Tips on sprucing up outdoor entertainment areas.

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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. 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.
Weed control – weeds can ruin the look of your garden. Spot spray weeds with fast acting Yates Nature’s Way Organic Weed Gun Ready to Use. It contains natural ingredients and is certified for use in organic gardening.
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.
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.