Rain glorious rain last Sunday and Monday was a welcome relief for gardeners as well as farmers.

While we have not yet had enough to bring moisture levels back to normal, it does at least herald the start of the new gardening cycle. It should be safe to sow lawns. You can be starting to divide perennials and clumping plants (but make sure you water them in well) and thinking about autumn planting of shrubs and trees.

• If you are planning to divide or plant bluebells, do not delay. They will be moving soon. Our large daffodils are already in growth but the dwarf daffs are still able to be divided and moved.
• If you have untidy looking hedges, now is the time to give them a trim in preparation for winter if you are in a fairly frost free or light frost area. Trimming them encourages fresh growth and you don’t want to delay or that growth will be very soft and tender just when Jack Frost pays his first visit. Leave the radical hair cut for springtime when the plants are in full growth. This is more a light maintenance trim.
• The Curious Gardener’s Almanac quotes an old saying:
  

  if a shrub flowers before the middle of summer, prune it in the autumn; if afterwards, then wait till spring. There are exceptions to this but generally it holds true.

  We are still digesting this piece of advice. Certainly you will be trimming off flower buds on rhododendrons and camellias at least, but it may be appropriate for radical rejuvenation where you are willing to sacrifice the flowering for the next season. So if you are an inveterate hacker, you could take this piece of advice and head out to prune everything (except flowering cherries where you have missed the boat) which flowered before the end of January.

• Keen vegetable gardeners will be preparing the ground in advance for later crops such as onions. Keep tomatoes sprayed with copper to extend their life span into autumn. Citrus trees will also benefit from a clean up copper and oil spray to combat botrytis and scabbing on the fruit. Botrytis will take the leaves off and rot the fruit.

The final thought for this week (also from the above mentioned almanac) is that worms are roughly 1000 times stronger than humans, relative to their size. We did not know that and it is likely that you did not either.

• In the current dry conditions, there is not a lot you can do in the garden. Treat this hiatus as a time for contemplation and planning. In cold climates where gardening is not possible for months on end, winter is the time for planning. Here we can continue to garden all winter, but this abnormal dry spell has put the brakes on most gardening activities this autumn.
• If you are still mowing your lawns, set the lawnmower on a high level. If you scalp your lawn by mowing it too short in these dry conditions, the grass will die and it will be weeds which will be the first to colonise the bare areas.
• Keep preparing areas for new lawns. At least the dry weather makes it easy to hoe off germinating weeds. Wait for the promise of a second rain before you actually sow the lawn.
• If your vegetable garden is well cultivated and well watered, you can be planting winter vegetables such as brassicas, lettuce and even broad beans if you are really keen.
• Dig potatoes. Clear old crops and sow areas you don’t need for replanting in green crops.
• It seems a bad season for whitefly. If you have particularly bad infestations (check your pumpkins and other cucurbits), get rid of the host plant by covering it at the bottom of your compost heap. Whitefly appear to have overcome their natural predators and are now immune to many of the sprays available to the home gardener so early intervention is best, especially in a glasshouse. With a life cycle of five days, the population can explode exponentially in an alarmingly short period if you ignore it. If you feel you must spray, Confidor kills the adult flies and works as long as the plant is not getting reinfested. Applaud attacks the larvae stages but not the mature flies. Flyspray or summer oil with added pyrethrum can also knock them down.

Mark was given The Curious Gardener’s Almanac for Christmas which is proving to be a fund of information. This week’s snippet for readers is the origin of the wheelbarrow – thought to have been developed in China around 1800 years ago as a form of transport for military supplies. There is no evidence that it reached Europe until the thirteenth century. Where would we gardeners be without it today?

• It is harvest time. Don’t delay on getting the onions in lest they start rotting or going back into regrowth, which they will do as soon as it rains. Main crop potatoes should be lifted as soon as they are ready. Pumpkins and melons should also be maturing and are best picked, not left to lie in the open.
• As crops are cleared in the vegetable garden, it is a good opportunity to have a general clean-up and to sow a green crop if you don’t intend to replant immediately. Green crops replenish the soil, add texture and nitrogen. At this time of the year, our preference is for lupins, oats or ryegrass which will be dug in by springtime.
• Most winter vegetables should be in the ground by now though you can still continue sowing all the brassicas and leafy greens such as silver beet and winter spinach.
•   If you can keep water up to them, you can start sowing fresh lawns and over sowing bare patches. Cover fresh sown areas with bird netting or old shade cloth to protect the germinating seed.
• Don’t delay any longer on lifting and dividing spring bulbs and garden centres should have their best selections of dry bulbs in store now.
• It is a good time to start dividing up perennials but make sure that you water them in as you replant. Perennials perform best if you lift and divide clumps every two to three years.
• If you live in a colder area and have sharply clipped hedges, don’t leave it much longer before you give them their last trim before the end of winter. Clipping them forces them back into growth and it is that soft growth that can get frosted.

