• If you have a patch of helleborus orientalis (commonly known as winter roses), you may like to go through and cut all the old leaves off at this time. This allows the charming new flowers to be more visible as they otherwise tend to hide below the foliage. It is a good time to mulch around the hellebores.
• Hellebores are one clumping perennial which does not like to be dug up and divided. They are frequently grown from seed and not division. The seedlings come up very readily in the garden but it pays to weed them out while they are still small or you risk the plants getting overcrowded. They don’t come true from seed unless you have isolated the mother plant and hand pollinated it. So to increase the double flowered varieties or the exciting new slate coloured ones, you will have to divide it but be patient because it can take several years for the plantlets to recover and perform well.
• Polyanthus, however, do respond well to being divided. Indeed if you look at a plant which you may have bought as one substantial clump some time ago, you may notice that there are now multiple small plants and no large one. If you lift the small plants and give them space to grow, they will reward you with renewed vigour and flowering.
• Sasanqua camellias are in flower now if you looking for late autumn colour.
• Clean up established lawns by getting rid of broad leafed weeds, hydrocotle and oxalis. There are specific sprays which will target these weeds and it is safer to surrounding plants to spray now rather than waiting for spring. Sulphate of ammonia can also be used to suppress broad leafed weeds.
• Harvest feijoas. They don’t last long if you leave them on the ground but will keep better in cool conditions.
• Plant out strawberry runners for spring crop. You can divide established crowns if the plants are not producing runners, which some modern varieties don’t.
• If you have not yet given your citrus trees a copper spray, then get on to it. It is the most important spray of the year for citrus.
• Clean up asparagus beds. You can lightly fork the surface to counteract compacting and caking of the soil but be careful not to damage the crowns of the asparagus. Mulching will keep the bed looking tidy and suppress weeds as well as enriching the soil.

If you are planning to move any large plants this winter, do not delay on starting to wrench them. Make a deep cut around two sides of the plant allowing for as large a root ball as practical. In a month’s time you make the remainder of the cuts and then lever the plant out a couple of weeks later. This slow preparation greatly reduces the shock to the plant and increases the chance of moving it successfully. It is particularly important to go through the wrenching process for large evergreen plants.

• It is a myth from England that you can not move magnolias successfully. This may be true in the UK but we can vouch for the fact that it is possible to move quite large magnolias in winter without even wrenching them, as long as you take a large enough mass of roots with them.
• Dig and divide. It is a very satisfying way of getting plants for nothing. But discard any plants which indicate that they are spreading alarmingly fast and threatening a takeover bid. And beware of the feeling that you must use all the plant divisions no matter what. There are limits to how many achillea, for example, that any garden needs. The compost heap is fine for surplus.
• Spray citrus trees with copper. This is a very important spray to reduce diseases in the spring. Copper combats brownspot on the leaf and fruit which rots on the tree before it ripens. Mandarins are particularly susceptible.
• Now is traditionally the time for a main sowing of broad beans. You can still continue planting brassica plants. Harvest pumpkins before they go rotten and dig main crop potatoes.
• The autumn clean up in the vegetable garden is an important part of keeping pesky diseases at bay and good tidy practices will reduce the need for spraying in the future. The same is true in rose gardens where diseased foliage is best removed from the garden bed. The advice is generally not to compost rose leaves unless you manage a mix which heats up enough to kill the fungi and bacteria. If your compost does not get hot enough, you risk circulating weed seeds and every undesirable problem when you spread the compost around the garden later.

