Cutting remarks that will benefit your lawn and garden borders

In the Garden

When there has been a dry spell, and it’s easy to focus on the rain, there is still plenty to do in the beds and indoors for now. Hopefully the lawn has had an initial mow on a high setting by now, if not, do it on the next dry day. 

Leaving the grass longer encourages moss and other weeds you might not want. Pull out and the deep rooted perennial weeds and the grass will take over. Turn your back for a minute and dandelions, sow thistle and lesser celandine will be partying wildly like a gospel choir all over the lawn. 

It’s definitely time to be pruning hydrangeas in order to help them produce a larger amount of flowers this year. There are different groups of hydrangea which include the mophead variety (macrophylla), or the more regulation sized paniculata and aspera varieties. Mopheads flower in midsummer and always remind me of visiting older relatives in retirement homes set in lavish grounds. As a child I always thought there was a link between blue mopheads and those liquorice allsorts that always get left in the packet. Both were commonplace in that environment which probably added to the hypothesis. 

Other groups flower in late summer or early autumn so it's easy to know which one you ve got. Both can be pruned now as it's a window for both while there’s still a nip in the air but plenty of rain. Also hydrangea tend to be quite resilient and robust shrubs once they’re  established so a mulch of leaf mould here and there keeps them in great shape over winter. 

Ideally you want to cut everything down to about 30cm/12’ and the dead stems completely cut away. Cut back above a shoot. At this time of year leaves will have started to sprout too just to make it easier. This way you can shape the shrub or if you want taller plants, then prune higher up the stem. 

Hydrangeas are easy to care for and look after themselves well if you give them a prune and some mulching whenever you can remember. 

On the Plot

Whilst the veg patch is threatening to turn into a quagmire, focus on the health of the compost. It’s all too easy to chuck green and brown waste into the bin or heap and think it will look after itself. Well, it won’t. It needs turning with a fork and checking for good decomposition now and again. If it's too wet it needs brown and if it's dry it needs green waste. Lots of worms mean it’s at least halfway to where it should be. Compost doesn't have to resemble the black crumble we, or at least I fantasise about. Even if it's three quarters decomposed then it can be used. What you don’t want is anything that still resembles its original form. Admittedly I sometimes have lemons in there but tend to drop those in trenches for potatoes or beans where they can’t be seen and can rot away underground. 

Certain personality types can obsess over compost and hundreds of books have been written about the subject so you can get into temperature gauges and acidity testing if you like, but life is short and I prefer to spend that on watering or weeding, or happily sitting down contemplating things. 

If you layer your compost with brown and green waste and then spin it over with a fork you won’t go far wrong. Adding coffee grounds in there won’t increase the acidity but it will deter slugs and snails who I always imagine would prefer tea. It’s often free from coffee shops so it's worth bringing a bag home. 

The rain will eventually magically morph into what we remember as that warming sunshine we all associate with actual springtime.