(u'Yates gardening',)
(u'Yates gardening',)
A utumn has arrived, with the promise of cooler, bright days, much less humidity and fewer flies — it's the perfect time to do some gardening.
Yates has provided Your Home readers with some great tips on how you can encourage your plants to thrive, even as the weather cools.
■ March is a great month for sowing Asian vegies, especially those slightly tricky Chinese cabbages that can bolt to seed if it's too hot or too cold for their liking. Yates Wombok Chinese cabbage has a compact head of leaves packed into a tight cylinder. Chinese lettuce is a great option for adding crunch to an Autumn salad.
■ Hollyhocks are a great flower to grow in March as the weather will help to keep them happy. Yates Hollyhocks Double Elegance can grow to more than two metres tall, when grown in a great environment. But you will need to watch out for pest damage as Hollyhocks are prone to a similar range of insect problems as hibiscus plants.
■ March is also a great time for lawn care; you can feed your lawns to encourage growth throughout winter, and maintain that lovely spring green.
■ Insect pests have had ample time to build up numbers through the warm weather and there's a lot of growth around for them to get stuck into when it gets cool. Caterpillars grow ever bigger as they feast on your favourite plants. Yates Success will control caterpillars, and Nature's Way Natrasoap can treat smaller sap suckers like aphids and thrips.
■ Details: Visit: yates.com.au