Spring into the garden

The season that brings a smile to most gardeners’ faces is here and it’s the perfect time to freshen up garden beds and plant edibles and companion flowering varieties that look amazing while keeping pests at bay.

Redcliffe Garden Centre’s Sondra Grainger and Tylor Elmsley recommend planting herbs and vegetables now for summer before the heat arrives.

That means cucumbers, carrots, chillis, beans, corn, lettuces, zucchinis, watermelon, pumpkins, squash, strawberries, blueberries, most herbs and even citrus because many are flowering and starting to fruit.

“If you’re putting in a fresh citrus, you can chop off most of the fruit and just get a few select fruit that give you a better crop. Especially if you’re planting it in the ground, you have to give the plant time to grow before it starts producing fruit,” Tylor says.

“With the blueberries you can do the same thing but they’re such small fruit that as long as you’re putting fertiliser in the soil and keeping that up to them, they’ll be able to handle having that much fruit on them.”

Blueberries like a slightly acidic fertiliser, so you can use azalea, camelia, gardenia fertilisers or even just a fruit and citrus food.

Sondra says if you are planting blueberries in pots, they need an azalea/camelia potting mix.

“They do really well in pots, so if somebody wants to put a couple of pots in a full-sun spot on a balcony, they can. They’re great for the kids, the bees love them and they’re prolific fruiters. These new ones that are coming through are perfect for our climate and they’re delicious,” she says.

The varieties available now will keep fruiting into summer, but you can mix and match them if you want fruit throughout the year.

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