The weather is finally warming up and spring has just arrived. What better time to give your garden a spring clean, as well as your house. Our gardens are often neglected over winter and require some much needed care and attention come spring.
Read our top 10 gardening spring clean up jobs below and get your garden in tip top shape for when the warmer days are finally here.
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Spruce up your patio
As we will be spending more time outdoors, why not give your patio, decking or any outdoor surfaces a much needed clean to remove all the mud, algae and moss that has built up over winter. Sweep away any loose dirt and leaves and scrape away large areas of thick moss. A great tool to do this is a Long Handled Weeding Knife. Use it to get into all the nooks and crannies and remove any moss or weeds.
2. Revive your lawn
Winter can cause many stresses on the lawn. Moss thrives during the cold, wetter months and spring is the time to deal with it by using a moss killer. Give your lawn a feed too to help revive it after a harsh winter and will also help strengthen it so it will outcompete weeds and diseases.
Read our handy spring lawn guide to find out more.
3. Prune back
Spring is the ideal time to prune back plants and shrubs to encourage their growth therefore resulting in more flowers, stems and foliage. You can also make sure you are cutting back any plants that have dead stems or have developed diseases over the winter. Grab yourself some sharp secateurs, loppers and a pruning saw to cover a variety of jobs.
4. Tidy up beds and borders
Over the winter your grass may have grown over and into your garden borders. Use lawn edging shears to neaten up all those edges around paths and beds for a tidy looking garden.
5. Weeding
It is best to really make sure your garden is free from weeds as when the weather becomes warmer they will begin to thrive and grow more rapidly. Controlling them now will give them less of a fighting chance, especially if you pull out their roots. Use a clever weeding tool on lawns and beds and borders, such as an corkscrew weeder. This clever corkscrew design will pull out the entire root of a weed with just a simple twist in a clockwise motion. This tool will remove stray dandelions and tap-rooted weeds, making it effortless and also a natural way to de-weed.
6. Tidy up the shed & greenhouse
As the growing season has just started, now would be the time to tidy up your greenhouse or shed. Give your greenhouse a good wipe down, sort out your seed trays and pots and make sure you have all the equipment you need for the coming months.
Hang up your tools in your tool shed on handy hooks, put shelves up to store grass care products, plant feeds or any other garden essentials. Use a hose hanger to keep your hosepipe neat, tidy and protected ready for use in summer.
7. Make a compost heap
If you haven’t done already, now is a great time to start home composting. It is sustainable and good for the environment, but it’s also a great way to create organic matter to enrich your soil in beds, borders or veggie patches. After all your pruning, weeding and other jobs around the garden, you can place all the garden waste in a compost bin or heap. By using a mixture of garden waste as well as food waste, you are recycling large amounts of waste that would end up in landfill. Read our article on how to home compost to find out more. Use a compost maker like Garotta to speed up the natural process of compost whilst creating better quality compost to use around your garden.
8. Care for hedgehogs
Not a spring clean garden task, but something you can do to help the hedgehogs in your garden. If you come across one whilst tidying, cover it with leaves and put water and some hedgehog food out nearby incase it is disturbed from hibernation. You can even put out a hedgehog house to give them somewhere to shelter. Make sure you keep your bird feeders topped up too!
9. Repot houseplants
Come April it is time to give your houseplants some fresh new compost and be put in a brand new pot if they have outgrown their current one. Signs that an indoor plant is struggling include yellowing foliage and excessive leaf loss, sluggish growth, poor flowering as well as a mass of roots emerging from the base of pots. Compost can become depleted of nutrients over the years and stressed plants are also more prone to aphid infestations. You should repot houseplants into fresh, peat-free compost every two to three years. Spring, the start of the growing season, is the best time to settle houseplants into a new pot (repot).
Watch our Beneath the Leaf Repotting video to find out more…
10. Support the plants
Put plant supports around herbaceous plants before they get too big. Add support grids to heavy headed flowers such as peonies and other plants with tall stems so they can grow through the supports. Once the flowers are in full bloom the supports will then be disguised. Create a bamboo cane tripod for sweat peas and other climbing plants, push into the soil and tie together at the top with twine.
