A Pre-Christmas Garden Blitz!

Get Ready for Your Holiday Visitors

Christmas and New Year’s festivities are the perfect motivators for whipping your garden into shape before guests arrive. Plus it's a great time to prepare your garden if you're heading away on holiday. Here are a few simple ways to spruce up outdoor areas before Santa gets here!

• Trimming hedges – give hedges a light trim to create a lovely crisp look. For less formal hedges and shrubs, just trim back any untidy, wayward or dead stems as well as any spent flowers. And if you're feeling super-festive, you can make a Christmas wreath out of your hedge trimmings with a simple twist of wire. Decorate it with pretty objects and textures from the garden and hang it on the front door, or wherever you're entertaining! 

• Weed control – weeds can ruin the look of your garden. Spot spray weeds with fast acting Yates Zero Rapid Weedkiller. Visible effects are noticeable on most weeds within 1 hour, so it's easy to see where you've been and touch up any missed spots later.

• Mulching – applying mulch around flower and shrub beds helps unify the garden, fills in bare spots and is a great water saving strategy during the hottest months. An additional bonus is when organic mulches are used (such as bark chips), as they break down they add valuable organic matter to the soil.

• Quick lawn green up – Yates Lawn Fertiliser Hose on is a convenient hose-on lawn fertiliser that’s high in nitrogen for rapid greening, plus added potassium to encourage strong healthy grass. It’s fast acting and will give the lawn a quick green up.

• Watering – give your garden some thorough, deep waterings in the weeks leading up to Christmas. This moistens the soil down into the root zone, encourages plant roots to grow deeper and helps freshen up the garden.

• Mowing – don’t be tempted to give your lawn a harsh low mowing just before Christmas. This can scalp the lawn and create bare patches, which are unattractive and will invite in weeds. It’s better to mow little and often, removing no more than a third of the grass foliage each time.

• Edging - edging paths and driveways always adds an extra sharpness to your lawn.

• Lighting - 
• Planting - why not plant red and white flowering annuals to create a Christmas-vibe and brighten up your garden. Try Petunia or Alyssum - for many flowering annuals, it can take up to 12 weeks until they are mature and flowering, if you run out of time plant "potted colour" (established plants) instead. Pot up into larger pots or plant in the ground as a boarder or mass planting. For faster growth and more prolific flowering feed your flowering plants with Yates Thrive Natural Roses & Flowers Concentrate. 

• Decorating: Add pops of colour – a simple way to bring festive pizzazz into outdoor entertaining areas is to plant up a few pots with floral colour. Red and white flowering petunias look very Christmassey, geraniums add vibrant splashes of flowers and hanging baskets of cascading calibrachoas add a lovely vertical dimension to a patio, veranda or deck. Indoor plants like traditional Christmas Poinsettias make a great table decoration and of course don't forget some pohutukawa flowers!

Your guests (and Santa) will love it!