WELCOME to the season of spring gardening.

At the time of writing these notes, the winter has not been too bad and certainly not the ‘worst winter on record’ that had been predicted, of course there is still time.

One thing I must say about the weather is the dry conditions. Some plants are drooping especially our tubs and pots. Lawns are also looking dry and a little sad. I think we could be looking at a ‘dry season’, so do we mulch our borders now to retain as much moisture as possible, or wait to see if and when rain falls and then immediately mulch to keep the maximum amount of moisture in? I have noticed with our spring planting the dry weather has stopped these plants from growing and thickening up, some of them are not much bigger than when they were first planted but hopefully they will still fill out before flowering. Spring bulbs are also now pushing their way through and look forward to seeing our first daffodils. Snowdrops were seen in late January.

Well that’s enough chit-chat, now for a little about our teams working out in the cold.

General maintenance of our gardens are pretty well up to date and just waiting for the spring rush. We still have some lawns to work on, mainly dealing with moss. Just because we are fairly up to date on our outside works we still have plenty of maintenance to do within the yard area, especially dealing with out waste materials from the summer months. We are building up some good compost areas, these have been turned and re-stacked. All our waste prunings and shrubs have now gone through the chipper and we have a good supply of wood chip which will be used, once matured, for mulching those hidden shrub borders and possibly to be used on woodland paths/border path, surface areas. Large branches and trees that were felled during the summer months are now being logged and once matured and dry will be used to keep the home fires burning.

The other jobs that are looming are the houses that we have clad with Ivy climbers. We will try and get an early trim to these climbers prior to the birds starting their nesting season!

Our Landscapers have been busy creating a garden near Swindon, mainly forming new borders including vegetable areas and purpose-built compost bins. The borders have been dug over and hopefully the frost will do the rest. Our work also consisted of a large deck area over a sloping section of the garden and this makes a good flat surface area for the garden shed, utility and potting up area.

It is worth a mention that when we were marking out and hooking up the turf for the formation of the borders, we found a lot of leatherjacket larvae and chafer grubs. No wonder this lawn was looking patchy and worn, certainly not a patch on its condition during the summer months and I thought it was the dry weather! This lawn will be sprayed during the month of March which hopefully will reduce the infestation.

Other schemes include a garden enlargement marrying the old established garden in with the new section, a front parking area but retaining vegetation each side. The parking area slopes towards the house so a drainage system was installed to remove surface water. This particular drive construction was a maroon tarmac.

A less interesting scheme but nevertheless just as important, repairing large grass areas on a large grass verge running alongside an “A” road. These areas were damaged by the utility workers, visual areas have been laid to turf and the more hidden areas are being laid to grass seed.

The promised photos regarding out two water feature schemes are still not to hand. Hopefully next time I write I will have these schemes completed with the necessary photos and look forward to showing them to you.

Colin Byrne.