I hope you’ve had a lovely weekend.
One of the nicest things about this time of year are the long days, June has the most hours of daylight up to the summer solstice on the 21st of June.
All that daylight, combined with rain and sunshine, encourages everything to grow so quickly that it can easily romp out of control, so here are a few essential tasks to do to keep it all looking good:
General Gardening:
- Support plants like dahlias with stakes and tie them in as they grow to prevent them flopping over.
- Sow hardy annual flower seeds directly into the soil, you’ll find all the information you need in this post.
- Dead-heading: remove spent flowers on roses to encourage the plant to produce more flowers.
- Clip box hedges and topiary to keep them looking nice and sharp, the cut leaf edges will turn brown if you do this in sunshine, so reserve this little task for evening or a dull day.
- Avoid hedge trimming at this time of year as you’re likey to disturb nesting birds, and we really want to give birds as much help as possible.
- Make sure the bird-bath is topped up with clean water too.
- Pull up weeds before they take over and scatter their seeds everywhere, scuffing them out with a hoe is also a good method, as long as there aren’t any seedlings that you want to keep. I know that some don’t like these chores, but I find these mind-less little garden tasks quite relaxing.
Vegetables:
- Frost is unlikely in most areas of the U.K. so it’s time to plant out things like courgettes that have been started off inside.
- Sow small amounts of carrot, salad and beetroot seeds so you’ll get a continuous supply through the summer. These are easy to grow in containers too, but will need watering more often.
- It’ll be time to harvest broad beans if you haven’t done so already. Pick them when their about the size of your thumb and the beans inside are still tender.
- Cover strawberries and other fruit with nets to stop the birds raiding them.
- Cut chives back to produce new tender stems, have a look here at an earlier post about exactly how to do this.
Enjoy your garden
Jill
all images: Jill Anderson
