Borough Life Spring 2006: Home grown successes
Garden team’s top tips for Spring action
The Grounds Maintenance team offers the following tips for what to do in the garden at this time of year:
- With the weather getting a little milder, get into the garden as often as you can, pottering and titivating - it’s good exercise and a great stress buster.
- Start the mower to make sure it’s in good shape for summer. If the weather allows, think about cutting your lawn so you are just ‘tipping’ the grass.
- Sow your tomatoes, chillies, peppers, cucumbers and herbs in the greenhouse.
- Give cacti their first good watering after winter. Repot them if necessary.
- Shrubs, such as buddleia, dogwood and willows can be pruned and shaped.
- Sow summer bedding pots or trays, keeping them in a heated propagator to germinate.
- To ensure a bumper crop this year, give your fruit trees and bushes a good feed with a balanced, granular fertiliser then add a good thick mulch of compost, composted bark or well-rotted manure.
- Herbaceous perennials can be lifted and divided. Lift the crowns and prise them apart with a fork. Take care not to damage newly formed buds and shoots.
- Hybrid Tea and Floribunda roses can be pruned down to their final height.
- Always recycle your green waste – in a council green bin if possible!
They cut three million square metres of grass a week, look after 4,000 trees and tend to an amazing 300,000 square metres of shrubbery.
In fact when it comes to greenery in our borough, you could say Wigan Leisure & Culture Trust’s Grounds Maintenance Team has got it covered. Most people will be aware of the team for the way it keeps the borough’s parks, sporting pitches, playing fields, bowling greens and the odd golf course or two in tip top shape during the summer months.
Now the multi-award winning squad are planning to bring their green-fingered skills to a garden near you by taking a certain Mr Titchmarsh on at his own game.
Grounds Maintenance has gone Ground Force by ‘branching out’ and offering its services to residents in need of expert help.
Manager Paul Barton explains: “We are lucky enough to have a team that has the skills to do everything from straightforward mowing and hedge trimming through to specialised landscaping and tree-surgery.”
The team’s talents are so sought after that they’ve already got a pretty full order book for private work. They are putting in plants and patios across the borough and even looking after trees in nearby Salford.
In fact the team is currently bringing in a cool quarter of a million pounds a year in private business and amazingly, most of it has been generated by word of mouth. The money earned is ploughed back into the services provided by the team.
Paul said: “The first thing we would do is look at what people want doing with their garden and assess the work involved. From there we would agree a price.”
For more information on Grounds Maintenance visit their pages on Wigan Leisure & Culture Trust’s website: www.wlct.org or call the team on 01942 731405 or 731406.