It’s one thing designing and creating your perfect garden, but keeping it looking its best is another thing entirely. Without proper maintenance, your garden can look beautiful and fresh one minute, but sad and neglected the next. That’s why Outdoor Options have written this helpful guide on how to maintain your garden and keep it looking good.
Clean Up in Autumn
Autumn is often a beautiful time of year; the leaves on the trees take on a spectrum of wonderful colours, making for picturesque scenes around the country. However, once those leaves fall off the trees, they become vehicles for disease that can spread to new leaves. Problems such as black spots on leaves or Iris leaf spot (where areas of otherwise-green leaves turn brown and dry) are symptoms of disease. This is why it’s important to clear away dead leaves promptly, to reduce the chance for disease to spread.
Watch Out for Bugs
Pests in your garden can cause a number of issues for your plants. There’s the superficial damage that they can cause by chewing through plants and vegetation, but beyond that, they can also infect the plants with bacteria and viruses by providing openings that the bacteria needs to get into the plant. Invest in pest killers to keep the harmful insects away.
Prune Your Plants
Be sure to be proactive when it comes to pruning your shrubs and trees. It’s better do it in late winter before spring comes around; this is because those shrubs, plants and trees can become infected over the winter. Once infected, the disease can become stronger, which makes it more difficult to eradicate. When pruning, make sure to do clean cuts; these heal quicker and are more conducive to healthy tissue growing back.
Love Your Lawn
Lawn maintenance is a simple but crucial part of maintaining your garden’s look and feel; everybody can see the difference between a carefully manicured lawn and one that’s been left untouched for a few weeks. There’s actually a recommended grass length to aim for when mowing your lawn: 5cm. The reason for this limit is that anything shorter means the soil won’t have sufficient protection, and thus will dry out in temperatures over 26 degrees.
Stay Hydrated
Everyone knows that watering plants is important but there are certain aspects of watering that may not be obvious to some. For example, it’s better to water plants in the evening or early in the morning; the soil is cooler during these times, so less water will evaporate as opposed to watering at warmer times of the day. Water the beds only; try and avoid watering leaves and plant heads, as this can lead to mould.
Call for Assistance
While there are plenty of things that you can do to maintain your garden by yourself, using a professional gardening company can ensure the maintenance is done to the best possible standard. Professional gardening companies have the best tools and years of experience in the industry, so they’ll be able to identify and carry out the most appropriate and effective courses of action.
Outdoor Options are proud to be a leading provider of professional gardening services for customers throughout Surrey. If you’d like to know more about what we do, please get in touch with us today and we’ll be more than happy to help you.
