Get Your Garden Party-Ready for Christmas & the Festive Season

Show off your garden by having your Christmas lunch outdoors! A beautiful table under a big umbrella or shady tree, surrounded by a lovely lush garden, will be such a treat for you and your guests. Here are some easy ways to get your garden party ready! 

Combine red and white flowering annuals to create a colourful Christmas-vibe and brighten up your garden. Try a combination of vibrant red Petunias or Geraniums and snowy white Alyssum. For many flowering annuals, from seed it can take up to 12 weeks until they are mature and flowering, so a quick pre-Christmas option is using 'potted colour', which are young but established plants. Plant in the ground as a border or mass planting. Or create a potted display with a few 30-40 cm diameter pots and position them around outdoor entertaining areas. For faster growth and more prolific flowering feed your flowering plants very 1-2 weeks with Yates Thrive Natural Roses & Flowers Concentrate.

Indoor Plants make great table decorations. Plants with colourful flowers, such as Anthuriums and Moth Orchids, are ideal. In the lead up to Christmas, garden centres will also have lots of beautiful potted Poinsettias. Available in traditional bright red and also white and pink, they're the perfect living Christmas decoration (and also make a beautiful gift!). At the end of the festive season, keep the poinsettia in a pot or plant into a shady and protected area in the garden. Feed with Yates Thrive All Purpose Liquid Plant Food every 1-2 weeks to promote lush and healthy growth. 

In the lead up to Christmas, give garden beds an all-over quick and easy feed with hose-on Yates Thrive Natural All Purpose. It's a naturally-based complete fertiliser that will encourage healthy green growth and promote lots of gorgeous flowers. A 2 L pack feeds 100 m2 of garden beds and you'll be watering and feeding at the same time. 

Give hedges a light trim to create a lovely crisp look. For less formal hedges and shrubs, just trim back any untidy, wayward or dead stems as well as any spent flowers. 

Applying mulch around flower and shrub beds helps unify the garden, fills in bare spots and also is a great water saving strategy during the hottest months. An additional bonus is when organic mulches are used (such as bark chips), as they break down, they add valuable organic matter to the soil.

Give your garden some thorough, deep waterings in the weeks leading up to Christmas and holidays. This moistens the soil down in the root zone, encouraging plant roots to grow deeper and helps freshen up the garden. To help break down the waxy and water repellent layer that can develop on the soil surface, particularly during hot and dry weather, use a soil wetter like Yates Waterwise Soil Wetter. Available in an easy-to-use hose on applicator, you can quickly treat large areas of the lawn and garden and help moisture move down into the soil where it's needed.  

 Weeds can ruin the look of your garden, as well as steal water and nutrients from your plants. Spot spray weeds in garden beds with fast acting Yates Zero Triple Strike Garden Weedkiller Ready to Use. You'll see visible results in some weeds after just two hours. And for paths and hard surfaces, an application of Yates Pathweeder will control existing weeds and prevent weed seeds from germinating for up to 12 months.

A rich green lawn is the perfect place for a Christmas BBQ and a friendly after-lunch game of cricket or football. Here are some easy ways to get your lawn BBQ and game ready!

A lush deep green lawn looks fantastic and creates a great space for entertaining. It's easy to give your lawn a quick makeover with Munns Professional Green Dominator Lawn Fertiliser. It's fast acting and will begin to green up an actively growing lawn within just four hours.

Don't be tempted to give your lawn a harsh low mowing just before Christmas. This can scalp the lawn and create bare patches, which are unattractive and will invite in weeds. It's better to mow little and often, removing no more than a third of the grass foliage each time.

A well-watered lawn will look greener and healthier, so in the lead up to Christmas, give the lawn at least two thorough waterings each week. It also helps to use a soil wetter, like Yates Waterwise Soil Wetter, to help move moisture down more effectively into the lawn's root zone where it's needed. Apply over the lawn using the easy-to-use hose-on applicator.