Central’s Gardening Tips for April

Central’s Tips

April 2019

Autumn is here and now is the time to prepare the outdoors for winter - plant winter greens, sow broad beans and put in a green cover crop. Plant some winter flowers so your garden to bring some colour to your outdoors during the winter months.

In the Veggie Patch

• Sowing broad bean seeds in and around ANZAC Day is a NZ gardening tradition. Even small gardens can fit a crop of the dwarf variety

• Start winter salad greens: hardy lettuce varieties like Cos, Iceberg, the French Merveille des Quatre saisons, spinach (for baby leaves) and rocket are great ‘greens’ to mix in with roasted vegetables for a hearty salad

• Vegetable areas that are not being used to grow winter food will benefit from being over sown with lupins and mustard seed. These plants can be cut down after a couple of month’s growth and dug into the soil to release nitrogen

The rest of the Garden

• Refresh pots for winter flowers – polyanthus, primula and poppies are annuals that are particularly cold hardy and it’s always good to pop a few hyacinth or daffodil bulbs in too

• After such a hot summer, use a lawn scarifier to take off dead thatch, then apply ProLawn

Turfmaster Gold to encourage growth over autumn

• Take cuttings of favourite

geraniums, fuchsias, lavender

and rosemary – more free plants next spring

• Tidy up the spent foliage of daylilies, ornamental grasses and trim lavenders and hebes

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