Just mix the fruit juice and water together – the heather will glow with all its colours.

Heather is a small shrub that is very popular as an arranger plant and gracefully decorates flower beds and balcony boxes. It is also known to look at its most beautiful in early autumn when the tiny flowers turn a variety of colours. In order to keep them in their full glory, heathers need to be nurtured and fertilisation needs to become a habit: then the plants will thank you with beautiful blooms.

Fertilizing heather from scratch

Heather doesn’t need any special care. The thing is, though, that watering during a dry autumn is probably best for the plants, as long as it’s done sparingly, because too much moisture can be just as damaging to them. What about fertilisation? A lot of people don’t fertilise, which is why heathers don’t always look their best. They’ll only be in good shape if they’re placed in acidic soil, which is highly recommended for them.

Caring for the quality of the soil for heather

Do you have heather in a bed or pot that’s not doing so well? The solution is to acidify the soil in which they grow. The good news is that the treatment is very simple and can be done even by someone who doesn’t think they’re much of a gardener. All you need is a lemon:

• Dissolve the juice of half a lemon in a litre of cold water and water the heather once a month in a small amount. Do you have an excess of citric acid in your kitchen cupboards? This too can be helpful, as it has the same effect as its fresh counterpart. In this situation, 1/4 teaspoon of citric acid and a litre of water is all you need to give the heather a good boost.

Of course, there are other natural ways to strengthen heather.

• Just reach for a coffee: pour 100 ml of the black drink over a litre of water.

If you’re not a coffee lover, there’s nothing stopping you from using a black tea infusion.

Preparing the soil for heather

As we know that heather needs acidic soil, it is worth preparing it in advance so that our heather grows as well as possible. So what do we need to do?

• If we know that we are going to grow heather in containers, we just need to buy, for example, a soil for conifers that meets the relevant standards for our colourful plants.

• If we plan to plant the shrubs in the ground, we can dig the soil thoroughly before placing them and add coffee or tea grounds, which should lower the pH of the soil.

I just wanted to mention one more treatment that can be really useful for heather. It’s mulching. It can stop moisture from evaporating, so you don’t need to water as often. Plus, some of the mulch can also stop weeds from growing, which can affect how well the heather develops. You can use lots of different materials for mulch, but pine bark works really well.