Get your garden ready for Spring!

Spring is an exciting time in the garden with warmer weather, longer days and thriving plants! Spring planting focuses on cool-season crops like leafy greens, root vegetables and peas, as well as preparing for warm-season crops like tomatoes, capsicum and zucchini.

Here’s what you need to do to get ready for Spring!

Prepare your beds

• Clean up: remove weeds, winter debris and spent crops.
• Prune fruit trees: If you haven’t already done this in Winter, now’s the time. 

Prepare your soil

• Enrich the soil: Add compost or aged manure.
• Mulch: Once the soil warms up and the winter frosts have passed, apply mulch (pea straw, lucerne or sugarcane mulch) to retain moisture and suppress weeds. These are available at landscape suppliers, nurseries, or from local farmers on Facebook Marketplace.

Planting tips

• Start seeds: Start your seeds in a warm spot like a hothouse or on a sunny windowsill.
• Sow when ready: Wait for the soil to warm up, then sow your seeds and seedlings into the garden.
• Stagger planting: Plant your seeds and seedlings out every few weeks to ensure a continuous harvest.
• Fruit trees: Evergreen fruit trees such as lemons, limes and oranges should be planted in spring when the soil has warmed up.
• Attract pollinators: Plant flowers around your veggie patch to attract bees and beneficial insects. Flowers such as marigolds, nasturtiums, petunias and zinnias are great, or try native plants like grevillea, banksia and bottlebrush.

Tips

• Check your watering system: Before the warm weather hits, check your watering system is in good working order. A dripper system works best as it waters the roots of a plant, rather than the leaves.
• Fertilise regularly: Apply appropriate fertilisers throughout the growing season for a bumper harvest.

What to plant

Grow plants you like to eat! Check out our Healthy Recipe Hub for ideas for ways to use your fruit and vegetables.

Fruit

• Apples
• Strawberries
• Blueberries 
• Figs
• Lemons
• Mulberries
• Oranges
• Passionfruit
• Peaches
• Pears
• Plums
• Raspberries
• Rockmelon
• Watermelon

Vegetables and herbs

• Basil
• Beans
• Cabbage
• Carrot
• Capsicum
• Celery
• Coriander
• Cucumber
• Chilli
• Chives
• Eggplant
• Leek
• Lettuce
• Oregano
• Peas
• Pumpkin
• Spring Onion
• Squash
• Sweet Corn
• Parsley
• Thyme
• Tomatoes
• Zucchini

If you’re new to gardening, the Growing in Loddon Campaspe booklet has simple tips tailored to our region, so you can learn step by step.