Gardening Calendar

Planting a veg garden really kicks off the year. By the end of March you'll have bought new potatoes and onion sets from our garden centre and tucked them into their new homes, and with a bit of luck you'll be getting out those seed packets you chose from our extensive range of fruit and veg to sow the first hardy crops like carrots, peas, cabbages and beetroot.

But what happens when that first flush of productivity is over? Once you've harvested those new potatoes it's still only June, there's half the growing year left but you've got bare patches opening up all over the place.

Planting for a continuous harvest throughout the year is one of the holy grails of veg gardening. With a little planning and some tricks of the trade you too can avoid boom and bust, evening out your harvest so there's always something to pick somewhere on the plot. Here's how:

• Successional sowing: Fast-growing veg like baby-leaf salads and carrots are ready within weeks, so repeat sow just half a row at a time every month through the season to keep them coming.
   
• Intercropping: use every inch of space by sowing quick-growing carrots, spinach or beetroot among slower-growing brassicas: that way while they're growing, you get an extra harvest from the same space.
   
• Plug plants: in our garden centre you'll find a huge range of young vegetable plants, ideal for dropping into gaps opened up by harvesting lettuces, cabbages or leeks for a near-instant second harvest.
   
• Sow different varieties: many types of veg, like carrots, calabrese and sprouts, have early, mid-season and late varieties: sow all three and they'll mature at different rates, extending your harvesting time.
   
• Remember winter: you won't feel like sowing crops for winter while it's still spring, but if you don't your harvest will stop dead in October. Plant purple-sprouting broccoli, winter cabbage, leeks and parsnips in March to keep the veg garden pumping out the harvest through the chill.

Please ask the staff in our Mullingar garden centre for more information and advice about keeping a continuous harvest from your vegetable garden throughout the year.

A handsome path is a striking finishing touch to your garden in Mullingar. It plays an active role in your design, leading a visitor through from one feature to the next and inviting you to explore. It's also practical, giving you access to borders for weeding and planting. Match the materials you use with others in the garden and you'll pull your design together so it's pleasing to look at and delightful to use.

Paths are one of the easiest garden landscaping projects, and you'll find everything you need in our garden centre from edging to stone slabs, setts and paviours. It's a project for a free weekend – here's how you do it:

• Decide what kind of path you want to build, whether it's a simple barkchip path for a veg patch or a smarter one made of brick paviours. Other options include stone flags, gravel or cobbles.

• Mark out your path and dig out the soil to a depth of 10cm (gravel or bark) to 15cm (paviours or stone flags). Make sure the base is level and even along its length.

• Install your edging: good edging materials include wooden boarding, brick paviours laid on edge, or granite setts. Fix wood in place with pegs, or lay stone edgings into a bed of mortar and allow to set.

• Put in a sub-base 75mm thick to act as a foundation. Scalpings, a by-product of quarrying, are ideal. Compact the base thoroughly, using a plate compactor or hand tamper, till it's level and even.

• For a gravel path, simply top with 50mm of peashingle – job done!

• For paved paths, add a layer of grit sand 40mm thick and compact into a smooth base. You can add cement, one part cement to 10 parts sand, for a more solid base.

• Lay paving on top, checking and re-checking that you've got it level. Then brush a dry mix of one part cement to four parts sand into the joins: the first shower of rain will make it set hard.

Please ask the staff in our garden centre for more information and advice about laying paths.

Birds are often a mixed blessing in the garden: they'll swipe your berries, but while they're at it they'll also strip aphids from your roses, eat small slugs and hoover up caterpillars too. On the whole, they do far more good than harm: and besides, they're lovely to watch as they flit around your plants, bringing your garden to life with song and colour.

In our Mullingar garden centre you'll find all you need to encourage a thriving population of garden birds to visit, from sparrows to woodpeckers. Follow our top five tips to make your garden into a haven for your feathery friends.

• Install a pond: birds appreciate a water feature more than anything. They'll go down to the pond to take a drink and have a little bath, and have a snack on the insects it attracts, too! We have both rigid preformed liners or butyl liner to make your own shape in our garden centre.

• Put up bird feeders: a range of different feeders on a stand, available in our garden centre, lets you provide everything from peanuts, in wider wire mesh feeders, to seed, dispensed through a plastic tube. A table catches waste and holds raisins, chopped apples and grated cheese. Don't forget to fit a squirrel guard to keep the long-tailed thieves away!

