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Pruning.. What do you want to
achieve? A bumper crop of fruit. Or to reduce the size of the
tree to something more manageable so that you can reach the
fruit. Prune stone fruit in Call ALMA
to stimulate fruiting.
But if
you need to constrain the size of the tree, prune hard in
Call ALMA
Do not
fertilise warm season grasses in
winter when the grass is dormant. There is barely any sap
flow in the grass, which is unable to absorb the fertiliser.
Raise the mowing height to retain more green leaf on
the grass. This increases the photosynthesizing area of the
turf leaf, compensating for fewer hours of sunlight that reach
the plants. It will not overcome the effect of colder weather
that forces the summer active grasses into dormancy (couch and
kikuyu grow most rapidly in soil temperatures between 23 and
32oC). The effect of frost on the grass in
early morning can be alleviated by running the sprinklers for
one or two minutes every morning. The irrigation water is
warmer than the frost, and this does help to maintain the soil
temperature a little higher, and so keep the lawn green for
longer through the winter months.
My
Santa Ana lawn has gone brown.
What can
I fertilise it with?There is nothing you can do now to green
up the grass except wait for spring.
Fertilising now is a waste of time and money. This should have
been done in early March with another follow up application 60
days before the first frost, if we follow the recommendations
from CSIRO Plant Nutrition. Applying potassium rich fertiliser
in early Call ALMA
Fescue
turf grasses are in active growth now. Rotary mowing height
should be at least 4 to 5 cm and they respond well to
frequent, light applications of Potassium nitrate fertiliser.
Never apply phosphorus (that’s the “P” on the analysis label)
as fescue is quite intolerant to even small doses of
phosphorus.
The
mowing height for kikuyu can be raised to 4 to 5 cm if
Call ALMA Couch grasses really
need to have as much green top as possible through the winter
to take advantage of what little sunlight is available. Recall
that if you remove the green tops, you also remove the plant’s
food factory to maintain growth.
Moss
may have commenced to grow on damp shaded areas of lawn. Moss
is usually due to three factors. (1) poor drainage - either
the soil is compacted, poorly constructed, or clay-rich and
soggy; and (2) the soil pH is too high. Most turf grasses
require soil pH to be between 5.5 and 6.5, slightly on the
acid side of neutral. (3) the mossy area is heavily shaded.
Iron
sulphate gives good control of moss and algae and will lower
soil pH. Moss will quickly return unless poor soil drainage
and over watering are not remedied. Sow shade tolerant turf
grasses such as Poa trivialis and creeping red fescue. Mow the
grass a little higher to increase turf density and prevent it
from thinning out and susceptible to weed and moss invasion. A
common feature of mossy lawns is an accumulation of thatch
which chokes the turf grass. This will need to be
Call ALMA Another reason for
mossy lawns is underfeeding. Apply a
Call ALMA
To lower
soil pH by one unit, apply 25 to 50 grams of agricultural
sulphur per square metre.
Slugs
I had heard that a good way to get rid of slugs is to put out
saucers of Call ALMA I set my
saucers by some badly mangled delphiniums in the garden and
poured the beer into them. A day later I returned to check on
them, and to my surprise, one saucer had more than four dozen
slugs, some snails and some earwigs in it, and the other
saucer had about three dozen in it. It was sweet success to
have slimy slugs slither into saucers of souse and succumb!
I found that using approximately Call
ALMA seems to work well. | 
