Feeding your plants

• A matchbook fertilizer

This is for when you want to add sulphur to the soil to lower the pH for acid-loving plants. Tear out the matches from several matchbooks and throw them into the bottom of planting holes for such plants as hydrangeas, azaleas and gardenias. Add onion skins for extra effect.

•  A freebie from the fireplace

Hardwood ashes from a fireplace will supply potassium and phosphorous to the garden. But don’t use wood that has been treated with preservatives (or anything else). To fertilize plants, spread a 1-cm layer of ashes a few centimetres from the stem and dig into the soil. Caution: If you store ashes outside, protect them from the rain or their nutrients will be depleted; and don’t use ashes around potatoes, as ash can promote potato scab.

•  Limit your plants’ coffee consumption

It isn’t the caffeine in coffee grounds that garden plants like azaleas, rosebushes and evergreens love, but rather the acidity and aeration that the grounds provide — not to mention nitrogen, phosphorous and trace minerals. Just be sure to dig the grounds well into the soil to keep them from becoming mouldy.

Dig about 100g coffee grounds into the soil near the roots, repeating once a month. And don’t overdo it: fertilizing even acid-loving plants with coffee grounds too frequently could increase soil acidity to undesirable levels.

•  A tree-feeding drill

To make sure that fertilizer reaches a tree’s feeder roots, put a power drill to work on something besides wood: the soil. Use a bit at least 30cm long and 20mm in diameter and bore holes in the soil around the drip line — the imaginary circle beneath the outermost tips of the tree canopy. Space the holes about 60cm apart, then bore a second ring of holes about 75cm from the tree trunk. Funnel a slow-release fertilizer into all of the holes. Plug them with soil and water well.

•  Add sawdust and leaves to ageing manure

Fresh or raw, manure must be aged so that it doesn’t burn your plants’ roots — and only the most committed home gardeners will be prepared to wait the six months it takes. If you’re one of those gardeners, water a fresh manure pile, cover it with a tarpaulin so that the nutrients won’t leach out during rain, and turn the pile with a pitchfork every 10 days or so. To control the odour (especially in summer) and create an excellent texture, add untreated sawdust, dead leaves or wood chips.