If you’re about to head off on your holidays, there are a few things you can do to ensure that your garden stays in full health while you’re enjoying your time away so you don’t come back to dried-out plants, a yellowed lawn, or other problems!
Read our 5 top tips to keep your garden healthy when you’re away from home.
5 Garden Care Tips
1. Put Garden Furniture Away
Before you leave for your holidays, put away any garden furniture that’s on your lawn. This isn’t just a good idea to keep your furniture in the best condition — protecting it from whatever weather might come — but it also helps to keep your grass healthy. Having furniture on your lawn for a long period can crush the grass, as well as limit access to sunlight and water. It can result in yellow patches on your lawn where the furniture sat!
2. Watering
Check the weather and if it’s going to rain, you won’t have to worry about your lawn or plants drying out. If, however, it’s going to be warm and sunny, then you might want to consider how you’re going to keep your garden well watered.
In hot and dry conditions, your lawn will likely need watering around once a week (depending on your soil type and other factors). If you’re just going away for a week, water it deeply before your leave and then when you get back and it should be okay, depending on how extreme the weather is.
If you’re going for more than a week, you could set up automatic sprinklers to keep it healthy while you’re off on your holidays.
Along a similar line, you can create slow release watering devices for your plants. Check out some tutorials on Instructables, for example, and you’ll find lots of ideas! This is particularly useful for ‘thirsty’ plants (plants that require a lot of water) like tomato plants. You won’t have to worry about them drying out.
Along this line, it’s worth topping up ponds and bird baths before you go so if it’s hot the water levels don’t get too low!
3. Hire Some Help
Of course, if homemade irrigation systems sound like a lot of effort, you could simply hire someone to pop over every few days. A great idea is asking a young person on your street who could do with some extra pocket money. They could come over to water your plants and lawn, as well as pull up any weeds that might pop up while you’re on holiday.
4. Book Your Greensleeves Treatment
You don’t need to be at home for your local Greensleeves expert to treat your lawn. We don’t cut the grass, but we can provide a range of different lawn treatments from our summer seasonal treatment to specialist services like a hydration treatment to help your soil better absorb moisture and rainwater!
You can book for a Greensleeves expert to come while you’re on holiday so when you get back you’ll know that your lawn is as healthy as it can be.
5. Keep Pests At Bay
If you’re going away for a week or two, you can harvest your seasonal fruits before you go, but you’ll want to be able to do the same when you get back without birds and other animals having eaten them!
Protect your summer berries with netting so you can come back to plenty of delicious fruit.
Also ensure that there’s no rubbish left in your garden that could attract other pests, and look out for chafer grub at this time of year. If you spot yellowing patches on your grass it might be a sign of these insect larvae — you can look for white grubs in the soil too.
Chafer grubs attract bigger animals that will dig up your soil to get to the grubs. You don’t want to come back to a ruined lawn! Call in your local Greensleeves expert to treat the infestation.
Follow our five top tips and you’ll be able to come back from your holidays to a healthy and happy garden!