From the school of We Finally Got Around To It, it really is your last chance this summer to prune cherry trees. These are trees you don’t winter prune because you open them up to silver blight and cherry trees are short lived enough in our climate without making it worse.

• Next task here is to follow our own advice from a few weeks ago and remove the raspberry canes that fruited this year. Next summer’s fruit is set on new canes so the old ones are superfluous now. Raspberries are a rewarding crop for the home garden if you have some sort of netted cage to grow them in (keeping out the birds) but nobody here is exactly rushing to carry out the pruning.
• Autumn is certainly here and the heat has gone out of the sun but if you feel drawn back to planting, make sure you soak the root balls in a bucket of water until the bubbles stop rising before you plant. We are still very dry and watering a plant in will not suffice. If the potting mix around the roots has dried out, it will just repel water unless it is soaked first. You can not rush or skimp on this process without risking the plant.
• Keep preparing ground for autumn sowing into lawns. Push hoeing or raking off each crop of fresh weeds pays dividends in the long term.
• If you have a grape vine outdoors, do not expect any crop at all unless you have covered it with bird netting. The birds do not understand about waiting until the fruit is ripe before eating it and once they have pecked pretty well every grape in search of the perfect specimen, the wasps move in on the pecked ones.
• With the gentle rains, diseases can get away almost overnight on vulnerable crops like tomatoes. Keep up the copper sprays with special attention after even light rain. The humidity is the problem. Potatoes may need a spray against late blight unless you are growing some of the more resistant, modern varieties. Blight will kill the top and work its way down to the tubers. It was late blight which was one of the causes of the Irish potato famines. Potatoes are the fourth largest global food crop. Our guess is that they come in behind rice, wheat and probably soy. Given that they have only been around for 400 years, their rise in global popularity is astonishing.
• Side dress young vegetable crops with fertiliser if they need it to encourage them to continue growing strongly and keep the water up to them. Research shows that fertilising while the plant is growing by sprinkling around it can give better results than raking in all the fertiliser when you are first planting the crop. Cropping in a vegetable garden is no different to cropping in the field – unless you are alternating with green crops which you dig in and adding large quantities of good compost or other fertilisers, then constantly cropping the same area depletes the soil of goodness over time. You must keep feeding the soil.

Summer bunnies amongst us may have to accept that the full heat of summer has gone for another year, making a somewhat early departure this season, but keen gardeners will be relieved that conditions are becoming kinder for planting and cultivation. Keep thinking drought mode until we get some serious rain however.

• Start deadheading agapanthus as they finish flowering, especially if the plants are adjacent to waterways or to reserves. Most agapanthus have been ruled noxious weeds in Northland and Auckland now because of their seeding habits. Our summer roadsides and gardens would be dull without them but increased vigilance may slow any tendency to become a major problem. If you are buying them, look for sterile varieties which don’t set seed.
• Deadheading dahlias will extend their flowering season. Dwarf marigolds can also provide late summer colour if you like them. Some of us don’t.
• If you raise your annuals from seed (which is hugely cheaper than buying potted colour), you can be thinking about sowing seed for winter and early spring crops. They do most of their growing before winter and then slow down in cold temperatures before bursting into flower. Keep them disbudded, however, while they get established. Once they start to flower, they can rush to seed and die prematurely.
• Start thinking about wrenching large shrubs and trees that you plan to move in autumn or winter. Plan to take as large a root ball as you can physically manage.
• Lettuce, kale, broccoli, cauli and cabbage can all be planted from either seed or baby plants. Those with a warm spot could still get a late sowing of dwarf beans in but it is the last chance. They will develop into winter and the cold then holds them for an extended picking.

As we admired a beautifully crafted waxeye nest which had come down with a branch, Mark regretted that he had never tried to document the changing fashions in birds’ nests over the decades. This one was held together with fine threads of blue synthetic baling twine and did look very decorative. Other nests we have found over the years incorporate the soft plastic strips which we use for budding and grafting, the black plastic tape we use to tie plants to bamboo stakes and even the odd Tuflok label gets recycled to cushion eggs and babies. We wonder if the birds will ever get to build their nests entirely out of near indestructible plastics and synthetics that they pick up. It is a slightly alarming reminder of how much non bio degradable debris is lying around, even in an establishment where we try to reduce its impact.