A Pre-Christmas Garden Blitz!

Get Ready for Your Holiday Visitors

Christmas and New Year’s festivities are good motivators for whipping your garden into shape, before guests arrive. It's also the ideal time to prepare your garden if you're heading away on holiday. Here are a few simple ways to spruce up outdoor areas before the holidays get here!

• 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 (like bark chips); they break down over time and add valuable organic matter to the soil.

• 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!

• Fast 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 the holidays. Scalping the lawn puts it into a state of stress and actually makes it desperate to grow faster, which is not what you were aiming for! Stressed grass doesn't have the energy reserves left to resist hot and dry conditions, the way that healthy grass can. This explains why harsh mowing often creates bare patches, which are ugly, persist through summer and will encourage weeds. Over the summer it’s best to mow 'little and often', removing no more than a third of the grass foliage each time.

• Edging - edging paths and driveways always makes your lawn look sharp and cared for.

• 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. Fowering petunias in bright, primary colours look very Christmassey, geraniums add vibrant splashes of flowers and hanging baskets of cascading calibrachoas add a lovely vertical dimension to an outdoor area. 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!