Best wishes to everyone for a happy, healthy year, with enough rain at just the right times, no more heat waves and no frosts until mid-April!

How many of you made garden-related New Year’s resolutions?

Maybe you have resolved to plan your plant purchases and make fewer purchases on impulse.

Or perhaps you have resolved to get to the weeds before they seed, or get the mulch down before the weed seedlings appear.

A continuing trend to be friendly to the environment is to compost or recycle more and send less to landfill.

In relation to water usage, more people are harvesting rainwater, generally using water more efficiently and mulching to conserve soil moisture.

We should all be resolving, if not already, to spend more time enjoying our gardens in 2019 and to slip (protective clothing), slop (sunscreen), slap (hat), seek (shade) and slide (sunglasses) whenever we are outside.

The recent extremely hot weather is taking its toll on some plants. Keep the water up, especially to shrubs and trees planted last spring.

Keep mulching areas of bare soil to help retain moisture and reduce evaporation.

Cut back perennials such as shasta daisies, achillea, perennial aster, salvias and penstemon to encourage a second flush of flowers and extend the flowering period into the autumn.

Continue deadheading roses and other repeat-flowering shrubs.

Keep harvesting crops such as beans, peas, cucumbers, marrows and zucchini while the vegetables are still young.

They have a much better flavour and regular picking encourages the plants to produce more flowers and fruits to continue the crop into autumn.

Keep the water up to your vegies (unless, of course, you have been fortunate to be under a storm cloud recently).

Tie climbing beans and taller tomato varieties to stakes or frames.

By digging underneath potatoes, you can take new potatoes from the roots of the plant without harvesting the whole crop and leave the smaller potatoes to continue growing.

Keep hilling later-sown potatoes.

You can still sow carrots, parsnips, dwarf beans, silver beet, summer lettuce varieties and radishes.

The first meeting for 2019 for the Armidale Garden Club will be February 21 (the fourth Thursday of the month). All welcome. Mark the date in your calendars.