• Provide the right food: in winter, garden birds need more fat to help them keep on weight in the cold – you'll find fat balls and cakes in our garden centre. But in summer, it's better to eed a good-quality seed mix. Good year-round feeds include black sunflower seeds, nyger, peanuts and mealworms.

• Grow berrying shrubs: this is the most natural food for birds and one that will draw them in in their hundreds. Red-berrying shrubs like cotoneaster, pyracantha and spindle berry are most popular, followed by the orange berries of berberis and rowans: they seem to like white berries least.

• Leave seedheads on: don't be too quick to tidy up once annuals and perennials have died back in autumn, as birds really appreciate the contents of their dried seedheads. Sunflowers, globe thistles, teasels, mullein and evening primrose are all much appreciated.

When you're planning the hard landscaping in your garden, don't be afraid to get imaginative. You don't have to stick to just one material, and you don't have to use stone or brick: there are dozens of ways to make your paving unique to you, and your garden will be far more personal as a result.

In our Mullingar garden centre you'll find all sorts of materials to mix and match your paths for that hand-finished effect, from regular paviours and stone slabs to cobbles, pebbles, setts and tiles for mosaics. Get creative and try a few of these more unconventional approaches to paving:

• Grow plants between your paving slabs: Instead of filling with mortar, use compost and plant ribbons of low-growing thyme, chamomile or cushiony mind-your-own-business (Soleirolia soleirolii) between your paving slabs. The wider the ribbon, the more marked the effect: at its most extreme you end up with stepping stones in a sea of green.
   
• Insert contrasting circles: you can buy easy-to-install circular mini-patios in our garden centre which slot together in ever-widening rings. Sit one of these within a conventional square patio, preferably in a contrasting colour, for an eyecatching focal point.
   
• Cut a ribbon of water through: rills are an elegant way to bring water into the garden when you don't have space for a pond: running through a channel cut into a stone patio really brings your paving to life. If you're feeling really ambitious, try twin rills or a spiral rill leading into a central pool or bubble fountain.
   
• Design a mosaic picture: Leave an area of your patio empty so you can create a picture out of coloured pebbles. It can be as simple as a star or a flower; or as complicated as the one at Great Dixter in East Sussex, which depicts owner Christopher Lloyd's pet dogs. Lay out your design before you do it, then put down a screed of mortar and press the stones into it, making sure they're level.

Please ask the staff in our garden centre in Mullingar for more information and advice about making paving unique to you.

Your tools are your best friends in the garden. They'll stand by you through thick and thin: they're the first things you reach for at times of trouble, and your companions through your greatest triumphs.

Well-made, good-quality tools like those you'll find in our garden centre can last you a lifetime if you take good care of them. So make it a part of your annual routine to spend an hour or two at the end of the season getting them in good shape before storing them away for the winter. Here's how:

• Give them a clean: let your stainless steel spades and forks dry for a few days so the mud is easier to brush off with a stiff-bristled hand brush. Get every last bit off including the mud wedged in to the neck of the tool head.

• Repair any breakages: bent fork tines can be straightened with a piece of hollow metal piping: just slot it over the end of the tine and pull. Replacement wooden handles are available in our garden centre, and you'll also find spare watering can roses to replace the one you lost, and new blades for pruning saws.

• Oil non-steel tools to prevent them rusting in damp weather. This can be as easy as wiping them over with a rag soaked in paraffin, or alternatively fill a bucket with sand and mix in some oil; then dig your tools into the sand to clean and oil them at the same time.

• Hang everything up out of the way so they won't fall over into a hopeless tangle which you'll have to sort out before you can use them.. Hang spades, hoes, forks and rakes blade-upwards, on double nails banged into the wall, and add some single nails to hold hand trowels, forks, and shears.

• Get powered tools serviced at a reputable garden machine company once a year, to change the oil, sharpen blades and generally give them the once over before they're back in regular use again.

Please ask the staff in our Mullingar garden centre for more information and advice about looking after your garden tools.

You don't need to have masses of space to enjoy the beauty and movement of a water feature. Even if all you've got is a patio, you can still have a pond: just build one in a half-barrel container.

