Your guide to a festive garden

Escape the manic crowds in the shopping malls this month and rather spend some quiet quality time in the garden, transforming it into a beautiful, blooming festive season.

Eastern Cape

Plant a real tree in a pot for a Christmas tree, choose something indigenous like a wild gardenia (Gardenia thunbergia).

Choose a colour theme for your beds like traditional red and gold or try modern bright pinks and purples. Plant marigolds for gold and dianthus for red. Or plant bedding plants in rows to create red and white candy stripes – petunias are perfect for this.

Garden beds and containers will need regular watering and feeding now. Trim back spring growth, pinch back perennials such as fuchsias, geraniums and calibrachoas, and dead-head annuals regularly to encourage more flowers. Stake tall plants with soft ties. Mulch garden beds to suppress weeds.

Fungal diseases, aphids and slugs love this time of year. Keep a lookout and spray accordingly.

Summer herbs and veggies to keep on sowing include basil, marjoram, chives, oregano, coriander, thyme, borage, squashes, pumpkins, melons, peppers, chillies, eggfruit, cucumbers and spinach. Plant out runners from your strawberries, pinch side shoots of tomato plants and mound soil up around potatoes.

Hot tip: Plant up a Christmas wreath with succulent plants like echeveria. You can use circular floral foam rings (available at florists) and simply stick unrooted echeveria rosettes in there. If you spritz it with water now and again, they will actually root into the foam, and you will have new plants for the garden after the festivities.

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