Lavender is a beautiful, low-maintenance bee-friendly plant that offers many health benefits. This pretty flower’s calming scent can help reduce stress and improve sleep. March is the perfect time for pruning lavender to prepare it for the growing season, encouraging new growth and removing titty tatter winter growth.
Pruning your lavender bush allows you to maintain a manageable shape and size, but essentially encourages the plant to blossom for longer while preventing wordiness. Removing faded stems prevents the plant from putting its energy into seed production so it instead produces more flowers. Additionally, cutting dead and diseased stems back helps protect the plant from disease and pests.
The best time of the year to grow lavender is during spring when there is less chance of frost damaging its roots and it gives the plant more time to establish its roots before summer arrives.
Gardeners who want their lavenders to bloom abundantly and explode with colour should feed their plant with two natural items this month.
Lavender thrives from bone meal and lime because they help adjust soil pH to alkaline, as it prefers an alkaline soil. Garderners should use sparing amount of bone meal fertiliser when planting.
Adding around a quarter of a cup of organic bone meal and lime and bone to your soil will increase the pH which will allow the plant to absorb nutrients well.
It will also feed the lavender calcium, which keeps the plants healthy and phosphorus which helps flower production. This will promote good root growth and overall health.
Stephaine LeBlanc, a gardening expert and founder of Celebrated Herb, says: Organic fertilisers, such as composted manure, worm castings, and bone meal, are excellent choices because they provide a balanced mix of essential nutrients and improve soil structure.
“These organic materials can be added to the soil or used as a top dressing to provide a slow release of nutrients to the plant’s root zone.”
To allow your lavender to thrive gardeners should also keep weeds away from it as the plant does not like to be overcrowded and needs its own space.