Urgent jobs in the garden for April

• Save last seeds from the garden.
• Microwave, freeze, solarise or drown any fallen fruit or fruit infested with Queensland Fruit Fly or codling moth including quince, apples, citrus, guava, feijoa, berries and any other fruit growing in your garden.
• Check citrus for scale and apply white oil if present.
• Make compost.
• Dunk punnets of brassica plants (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, etc) in Dipel, an organic bacterium, to deter green caterpillars that emerge from eggs laid by white cabbage moths (see video below). Spray every 7 days or plant American Upland Cress between plants. This plant is a dead end trap plant. The white cabbage moth lays eggs on the leaves and when born the caterpillars eat the leaves and die (see video below).
• If resting beds till spring, sow a green manure crop to improve fertility.
• Plant out autumn/winter vegetables including garlic.
• Fertilise fruit trees with compost or a nitrogen and phosphorus fertiliser. Apply to the surface and don’t dig in. This is the time to add nitrogen, (not springtime when nitrogen will produce soft leaf and stem growth and make the tree susceptible to insect attack).
• Collect autumn leaves to make leaf litter or to add to compost. Add sparingly as too much in a layer in compost causes matting. Mix leaves well with other ingredients to prevent this.

Video links

Using Dipel: https://youtu.be/QsMPRgd_jZY

American Upland Cress: https://youtu.be/KANL-LbmZX8

Written by Robin Gale-Baker