You'll find rustic half-barrels available year-round at our Mullingar garden centre. One of the prettiest ways to use them is as a pond to enjoy just outside the back door. There are plenty of pond plants which are quite happy in a container, and you'll also find wildlife enjoy a half-barrel pond just as much as they do a conventional one.

All you need is the half-barrel, a few bricks and some gravel, and of course your plants. Here's how:

• If the half-barrel is dry, soak overnight so the wood swells up and becomes watertight. If you're having trouble preventing leaks, line the tub with a piece of butyl liner, stapling it to the wood just below the top.
   
• Place some bricks in the bottom at different heights, just like the varying shelves in a pond. Add a layer of gravel around 5cm deep on the bottom.
   
• Fill with water, preferably saved rainwater as it hasn't got as many chemicals in it as tap water so the plants and wildlife will do better in it. If you have to use tap water, leave it to stand for a couple of days to let the chlorine evaporate.
   
• Plant your pond up with a selection of different plants, placing a waterlily at the deepest part of the pond and then sitting the other plants on your bricks at different heights. To fill your half-barrel pond with plants, you'll need about four or five – go for dwarf types, better-suited to growing in containers. Try to include lots of different types, from waterlilies to oxygenating plants.

Here's just one of the many great combinations you could try with plants available from our garden centre:

• White pygmy waterlily (Nymphaea pygmaea 'Alba')
• Marsh marigold (Caltha palustris)
• Water iris (Iris laevigata)
• Water violet (Hottonia palustris)

Please ask the staff in our garden centre in Mullingar for more information and advice about making a half-barrel pond.

Holes in the lawn can be caused for all sorts of reasons. Too much traffic, especially at times of drought or extreme wet, can wear the grass out; an over-enthusiastic session with the lawnmower can 'scalp' the grass; or you might have recently dealt with a weed or moss outbreak, leaving weed-free but bare patches behind.

You'll find all you need in our garden centre to put things right again, including complete lawn patching kits containing ready-mixed lawn seed mix to use straight out of the bag. Here's how to mend that hole so it looks like it was never there.

• Cut an even square or rectangle around the bare area with a sharp spade, removing remaining turf and topsoil to about 5cm deep.

• Using a garden fork, loosen the area to about 15cm down, wiggling the fork back and forth to break up compacted soil.

• Fill the hole with topsoil (available bagged from our garden centre) till it's level with the surrounding lawn and mix in general purpose fertiliser such as Growmore. Water lightly.

• If oversowing with seed: simply broadcast the seed over the top of the patch (for larger areas, mix the seed with silver sand so it flows more easily) and rake in.

• If patching with turf: remove a little more soil to begin with so your topsoil sits a couple of centimetres lower than the surrounding grass, then cut a turf to fit the area.

• Press the new turf into the area so it's in good contact with the underlying topsoil and tamp in the edges until they sit snugly up against the surrounding grass. Fill gaps with more topsoil.

• For either method, water at least once a day for two weeks, to make sure your new grass doesn't suffer a setback to growth.

• Cover with clear polythene if the weather is cool, as this will help seeds to germinate and turf to establish more quickly.

• Your new patch will be ready to walk on and mow in another four weeks.

'One generation plants the tree, another gets the shade' – so goes the Chinese proverb. The fruit trees you plant today will grow for many decades into the future, though luckily you don't have to wait till your kids take over to enjoy the fruit.

Once you've selected your tree – traditional apples and pears, or perhaps cherries, apricots or a fig, all available from our garden centre – give it the best possible start to its long life by getting the planting right. Here's how:

• Choose the site carefully: some fruit trees, such as cherries, will fruit in partial shade but most need a sunny spot that's reasonably sheltered.
   
• Dig your hole: the size is important so your tree grows at the right height in the soil. Make your hole a third wider than the rootball, and the same depth as the container the tree is growing in (if your tree is bare-root, look for the 'soil mark' just where the roots meet the stem).
   
• Use a garden fork to lightly loosen the soil at the bottom of the hole to let the roots get through easily.
   
• Bang a sturdy tree stake, available in our garden centre, into the bottom of the hole at 45° to vertical, pointing into the prevailing wind. It should cross the trunk about halfway up.
   
• Now place the tree in the hole next to the stake, spreading out the roots evenly if it's bare-root.
   
