London Summer Gardens – some Top Tips for Exquisite Gardens
All winter the garden on which you spent so much time and thought last year has looked rather bleak, either frozen solid or dripping wet. The bought-in plants that gave so much delight in their first year look distinctly less fresh and healthy, there seem to be dead leaves rotting on all the lovely stone benches and the joys of having a garden seem but a distant memory. Was it all a waste of time? Do you need to start from the beginning again, buying more plants, doing more digging, planning afresh – this was supposed to be a pleasant, leafy, low-maintenance area in which you could sit with a glass of wine before dinner, enjoying the scents but not having to do too much else.
And so it will be again. Once you have established your garden, the hard work is done. It will blossom again year after year, but it will blossom even better if you give it some minimum care and attention before the growing season starts. Choose a sunny day and cut down all the dead stalks, trim all the bushes back by a couple of inches all round (this encourages new growth) and rake up the dead leaves. In the middle of the city you cannot indulge in the delights of a sweet-smelling garden fire, but, if you have room, you can pile up all these trimmings, clippings and leaves into a neat pile in a corner until they break down into a pleasant crumbly leaf-mould which, next winter, you will be able to spread round your flowering bushes as a soil improver. If you haven’t got room, they have to be green-bagged.
Next, feed all your plants with bone-meal (one small packet is ample) – this is an organic fertilizer which breaks down slowly in the ground, replenishing the nutrients which healthy plants need. Sprinkle about a tablespoonful of bone meal round every tree, bush and clump of perennial flowers in your garden. Now spread a thick layer of crumbly compost (easily bought from garden centers) around each plant. This works as a mulch – by the end of winter the ground will be wet and this layer of compost keeps it moist. It will also be taken down by the worms to the roots and so all your plants will be fed with minimal labor on your part.
This annual, relatively simple trimming and feeding will repay you in full with plants bursting with health and vigor, summer after summer.
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