Help life give you lemons
Feed citrus trees
Your lemons, mandarins, limes and grapefruit should be fattening up now ready for winter harvest, so show your trees some love by applying a citrus-specific fertiliser inside the dripline this month.
If it’s dry or they are in pots, which can dry out extremely quickly, keep the water up too. They appreciate a good long soak twice a week. Immature fruit might drop off any plant that gets dehydrated.
Clear weeds and rank grass growth within the dripline too, so they don’t steal nutrients and water from your trees.
In cooler parts of the country, think about frost protection. For young citrus trees it’s worth building a frame to cover the whole tree if you are in a frost pocket. Frames should be big enough to hold frost cloth above foliage without touching it so a layer of air acts as insulation.
Think spring
April is all about gearing up for spring and early summer flowers. There’s still time to plant spring-flowering bulbs and annuals planted now will bloom from late winter onwards. Alyssum, calendula, cosmos, nasturtium, sweet pea, poppies and wildflower mixes can all be sown directly into the garden.
If you want to increase your stock of summer-flowering perennials or refresh clumps that have become overcrowded, now’s a good time to divide them. Dig up the whole clump and discard the oldest tatty sections. Break up the remainder, making sure that each piece has both roots and shoots and replant.
Collect seeds from late-flowering annuals and perennials. Seeds must be fully mature or they won’t germinate. Wait for a dry day and choose seeds from the most vigorous plants. Make sure the seeds are completely dry – leave them in a dry, airy place on a paper towel or sheet of newspaper for a few days before storing them in an envelope or paper bag.
Bug patrol
Don’t let the pests get a head start. Some insect pests ride out the cold season by overwintering as eggs or cocoons. If you dispose of them now you’ll be ahead of the game next spring.
Look for the eggs of passionvine hoppers on the stems of any plants that they infested over summer. They aren’t fussy about which plants they stick their sapsucking fangs into or where they lay their eggs. You’ll find dotted lines of eggs on grapes, woody-stemmed perennials, and ornamental and fruiting trees. Cut them off when you do your autumn pruning and send them to the bonfire or garden waste recycling service to cut down on the number of juvenile fluffy bums hatching in spring.
Search for the eggs of green vege bugs on the underside of the leaves of plants they targeted and squash or burn them too. Smother aphids and scale with horticultural oil and give fruit trees a copper spray to prevent overwintering diseases.