By Calum Haygarth, Gardenarium
With spring just around the corner and buds starting to burst it’s time to finish all those end of winter gardening jobs.
All pruning of roses, deciduous trees and fruit trees should have commenced unless you are in a very frost prone area.
It is important to make sure you have applied a winter spray of lime sulphur straight after pruning to clean up any overwintering pests and diseases on roses that are not in leaf, fruit trees and ornamental trees.
Also on the important list is copper sprays for stone fruit trees, such as peaches and nectarines, to avoid the attack of peach leaf curl, sometimes called curly leaf.
If you had it last season you will definitely need to spray for it now as it does not go away if left untreated.
Ensure you do a few sprays, especially with all the rain recently.
If you had shot hole on your fruit as well and ornamental flowering cherries and anything in the prunus family that was prevalent last year, now is also time to get onto spraying those types of trees.
The time for planting dormant deciduous bare rooted trees and fruit trees is also drawing to a close.
Stone fruit and almonds and apricots are bursting into life so this week should be the last opportunity to plant these from bare rooted trees.
With our massive winter sale on too this is a good time time to grab a bargain with huge discounts on all excess stocks and over production of trees that we grow.
Be quick to bag a bargain as the sale ends Aug 14th unless sold out prior.
Whilst trees, fruit trees, roses, berries and nuts can be planted all year round sometimes the winter is easier on some situations where you won’t be able to attend to summer watering or you wish to make a head start whilst building a house.
Orchards can often be set up this way on new house blocks even if you don’t intend building for a few years.
Potted trees are available all year round from Limestone Coast Advanced Trees and often older, more mature trees are available too so people aren’t missing out on fruiting time.
Buying direct from the grower such as us can save you huge dollars.
The national demand for plants during Covid through our online business has meant we are struggling to keep up with packing out orders as well as keeping stock on the ground.
We have sold approximately six months worth of stock in around six weeks and the same goes for deciduous ornamental and fruit trees while grape vines are now the big one being hit the hardest.
Shortages of plants will definitely happen this spring so get planting now whilst you have good choices.
We have overproduced on some ornamental pear tree varieties this season at Limestone Coast Advanced Trees in Mount Gambier.
These overproductions happen from time to time where we have good grafting success and we grade them rigorously when they come from the paddock to maintain the quality of our trees.
We still have good stocks along of our exclusive newly released dwarf ornamental pear for 2020 which is a dwarf version that “sported” from its parent tree and ever popular Chanticleer in our nursery some years ago.
We have trialled it rigorously to ensure it maintains its smaller growth habit whilst still retaining all the great attributes of the other ornamental pears.
Growing only 4 metres high and around 3–4 metres wide its ideal for courtyards, under powerlines and fence lines.
Our exclusive evergreen ornamental pear “Wintergreen” again has met with huge demand interstate and we ran out early last year.
This year we have ramped up production of these greatly so will hopefully have enough of these to see us through to the end of the season.
We have two sizes at present, both 25 per cent off in the sale.
Seed potato and raspberry planting time is also upon us with good stocks of potatoes to keep to plant later or plant an early crop now.
As with the lettuce crisis, the prices of potatoes have also skyrocketed due to crop losses with floods and other factors, so now might be the time to give growing your own a go
They taste much nicer too while you can also grow in pots.
