Bask in the glory of your garden in high summer with our Gauteng gardening guide for January. This month we have some seasonal gardening tips for you that have some water-saving suggestions to help your garden flourish.
Spotlight on: Watering responsibly
Since Gauteng is typically dry during the high summer season, it’s crucial that you adopt some water-saving techniques. These are some of our water-wise tips that you can adopt in your own household:
• Try to water your garden between 6pm and 6am to prevent any water wastage.
• Ensure you keep most of the watering happens only at the root zone of your plants, you can also look at installing a drip irrigation system to feed water directly where it’s needed.
• Look at collecting and harvest rainwater. Water tanks, inflatable pools and rain chains are all great tools for doing this.
• Replace patchy lawn with pebbles, gravel or low water-usage groundcovers.
• Gradually replace thirsty plants with water-wise varieties, such as dianthus, vinca, petunia and gazania.
ON YOUR TO-DO LIST FOR JANUARY
Plant & Sow
• Fill empty pockets with colour by planting marigolds and vinca (both are heat-loving and water-wise plants).
• For those shady areas in the garden look at planting plants such as begonia, impatiens, lobelia and coleus varieties.
• Summer is a good time to refresh the vegetable garden. Plant new crops of radishes, lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and sweet basil, coriander and other herbs. (Pro tip: Remember to rotate your crops, as this improves soil fertility.)
• You can also look at sowing Cape gooseberry in trays this month.
Feeding
• Feed your roses this month with rose 8:1:5 or flower power to encourage new summer growth.
• Also add compost to your roses to improve the condition of the soil and retain water and food.
• Water full-sun pot plants daily and feed weekly with either a foliarfeed or things like flower power to give the plants the food that they need.
• Shaded and semi-shaded pot plants should be watered every 2–3 days, and fed weekly with Multifeed Classic. (Note: Water requirements may differ depending on the temperature of your area.)
Prune & Trim
• Lightly trim your fuchsias, roses and hibiscus plants to ensure renewed growth and flowers for the next half of summer.
• Once salvias have finished flowering, cut them back to encourage new growth in autumn.
• Adding compost to roses after a light pruning to encourage new flowers. Snap off any suckers ( these are the light green, thornless shoots) growing from the base of the bush.
• If your lawn is old, feels sponge-like and is difficult to mow without ‘scalping’, cut it as low as possible by crosscutting and lowering the blade after each cut. This will get rid of the layer of dead thatch hiding between the soil surface and the green top, you can then add fertilawn and watch it come back greener than ever.
