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Boost your garden blooms with Bio Ocean this Summer
As summer approaches, our gardens come alive with vibrant colours and lush growth. To ensure your flowers, vegetables, and indigenous plants thrive during this season, look no further than Bio Ocean fertiliser. This organic and environmentally friendly product is packed full of goodness, designed to give your plants the nutrients they need for bigger and better blooms.
Why Choose Bio Ocean?
1. Organic and Environmentally Friendly
Bio Ocean is manufactured by composting seaweed, fishmeal, humic acid, and poultry manure. This process creates a soil and plant conditioner that is rich in naturally occurring minerals and growth stimulants. By choosing Bio Ocean, you are not only nurturing your garden but also supporting sustainable and eco-friendly gardening practices.
2. Added Kelp and Fishmeal
These ingredients provide a slow, consistent release of nutrients, ensuring your plants receive the necessary sustenance over time. Kelp and fishmeal are renowned for their ability to enhance plant growth and improve soil health, making Bio Ocean a powerhouse of natural plant nutrition.
3. Water-Wise
South Africa’s hot summer months can be tough on gardens, but Bio Ocean is designed to be water-wise, helping your plants retain moisture and reduce water usage. This is particularly important in regions where water conservation is crucial. By using Bio Ocean, you can enjoy a lush, vibrant garden without the need for excessive watering.
4. Child and Pet Friendly
Safe for use around children and pets, Bio Ocean is pathogen-free and does not contain germs, mould, or bacteria. You can apply it to your garden with peace of mind, knowing it won’t harm your loved ones.
5. Easy Application
Pelletised for easy application, Bio Ocean is pH neutral and will not burn your plants, making it an ideal choice for all types of garden plants. The pellets allow for a slow, consistent release of nutrients, ensuring your plants are fed over an extended period without the risk of nutrient burn.
How to Use Bio Ocean
Vegetables and Herbs: Apply one to two handfuls per square metre every 6 weeks. Bio Ocean promotes healthy, robust growth in your vegetable and herb gardens, ensuring a bountiful harvest throughout the season.
Planting: Mix two handfuls into the soil at the base of the hole before planting. This ensures that new plants receive an immediate boost of nutrients, helping them establish strong root systems and promoting vigorous growth.
Flowers and Shrubs: Apply two handfuls per square metre every 6 to 8 weeks. Bio Ocean enhances the flowering potential of your ornamental plants, resulting in bigger, more vibrant blooms.
Trees: Apply 10 handfuls per tree for each year of the tree’s age (up to 2.5kg) every 10 to 12 weeks. Trees, both young and mature, benefit from the consistent nutrient supply, leading to stronger, healthier growth.
Indigenous Plants: Apply one to two handfuls per plant every 10 to 12 weeks, perfect for establishing new plants. Bio Ocean is ideal for South African indigenous plants, including fynbos, as it supports their unique nutritional needs and promotes their natural beauty.
Pot Plants: Use half a handful, depending on the size of the pot, and work into the top layer of soil. Container plants benefit from the slow-release nutrients, ensuring they remain healthy and vibrant throughout the season.
Maximise Your Summer Blooms
December is the perfect time to feed your garden with Bio Ocean. For maximum bloom power, focus on feeding summer-flowering plants such as:
- Hibiscus: Known for their large, showy flowers, hibiscus plants thrive with the extra nutrients provided by Bio Ocean.
- Bougainvillea: These vibrant climbers will produce an abundance of colourful bracts when fed with Bio Ocean.
- Geraniums: Enhance the flowering potential of your geraniums with Bio Ocean, resulting in stunning displays of colour.
- Marigolds: These hardy annuals will bloom profusely with the nutrient boost from Bio Ocean.
- Petunias: Known for their long flowering season, petunias will thrive and produce more flowers when fed with Bio Ocean.
Bio Ocean is not only great for these vibrant flowers but also for all your garden plants, including veggies, fynbos, and all indigenous plants. It truly is an all-round superstar product!
Visit Your Nearest Garden Centre
Bio Ocean is available in 200g, 5kg, and 10kg bag sizes. Head to your nearest Garden Centre to purchase this fantastic fertiliser and give your garden the boost it needs this summer. The convenience of different bag sizes means you can buy the right amount for your gardening needs, whether you have a small urban garden or a large landscape.
