Spring gardening is not for wimps. It's a time of unrestrained growth, which is mostly a Good Thing. Plants can do more than 50 per cent of their annual growth if fed and watered in spring. But that growth needs to be controlled, as do the pests that eat it. It's time to unleash your inner dominatrix or become the Genghis Khan of gardening, and be ruthless - just for a while.
Leave a weed now and it will seed or spread. By summer it will be a patch of weeds, deep rooted and determined. Dig them out if you are a masochist or need the exercise. I cover weeds with at least 60cm of pea straw. Three months later the weeds are dead and the earthworms are happy.
Try 'solarisation' before growing weed-sensitive veg like carrots. You do need to dig for this, as leftover dead plant roots lead to deviated carrots, ugly and hard to peel. Water well, then cover the ground with clear plastic for three weeks. Weed seed will germinate in the warm moisture, and then die. Rake the area, then sow your seed.
This is the year's best pruning time: wounds heal quickly and are less likely to host rot that can eventually kill the tree. This is also the best time to encourage fresh growth.
Roses flower on new wood. If you do not prune your hybrid tea roses back by a third now, you will get less new wood, and fewer flowers. If you don't prune your once-a-blooming-year roses back as soon as they have bloomed, you will have fewer flowers too.
Basically prune anything that blooms after it's finished flowering, including native shrubs. Each species has its own pruning needs. Look them up to see if they need a ruthless hacking back or a trim to tidy.
Pruning fruit trees gives you bigger fruit, and fruit that ripens evenly. I prefer our fruit to ripen unevenly, as dealing with four cases of plums in mid-summer is a nuisance. But if big means beauty for you when it comes to apples, plums or peaches, prune now and thin the clusters.
This is the time of year to tell your trees and shrubs who is boss, and exactly where you'd like that new growth to go.
I prune off all lower branches so the wallabies can't reach them. You may prefer to do this so you can mow more easily under them. A high canopy also allows breezes through, carrying the cooled air from the shade of the tree to your house. Some landscape gardeners believe pruning lower branches is desecration. I call it 'convenient'.
I also 'shape' some of our trees. For a while I grew a 'fence' of thorny honey locust to see if it's possible to grow a burglar-proof fence. I spent about a decade twining branches together. It worked!
Friends have made a fence of intertwined dwarf apple branches. It's glorious when dappled with red apples, but sculpturally lovely even when its branches are bare in winter.
I've also turned a couple of naturally tall trees into spreading shade trees. Twist fencing wire loosely over the branches of a youngish tree, then bend the wire to the direction you want the branch to grow. It will obey. Remove the wire two years later so it doesn't ringbark the tree. Do this with all vertical branches and in three years you will have a glorious leafy and sometimes blossom-covered canopy above you for summer shade.
Take metre-long pieces of the widest garden hose available, or polypipe. Insert snail bait into the middle. Place around your garden, with the ends slightly buried for easier snail access. The snails will enter, eat, and hopefully die before they emerge, lessening any chance of killing non-target species.
Squish them with your fingers. Squashed aphid is also an aphid deterrent.
Possums love spring growth. They love it so much they can kill a tree.
Tell yourself - and the possum - firmly: "I am a Homo sapien and we are top of the food chain, except for disease-carrying mozzies, crocodiles, viruses and a few others we won't mention. That tree/rose bush and its produce is (mostly) mine!"
We have just put ferocious spiky possum collars around the trunks of my favourite trees, which also happens to be Possum X's favourites.
Spiked possum collars work, though make sure they are high or low enough so they don't poke anyone's eye out. Smooth sheets of metal also stop possums climbing up tree trunks or pergola posts. You can see them on some electricity poles.
Water shoots are the extremely vigorous new growth that zoom up from the rootstock of your grafted trees in spring. Do not cut them! Break them as destructively as possible - the greater the injury, the less likely they are to regrow.
There's no hedging about when it comes to hedges in spring. Turn your back on them and they'll have grown 30cm upwards and outwards. Prune weekly till summer heat slows growth. Don't cut into the wood that doesn't have leaf buds though, or that branch will die off. Many a hedge has been made redundant by a brown patch in the middle created by an over-enthusiastic pruner.
Wisteria will lift your roof and kiwi will grow through an open window if you let it. One of our kiwi vines has climbed over the fence, up the hill and over two pittosporum trees. Prune kiwifruit now. Prune wisteria as soon as it has finished blooming. Do it ruthlessly. You constantly need to show wayward wisteria who is boss.
Spring is also the time to identify weedy climbers like jasmine when they are blooming and most obvious. We have an annual battle with the potato vine and jasmine that a friend planted as a 'nice surprise'. It was indeed a surprise and still is 20 years later. Jasmine is hard to kill, especially when it's three metres above you in a tree. Even low-growing jasmine is resistant to herbicides - the waxy coating on the leaves inhibits penetration. Hunt out the stems, cut them, then peel the outside of the stem and apply a herbicide gel. Use gloves, a paint brush and a mask, but there'll be no spray drift, just an ugly dead patch of vine to haul out.
This will not be easy. But it's spring. You'll be working with the scents of new blossom and freshly grown grass, in one of the eight weeks of the year when Canberra's climate is perfect, when it is a joy to be a gardener.