• If your hostas are looking distinctly unwell, it is because they are going dormant for winter. All their leaves will rot off and the plant hibernates below ground. If you have well established clumps, you can lift and divide them any time from now on until spring.
• Lifting and dividing is the gardening term used to describe the process of splitting up clumping plants (as opposed to woody trees and shrubs). These include perennials such as hostas, grasses, flaxes and asters. These types of plants can get very congested if you just leave them whereas they will gain new vigour if you divide up the clump. To get maximum small plants, wash the roots (so you can see what you are doing) and then split into divisions so that each piece has some roots and a few growing tips. Cutting a clump into sections with a spade or sharp knife is less precise but will work just fine. Replanting the divisions into well cultivated soil gives the plant a good start again.
• If you don’t want to lift and divide, gouging out some of the central growing tips will reduce congestion, as will scratching around the outside perimeter of the plant and chipping away some of the bulk.
• Winter is approaching so in the vegetable garden it is all about battening down the hatches – clearing old crops and either sowing in a green crop or planting winter veg such as spinach, carrots and brassicas. Broad beans can be sown now and even garlic can be planted, if you are keen. It is not compulsory to wait for the shortest day to plant garlic.
• Keep spraying with copper to beat fungal diseases. Copper is regarded as a safe chemical to use on edible crops with a very short with holding period before it is safe to eat them.
• If you have a very sheltered and favoured spot, you can do a planting of early potatoes. Use a quick maturing variety such as Jersey Bennes or Rocket and you may be able to compete with the highly priced first crop new potatoes which appear in the supermarkets at the end of winter.

• A couple of weeks ago we talked about the autumn rains having arrived. Well they have been and gone so watch out for container plants drying out too much and maybe hold back on too much planting or shifting of trees and shrubs until the rains return (which they will, this being Taranaki not Australia).
• Dry spring bulbs can still be planted although it now too late to lift existing bulbs and divide them.
• Don’t delay on sowing new lawns and April is good month for topdressing. Time it for just before rain or the sun may act with the fertiliser to burn the grass. If the nitrogen doesn’t get washed in, much of it will disappear in the air. Use a cheap NPK fertiliser, or Bioboost works well.
• If you covet sweet peas, sow them now in a well dug bed with lots of rich compost. They need a frame to climb up and are ideal for growing in the vegetable garden as a cut flower.
• Sow leafy greens now from seed. The female half of our household regards silver beet as stock food but others may like to plant it, especially the coloured chards which are allegedly ornamental. The same goes for swedes, kohlabi and turnips which can be planted now if you are desperate enough to want to eat them later.
• Rhubarb (which we do like upon occasion – very nice cooked the Alison Holst method with sago) can be divided and planted. It likes plenty of compost and fertiliser.
• Plant strawberries. If you have runners from the season just past, you can use these but some of the newer varieties do not seem to put out runners. In our climate, strawberries are often treated as an annual and tend to give their best crop in the first year.
• Take cuttings of fuchsias, lavenders, pelargoniums and similar plants now. Apparently you can use honey instead of rooting hormone – presumably liquified honey but we have never tried it.

• April is an excellent gardening month. The autumn rains have come, the sun has lost some of its intensity but the soils are still warm. Planting now gives plants a chance to settle in and establish some root growth before the cold of winter slows everything down. So you can rip into replanting messy borders or beds now if you want to.
• All of the above is why it is a good time to plant new hedges now. If you have untidy existing hedges, do not delay pruning them any longer. The plants will respond by putting on a little (but not too much) fresh growth before they stop growing for winter. Be very cautious about cutting back in to bare wood unless you have already checked that your hedge is of a type which will sprout again from bare wood – buxus (box), camellia and totara are examples of these. Most conifers will just leave you with ugly bare bits.
• Some autumn leaf drop is starting already. Too many leaves can smother plants below or get slippery on sealed areas. But allowing the leaves to rot down adds humus and health to your garden and is a natural process. Often all that is required is to rake fallen leaves back in to the base of the tree or to disperse them under other plants. Or you can compost them. But a scorched earth garden where all natural leaf litter is removed is not a healthy garden.
• Autumn conditions bring a fresh flush of weeds. Be vigilant on these. Leaving fallen leaves will significantly repress these freshly germinating weeds.
• April heralds clean-up time in the vegetable garden. Remove spent crops such as corn, potatoes and beans. Continue with sowing seed for winter and spring vegetables – brassicas, onions, spinach, lettuce etc. It is getting late for leeks so it is probably better to use plants rather than seed if you still want a crop.
• If you are not intending to replant areas of your vegetable garden immediately, sow a green crop to be dug in when spring comes. Oats, mustard, lupins or ryegrass are the usual green crops. Continued use of soil to take a harvest depletes the goodness and to manage a good vegetable garden, it is necessary to feed the soil continually with compost and green crops.