• Back-fill the hole with soil, treading it in gently as you go so the tree is well anchored in the soil.
   
• Water thoroughly, so the moisture sinks right down into the root zone, and top with a nice deep mulch of well-rotted farmyard manure, pulled back from the trunk so it doesn't encourage rotting.
   
• Finish by tying the tree to the stake with a specialist rubber tree tie. You'll find these in our garden centre: they work in a figure-eight between tree and stake to prevent rubbing and allow the tree trunk to expand.

Most gardens have a shady spot: a north-facing wall, perhaps, or under a tree, or in the shadow of a nearby building. Learn to love your shade: you'll find a world of new plants opens up, and you get a cool, pleasant nook to sit out of the heat of the day: perfect for enjoying an iced drink after a hot session gardening.

The range of plants you'll find in our garden centre in Mullingar to grow in shade is extensive and includes delicate woodlanders, broad-leaved foliage plants and pretty spring flowers. We've picked our top ten shade-loving plants to turn your shady bits into garden highlights.

• Hostas: there's an ever-wider choice of bold, broad-leaved hostas, from beefy ribbed 'Sum and Substance' to white-splashed 'Fire and Ice'.
   
• Ferns: damp shady spots cry out for graceful Osmunda regalis or silver-and-purple Japanese painted ferns.  If your shady spot is dry, grow Dryopteris felix-mas: 'Cristata' has curly-ended fronds.
   
• Rodgersia: massive leaves like a bronzed horse-chestnut 30cm across erupt from the ground, followed by stately plumes of white or pink flowers
  .
• Foxgloves: living wild in woodland, foxgloves love dappled shade. Grow common foxglove in purple or white, or an eyecatching modern multicoloured hybrid.
   
• Epimediums: among the prettiest spring woodlanders, the young emerging leaves in shades of copper are almost as lovely as the dancing flowers.
   
• Pachysandra terminalis: a really useful ground-cover plant with a dense covering of evergreen leaves that grow even in the deepest shade.
   
• Euonymus: choose from silver-and-green 'Silver Queen' or gold-and-green 'Emerald 'n' Gold' for an easy, evergreen, low-maintenance shrub that sings out from a shady spot.
   
• Brunnera: with broad, ground-smothering leaves (in 'Jack Frost' they're silvery-green), it's the flowers which really steal the show, powder-blue and prolific throughout spring.
   
• Hardy geraniums: among the easiest plants to grow, geraniums flower profusely in shade: choose pale-coloured varieties like Geranium sanguineum 'Album' to glow in low light.
   
• Heucheras: heuchera leaves are every bit as colourful as flowers, from rich plum 'Palace Purple' to 'Amber Waves', the colour of butterscotch. They're evergreen, too.

Please ask the staff in our Mullingar garden centre for more information and advice about choosing plants for shade.

Natural planting using swathes of gently-swaying grasses shot through with drifts of tall, open perennials to mimic the wild look of the American prairie lands caught the imagination of gardeners across Europe in the 1990s, and it's been going strong ever since - you can see some fabulous examples at public gardens like Trentham in Staffordshire. It's a look you can adapt easily at home for a gorgeous, contemporary design that's also very low maintenance.

You'll find all the plants you need in our Mullingar garden centre: here's how to create your own back-garden prairie.

• Choose the right spot: prairies need sunshine, so pick an open, bright area of your garden, preferably not too damp as most prairie-style plants prefer free-draining conditions.
   
• Restrict your varieties: prairie planting relies on repetition for its effect, so limit your range of plants to a handful of grass varieties and a few perennials or annuals - just plant lots of them.
   
• Start with the grasses: these form the backbone of your design, so choose carefully. Tall grasses move gracefully in the wind: good choices are Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster', Molinia caerulea 'Transparent' or evergreen Stipa gigantea. All have spectacular flowers which sparkle in the frosts of winter.
   
• Mix in the flowers: flat-headed or spherical flowers work best with grasses as contrasts in texture and shape. They often flower at the same height, too, giving that level prairie-like look. Go for achilleas, autumn-flowering asters, and other daisies: both echinacea and rudbeckias were made for prairie settings.
   
• Plant in drifts: design your planting not in blobby groups, but in drifts of the same plant meandering naturally in waves through the design. Plant seven, nine or eleven of the same plant together: be generous for maximum impact.
   
