Sorry to break the bad news, but Summer is coming to an end, and Winter is now only about 12 weeks away. It’s time to get your garden and home back into tip-top shape and start preparing for Winter plants and vegetables.
Here are five jobs to get done at the end of Summer to ensure that your home and garden are ready for Winter.
Autumn jobs
1. Firewood Preparation
If you’re lucky enough to have a fireplace in your home, it’s time to start preparing your wood stockpile for the cold winter months. For those of us living on a few acres or more, you might have your eye on a dead or felled tree that can be re-purposed. If you need to cut a tree down or chop a tree that’s already down, Coastal Hire can hire you a chainsaw on a day or weekend rate. We also have a hydraulic log-splitter which will save you hours of backbreaking work splitting the dry wood ready for the pile. Once you’re finished, you might need to get rid of the tree stump – we can help you with that – why not hire our Stump Grinder and really make things easy!? If you don’t need to cut the wood yourself but decide to purchase a load from a firewood supplier, we can hire you a box trailer for a day or for a weekend.
2. Lawn Care
Our lawns become dormant during Winter, so Autumn is the ideal time for you to aerate the lawn. Aerating the lawn performs two functions: reducing compaction of soil, and preventing ‘thatching’. Thatching is a build-up of dead grass and new grass which can form a thick layer between the lawn and the soil and if not managed, can lead to root rot and make your lawn more susceptible to disease. Reducing the compaction of soil means that your lawn will be better able to soak up rainwater and nutrients in the soil. One of the easiest ways to aerate your lawn is to use a lawn roller with spikes. Coastal Hire can hire you a push-along lawn roller with spikes for a day or for a weekend. The roller easily fits in the boot of an SUV or tray on a ute. For bigger jobs such as ripping a whole lawn up and starting again, check out our rotary hoe. Once your lawn has been aerated, apply a wetting agent to help the lawn soak up as much water as possible during the Autumn and Winter rains.
3. Pruning
Prune the hedges and flowering shrubs in your garden such as Camelias and Azaleas, and feed with fertiliser. Coastal Hire can hire you a hedge trimmer to make pruning much quicker and easier, as well as a pole pruner for those high-reaching branches.
4. Turning garden beds
Just like your lawn, the soil in your vegetable garden needs to be turned from time to time to introduce oxygen back into the soil, ensure the even spread of nutrients, and break up any clumps. Aerating the soil in your vegetable garden bed also ensures that it is best able to soak up and retain moisture. Turn the soil in your garden by using a pitchfork or a rotary hoe and add gypsum into heavy clay soils to help break up the clumps and prevent waterlogging.
5. Clean out gutters
With Autumn comes the iconic shedding of deciduous trees, which can be beautiful to watch as the leaves change colour. Unfortunately, it also means that the leaves have to be picked up. Winter is a time when large amounts of rain can fall so its best to clean out your house gutters in Autumn to ensure that any rainwater makes its way to your water tank, stopping the gutters on your house from overflowing. Gutters can be tricky and dangerous to reach, so consider hiring a mobile scaffold tower, trailer-mounted boomlift (cherry picker), or scissor lift for a day or a weekend. Coastal Hire can help you with all three of these hires!
That concludes our list of 5 jobs to get done in Autumn to prepare for Winter. Autumn is a great time of year with cooler temperature and sunny days so why not get outside this weekend and enjoy some fresh air and a bit of D.I.Y? You’ll be glad you did, come Winter.
