Get on board with a lime suiter
Sprinkle over a general-purpose fertiliser, rake again, then sow the seed – again by walking across and up and down. Rake yet again, this time lightly, to cover as much of the seed as you can with soil. Then wet with a light sprinkler. Never let the lawn dry out until the seedling grass is well established.
Choose your lawn seed according to your needs and desires. A wide range of lawns can be achieved from lush velvet to hard-wearing and rugged. Owners of female dogs can avoid dead patches in lawns caused by urine by having a lawn of clover instead of grass.
Edibles
Sow a green manure crop without delay – for maximum effect sow multiple species such as oats, mustard and lupin. Green manure crops should be dug into the garden in late winter to early spring.
Sow silverbeet about 1cm deep in rows 50cm apart, in soil preferably with lime and blood and bone added.
Earth up celery and leeks, and water well.
Should you have had clubroot in your brassicas, dig in dolomite lime to lower the pH of your soil.
Save seeds from your best tomatoes. Place on a tissue or paper towel on a sunny sill and when dry store in an airtight container till spring.
Prune boysenberries and blackberries after fruiting by cutting all canes that have just borne fruit to the ground. Then mulch.
– Mary Lovell-Smith
back to France by the increasingly demonic Malachi provides a picaresque turn-of-century travelogue that increases in tension as the enraged brother gets closer and closer.
To save them, Lika leaves Brodie and disappears. It’s her Malachi is after, she says. Brodie will be safe without her. Safe, perhaps, but lost. He spins a globe and randomly pins the Andaman Islands as his retreat, where the warmth and healthy air will hopefully improve his increasingly deteriorating consumption and where Lika may come to him at last. It’s Boyd’s skill to keep us on tenterhooks to the end. – Felicity Price