How to help your spring garden thrive

Landscape gardener Grant Smitten has the following advice to ensure your outdoor spaces look their best this spring.

Create a mud map of your patch, giving thought to what you would like to plant for the coming season and working out a planting schedule.

Always ensure you allow space to grow a green manure crop each season, as it adds organic matter back into the bed and helps guard against disease within your veggie patch.

Lastly, remember to never plant the same thing in the same place twice - some plants (such as tomatoes), draw too much nitrogen from the soil, so when planted again in the same space all the nitrogen is depleted.

In the southern and coldest parts of Australia you could give your apples and pears one last prune before the buds burst through.

Always remember not to prune your stone fruits through winter, as they are prone to disease.

Schedule your stone fruit pruning for early autumn or after they fruit.

As we enter spring it is a good time to give your citrus fruit a prune. The main focus is to prune some of the growth through the middle of the plant, to allow airflow that helps guard against scale and other insects taking up home in your tree.

I give my citrus trees a slow realise fertiliser every six months, however the best way to look after your citrus tree is to mulch finely cut grass clippings.

The clippings break down and form nitrogen, which in turn feeds the fine root system that sits close to ground level.

If you have a raspberry patch, now is a good time to get in and clear back any of the spent canes, weed, and fertilise.

To identify the spent canes, I slowly run my hand through each section at low level and the canes will break off.

I cover the base of the canes with a 25mm layer of organic compost, which allows the raspberries to feed on the compost during the year.

As a hotter year is predicted, now would be a good time to start testing your irrigation system so you can identify and repair any leaks to your system ahead of the spring growth.

As your bulbs start to flower, ensure you start to fertilise them and don't be too quick to cut them back.

As these builds start to die back, the bulbs drawn nutrients from the dying bulb and leaf, and put that energy into growing more bulbs, so you will have more bulbs the following year.

For further seasonal advice, Grant recommends The Diggers Club's range of books, or visit their website, diggers.com.au.