for Brentwood Boys (now Brentwood Athletic) and Hartswood Stars, before moving to Danbury and playing for Heybridge Boys.

At 16, I actually formed my own team with school mates from KEGS (Chelmsford) that played in the Chelmsford Youth District League. Whilst at Reading University I played for the University team before then playing adult Sunday league football throughout the Chelmsford and Brentwood leagues until 2016 when Hashtag United was formed. Make no mistake, any success I’ve had in football has come in spite of my abilities rather than because of them! My biggest highlights came through YouTube charity games such as the Wembley Cup where I was lucky enough to play multiple times in front of crowds of 34,000+ people and with and against players such as Steven Gerrard, Robert Pires and many more legends of the game.

Hashtag was formed around my friends and my brother’s friends, many of whom played with me at school and university.

What would you say you are most proud of having achieved at the club so far?

There’s so much to be honest. The merger with our brilliant women’s team and youth set up is right up there for sure. Winning the first title, and achieving two promotions with the men since we joined non-league is also massive. But it’s also hard not to highlight playing in front of 34,000 people at Wembley stadium!

With over half a million subscribers on YouTube, can you explain just how much support you have received not only from the online community but locally as well and did you even envisage a fan base of this magnitude?

The support we have online is incredible and really sets us apart as a truly unique club, not just locally but globally. We are one of the most followed clubs in the UK and we usually finish in the top 6/7 spots nationally on charts ranking things like monthly YouTube views and followers etc.

It’s amazing to have so many people from across the globe continue to support our team, buy our shirts and watch our videos. Locally, it’s definitely stepped up since we merged with Forest Glade youth club at Barleylands in Billericay. We inherited an incredible family of local football lovers, be them kids or parents, many of whom are now crucial parts of the organisation of the club. However we still believe there’s a lot of people in the local community that don’t really see us as a local asset though, partly due to our unique club name not featuring the name of a place/town in it. But we are very much based in this part of Essex, and proud of it, with our offices in Brentwood and Brentwood being where I live and grew up.

What would you say are the pros and cons of Hashtag United having such a huge following? Are there games where you are subject to abuse from opposing players and fans and almost treated as though you are the pantomime villains?

To be honest any successful team in football attracts some detractors, that’s unfortunately part and parcel of the game. In some ways it’s flattering, especially when you consider we haven’t actually ever done anything worthy of criticism.

We pride ourselves on being a tremendously positive club, with a family feel and celebrating inclusivity for all. Everyone is welcome at Hashtag. We have a very unique origin story and a funny name, some people don’t like change and are perhaps threatened by us. But those people don’t really understand us.

We are a family-team that’s been brought up in the non-league scene, I grew up following my dad who was a physio for clubs like Brentwood Town and East Thurrock United and some of my earliest YouTube content was based on East Thurrock. I have real respect for the traditions of the game, I just don’t believe there’s only one way of doing things. And I think we’ve proved there are ways of innovating and bringing more attention to our country’s great institution of non-league football. Surely that’s a good thing? We’d be stupid to think everyone will like us and support us, but nearly 7 years in we’ve managed not to attract any genuinely deserved or factually correct criticism, so I sleep soundly!

As CEO, what would you say is your overall ethos and style of play that you like to integrate into Hashtag United?

My job is running the club on a daily basis, from working with our exceptional commercial department, our brilliant media team and our football/Esports sides. There’s a lot going on! But we have two brilliant first team managers (Jay Devereux at the men’s team and Jason Stephens on the women’s side) who have already won multiple promotions and titles for our relatively young club with their exciting brand of football.

How would you assess the 2022-23 season so far and are there any upcoming fixtures/ events local readers can look forward to?

Both teams are doing fantastically well. Our Men’s 1st team sit 2nd in the Isthmian North and are very much aiming for a promotion, and the Women’s 1st team sit top of the National League Division 1 South East. Our women’s team are also Essex champions so we see them as the pride of the county!

We’d love readers to get themselves down to a game to support either team, both of which are winning a lot of games. Our men ground-share with Bowers and Pitsea (near Basildon) and our women ground-share with Aveley.

Where would you like Hashtag United to be in the next 10-20 years?

One thing that’s huge for us is getting our own ground, and getting our teams playing out of the same venue. It’s something we haven’t been able to achieve yet but is very much on our radar. We want to put down proper roots in the local community and build a local support that can rival our amazing online/global fan base. I’d love for Hashtag to be seen as a valued part of the local community and see some more of our youth players transition into the senior sides. We already have a great set up at our Forest Glade site in Barleylands with over 40+ teams and 500+ boys and girls representing Hashtag United and I’d love to see that grow even stronger too.

Follow the club online through social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok), YouTube and their website www.hashtagunited.co.uk