December in the Garden
It’s holiday season, and a jolly good reason to celebrate! Live life to the fullest surrounded by the ones you love and a gorgeous garden to host them all in. We’ve got a fully loaded, super fun summer entertaining and planting guide to get you in the spirit of things this December.
Warm welcomes
Wet vines from the garden can be transformed into gorgeous decorative wreaths, which you can secure onto your front door. Try ivy varieties, grapevine, and big num num (Carissa macrocarpa) with ornamental grass strands that’ll maintain colour for longer too. Add to the friendly vibes by adding a textured welcome mat available from your GCA Garden Centre.
Try this: Once you’ve gotten a solid run from your wreath, tie it onto a tree branch and hang some birdseed feeders from it.
Eternal sunshine
Solar lights are the best-kept fun secrets this summer. Light up your pathways with lanterns, accentuate your trees with spiralled fairy lights, and make the patio pop with spotlights highlighting your gorgeous container beauts. Solar jars are also a sure win, to which you can add glass stones for extra sparkle. Solar jars look super magical when added to fairy gardens and scattered around beds.
Always lit tip: Wrap battery-operated fairy lights around your front door DIY wreath for added evening ambience as guests arrive.
Inquisitive kids
Keep the kids entertained and educated with a ‘Find that bug’ quest. You can easily create a printable worksheet for your kids and their friends listing the goggas to be discovered in your garden. Alternatively, there are several local apps to be downloaded, which kids can use to identify their discoveries. Why not get them all to give a fun little presentation about the bugs afterwards!
Handy helpers top tip: To bring in friendly flyers and pest-munching bugs, check out this article: (link to that other article we did about bug/bird-friendly gardens)
Happy house plants
Consider playing with poinsettia (Christmas star) and amaryllis (Christmas flower) as part of your festive décor prep. Fill your house with cut hydrangea flowers (Christmas rose) if you have lots in the garden. Pick mature flowers (all the little florets must be open) and then scrape about 5cm of bark off the bottom of the stem. Leave them overnight up to their necks in cold water for max bloom power before you arrange them in vases.
Indoor garden tip: Make sure your windowsill/countertop crops are stocked with lekker herbs for braai and cocktail garnish. Pots and seedling trays are available from your GCA Garden Centre.
Good time edibles
Plant: Melons, sweet potatoes, cucumber, eggplants, peppers and the last tomatoes for the season.
Harvest: You can now finally feast on the watermelons and sweet melons sowed in August. A large watermelon is ripe if it feels a little bumpy when you stroke it. When sweet melons are ripe, a small crack appears at the point where the fruit attaches to the vine.
Pests NOT invited to the party
Dash down to your GCA Garden Centre for effective pest control solutions and don’t allow any uninvited guests to your super-fun summer.
Look out for:
- Scale on citrus trees
- Orange Dog caterpillar on citrus trees
- Tip-wilters on the soft tips of roses, dahlias and abelias
- Fruit fly on pumpkins, squashes and fruit trees
- Codling moth on apples and pears (wrap sticky tape around the base of the tree)
- Amaryllis caterpillar on crinums and other bulbous plants
- Mildew on roses, dahlias and cleomes
- Whitefly on beans and fuchsias
- Rust on hollyhocks
- Pear slug on peaches, cherries prunus and ornamentals
- Outbreak of red spider mite during hot, dry weather
Quirky container combos
Plant these instant annuals for pots dripping with life, colour, and nutrition. Seedlings and seedling trays are available from your GCA Garden Centre now.
- Tomato, parsley and petunia
- Basil, eggplant and petunia
- Euphorbia (soft white) with red petunias
Fun-filled, sunny gift ideas for gardeners
- A birdbath, bird feeder and a packet of wild birdseed.
- A potting bench for dad.
- A garden bench for ouma.
- Trays of flowering seedlings and a bag of compost.
- A concrete rabbit or frog and other garden ornaments.
- Instead of the conventional festive stocking, use gumboots, garden clogs, or a watering can.
- Wrap gardening gloves, seed packets and a trowel in a flowery tea towel.
- For the diligent weeder, a good choice would be a kneeling pad and good quality hand tools.
- A garden diary or calendar so that the gardener can plan and record seasonal plantings and blooming habits of plants.
- Top edibles to use as gifts are chillies. There is a wide variety available from hot to very hot. One thing to remember is that some of them can reach up to 2m tall and so are not ornamental. Also think about ‘berry delicious’ in the form of strawberries and blueberries.
