Your garden can sell your Benoni home
A neat, well-maintained garden that is inviting and interesting can help to sell your property and need not cost a fortune. Before you rush off to the nearest nursery and start buying, on impulse, anything with a flower, stop! You will be wasting precious time and money on all the wrong plants, which probably won’t last for even a couple of months.
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Firstly, walk around the garden and take notes on what needs to be done. Tidy up generally and do some light pruning if necessary. Remove any rubble and keep driveways etc neatly swept. A well-maintained lawn makes a garden and it is time to tend to your lawn now, before the spring rains arrive. If it has a very thick thatch of dead grass you need to mow it very short and then rake out any remaining thatch with a steel rake. |
Level any uneven spots with a lawn dressing, apply an organic lawn fertiliser and water it in well. A healthy, strong growing lawn will smother out the weeds. If your lawn is full of weeds you may have to resort to spraying it with a broad leaf weed killer for lawns
Now you are ready to tackle you garden beds. Remember, you only want to fix up your existing garden, not re-design everything and you need to work with what you’ve got. Decide which plants really need to be removed, but choose carefully because removing even a small shrub can leave a great big hole in the garden, that will need to be filled. Most plants will respond well to a light pruning and feeding; shooting beautifully again in spring.
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Decide where some colourful summer seedlings will be the most visible and have the most impact. Take notes on how much sun or shade these areas receive. Plant spreading groundcovers in all other bare patches, this will make the garden look full. If you do want to add the odd colourful shrub, choose perennial plants or inexpensive, long flowering shrubs like daisy bushes.
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[singlepic=167,320,240,,] Dragon wing Pink Begonia. |
Please buy some compost to plant your seedlings with, this is well worth the money spent and will keep them growing and flowering for so much longer. Skimping on compost and other essentials simply doesn’t work and will cost you in the end.
Planting larger groupings of a single colour or variety of flower is much more effective than scattering seedlings all over the place.
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[singlepic=169,320,240,,] Ideal Series Dianthus
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[singlepic=170,320,240,,] Ideal Select Mixed Dianthus
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For more gardening “know how” visit www.gardeninginsouthafrica.co.za; South Africa’s favourite gardening website. We make gardening easy and a lot of fun.
Darlene Roelofsen.
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