April work in the garden

April, fourth month of the year and spring has entered our lives for good.

As the day and night temperature gradually rises and the sunshine becomes more intense, we are ready to fill our everyday life with more color and vitality with our favorite plants.

After all, gardening is the best hobby to spend time at home with optimism and joy.

This season we start the new plantings and the cultivation of the spring vegetable garden which will give us better vegetable harvests during the summer. Spring is the right time to plant favorite decorative plants both in the garden and in pots on the balcony.

Ideal time also to plant a new lawn or to fill in the gaps of our lawn and take care of it.

Within April, we can propagate many ornamental plants and flowering shrubs to fill the garden with flowers and share them with our loved ones.

At this time of year, we prune a lot of citrus trees and other evergreens. And of course, we harvest fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables from our garden and enjoy the effort we put into growing them.

So let’s see in detail what cultivation care our plants need in April, in order to plan the required work. And thus to maintain a wonderful garden, with lively vegetation, beautiful flowers and delicious fruits.

1. What fresh seasonal vegetables and fruits do we enjoy in April? April is the month that offers us enough vegetables from the late autumn and winter plantings. Let’s start with beans, artichokes and strawberries and work our way up lettuce, beets, spinach, Swiss chard, and carrots, as well as various herbs such as parsley, dill, rocket and spring onion. From the fruit trees we have in our garden, we will also have a harvest of fresh delicious fruits such as loquats. Also, at this time of year, we harvest Anchor tangerines, Navellate navel oranges, lemons, grapefruits and avocados
2. We start planting the vegetable garden. It’s April and it’s time to start the first plantings of spring vegetables in the vegetable garden to enjoy the harvest in the summer. We can plant directly from seed, transplant ready-made plants that we made on the street, or get plants from nurseries and agricultural stores. We plant our vegetables at the proper planting distances so that they have better ventilation and receive more light. The sparse planting of vegetables contributes to better growth and fruiting, as well as reduced attacks by insects and diseases. So we start our spring vegetable garden, with tomato cultivation, pepper cultivation, eggplant cultivation, cucumber cultivation, zucchini cultivation, strawberry cultivation, onion cultivation, melon cultivation, melon cultivation . of the watermelon, the cultivation of okra and the cultivation of willow. Before planting vegetables it is important to prepare the soil using the appropriate soil improvement materials. So we incorporate organic matter into the soil in the form of compost, digested manure and organic fertilizer to strengthen the soil with nutrients.
3. We prune trees and ornamental plants. After the winter frosts and low night temperatures have passed, in early spring, we start pruning trees and shrubs choosing a sunny day without rain. At this time we prune the citrus trees and carry out the pruning of the orange tree, the pruning of the mandarin tree and the pruning of the lemon tree, after they have completed their fruiting. We also prune ornamental shrubs after they have finished flowering or those we did not have time to prune the previous month, such as roses, gardenias, azaleas, hibiscus, hydrangea and geraniums.
   The remains of pruning, as well as individual grasses (weeds) that we pull out from various parts of the garden we do not remove them, as we can utilize them as suitable materials for creating compost that we will gradually integrate into the soil after the composting is completed.
4. We plant ornamental plants and flowers. The month of April is the right time to add color and beauty to our garden or our balcony. We can transplant ornamental shrubs directly into the soil or into larger pots such as roses, geraniums, hydrangeas, azaleas, camellias and hibiscus. Also, during this period, in April, we sow or transplant spring flowering plants such as pansies, petunias, dogwoods and others to make our flower beds and planters on our balcony more beautiful. And of course this month we continue to plant spring bulbs for gladioli, dahlias, amaryllis and lilies that will give us impressive and colorful flowering in the summer.
5. We take care of the protection of the vine. Whether it is wine-making varieties on our vine or table-bed varieties, we start in the month of April to ecologically protect the vine cultivation, from downy mildew, the most important mycological disease of the vine. Downy mildew in the grapevine affects all the green parts of the plant, with the most serious damage being done to the foliage and grapes at various stages of its biological cycle. To protect the vine from the pronospore with the ecological preparations, we start spraying with copper preparations or dusting with thiochalcine when the shoots when the vegetation is 8 to 10 cm long, after ten days, just before flowering (berry stage), and immediately after fertilization.
6. We plant and take care of the lawn. If we want to plant new turf (lawn) or cover the gaps of the old turf, in April, we sow with the variety we have chosen. It is the most suitable as we have excellent conditions related to this season and relatively high temperatures for the lawn seed to germinate. Before seeding the new lawn, we incorporate peat moss, compost, and a special slow-release lawn fertilizer for greater success. We remind you that until the lawn grows, it needs daily watering at least twice a day. Also, April is an important month for taking care of the lawn we have installed as we start to mow it and do the first fertilizations to grow its vegetation.
7. We create new plants by propagation. During the month of April, we can create new ornamental plants for our garden and for our pots in the easiest and most economical way.

In particular, we make new plants from herbaceous flowering plants and ornamental shrubs such as roses, geraniums and camellias using mainly the method of plant propagation by cuttings.

Of course, for climbing plants such as jasmine, rhynchosperma, fouli, plumbago, begonia, capensia and vine, we can also try other, much easier ways of propagation, such as cuttings and offshoots.

Also, in April is the right time to graft many fruit trees such as lemon, orange, pomegranate, apricot and tangerine with the desired variety we want. Depending on the fruit tree and the season of grafting, we choose the appropriate grafting method to make the highest success rate.