Lismore Garden Club News

Conditions for gardening lately have been the best that many of us can remember. Lovely mild to warm showery weather – you can’t beat it! As a matter of fact, when I suggested to a lady gardener lately that her garden and lawn would love this weather, she said with a sly grin, “Yes, if you’re real quiet in my garden you can hear the lawn growing.”

Well, it is officially autumn and a really good time to do almost anything in the garden as we potentially have about three months of this lovely autumn weather ahead of us before the temperatures start to wind down. It’s a very good time to plant trees and shrubs including fruit trees and vines. It’s also an excellent time to prepare our garden beds and plant annual flower and vegie seed and seedlings as they will power away in the milder conditions.

Right now you can plant seed and seedlings of:

Flowers: alyssum, aquilegia, calendula, candytuft, Canterbury bells, carnation, cineraria, cornflower, delphinium, dianthus, everlasting daisy, forget-me-not, foxglove, gerbera, godetia, gypsophila, hollyhock, honesty, impatiens, linaria, Livingstone daisy, lobelia, marigold, nigella, pansy, snapdragon, stock, verbena, viola.

Vegies: beans, beetroot, Chinese cabbage, cucumber, eggplant, garlic bulbs, herbs, leek, lettuce, onion, parsnip, peas, potato, radish, shallot bulbs, spring onion, tomato, turnip.

Given the rampant growth we have experienced in our gardens of late it’s a good time to get in and give things a bit of a prune just to tidy things up and so you can actually walk around your garden without getting tripped up by tree branches and strangled by creepers. It is also important to keep ahead of weed growth by hand pulling them as we walk in our gardens. We will have plenty of time after May to kick back and take a breather from the frantic pace of the warmer months.

If you haven’t put out fertiliser for a few months now is a good time to buy a bag of pelleted chook manure and fertilise everything in the garden – trees, shrubs (including Australian natives), fruit trees and vines, flowers and vegies, and even outdoor potted plants. And while you’re about it top up the mulch on the whole lot as well and it will put your garden in good stead for the cooler months down the track.

The next meeting of the Lismore Garden Club is today (Thursday, March 11) at the Lismore Workers Club at 1pm. Potential new members are most welcome. The Lismore Garden Club is also holding a sausage sizzle at Bunning’s Hardware this Sunday, March 14. For info phone Ray on 6625 1773 or Rosemary on 6629 3353.

Finally: “The harder I work the luckier I get.” – Audrey Howell

Happy gardening

Ron Burn