• Don't be too tidy: part of the charm of a prairie planting is the effect of frosty winter weather on seedheads and dead stems, so leave clearing up until February, when you can just chop everything back down to the ground and let it do it all over again.

Please ask the staff in our garden centre in Mullingar for more information and advice about designing prairie planting.

Clematis win a place in the heart of every gardener for their breathtaking flower displays as they scramble becomingly up fences and over trellises. Most varieties are very well-behaved and just need a little tucking in to their supports every so often and an annual prune to keep them performing year after year.

One of the many good things about clematis is that there's never any need to be without their charming, sunny flowers, as there are varieties which flower at all times of the year. In our Mullingar garden centre you'll find clematis that flower in spring, summer, autumn and winter: here's our pick to give you a clematis for every month.

January:           Clematis cirrhosa var. balearica has pretty ferny evergreen leaves and curious red-speckled  
                            flowers: the fluffy seedheads which follow last for months

February:          'Wisley Cream' is another early bird with greeny-white flowers and glossy evergreen foliage:  
                            silvery, silky seedheads follow the flowers

March:               Clematis armandii is evergreen, with glossy, leathery leaves and almond-scented blossom

April:                  Alpine clematis have daintily nodding, violet-blue flowers that last weeks: 'Frances Rivis' is  
                            deep violet-blue and a prolific favourite

May:                   Clematis montana comes in white or pink and is cheerfully rampant, a froth of flowers in May

June:                  Early large-flowered clematis like 'Perle d'Azur' and 'Prince Charles' have huge and plentiful  
                            satiny flowers

July:                   Clematis viticella types are tough and trouble-free and come in rich, velvety colours: 'Etoile  
                            Violette' is deep purple

August:             Late-flowering 'Gravetye Beauty' is an eyecatching ruby red with lovely pompom-like   
                           seedheads to follow the flowers

September:     Clematis rehderiana needs plenty of room but if you give it the space it's an eyecatching  
                           choice, with big panicles of scented pale yellow flowers like little bells

October:           'Bill McKenzie' has bright yellow flowers with curiously thick petals, curling outwards like  
                            lemon peel, and long-lasting silky seedheads

November:       Clematis tangutica is smothered in lantern-like flowers followed by big fluffy seedheads

December:       Clematis cirrhosa var purpurascens 'Freckles' is a very reliable evergreen type with deeply  
                            speckled dusty pink flowers right through winter

Please ask the staff in our Mullingar garden centre for more information and advice about growing clematis year-round.

A greenhouse is a real asset in a garden. It can be a beautiful building, for one thing: when the sun glints off the glass of a white-painted greenhouse filled with vibrantly colourful plants it'll always make you smile.

But it's also a wonderful way to expand your gardening beyond all recognition. In our garden centre you'll find an Aladdin's cave of possibilities for your greenhouse, whether you want orchids, tender nerines and pelargoniums in day-glo colours, or tomatoes and cucumbers for warm fruit picked straight off the vine.

In fact, there's no reason you can't have something special in your greenhouse in every month of the year. Use our handy guide to make the most of your garden's best asset.

Spring
Greenhouses are great for forcing plants into performing early, whether it's spring bulbs for a late winter display, or strawberries for a crop a couple of months ahead. And once you start sowing seeds in a greenhouse, you'll quickly be bursting at the seams and wondering how you ever managed without one.

Summer
Glasshouses pump out the produce through summer as the extra heat allows you to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, chilli peppers and aubergines. Feed weekly to keep the crops coming and water at least once a day – automatic watering systems, available in our garden centre, ease the workload.

Autumn
As the last of the summer crops go over, replace them with salads to keep the greenhouse supplying you generously through the months to come. Plant plug plants of lettuce, baby-leaf salads and winter spinach straight into the greenhouse border where they'll grow slowly till spring.

Winter
You'll find a range of greenhouse heaters in our garden centre to keep your glasshouse frost-free through the coldest months of the year, so you can keep tropical plants like aeoniums and bananas going from one year to the next. Tender herbs like lemongrass, French tarragon or stevia suddenly become possible, too, when you can bring them under cover for winter.

Please ask the staff in our Mullingar garden centre for more information and advice about making good use of your greenhouse all year round.