Summer’s here and it’s the best time of year to be out in the garden, with flowers blooming, bees buzzing and long days to enjoy it all! Keep your garden looking fabulous this summer with our top 15 gardening tips for June.
- Fill pots and hanging baskets with summer bedding for fantastic colour that lasts for months. Trailing geraniums, petunias and lobelia love sunny spots and busy lizzies and begonias are great for shade. Feed fortnightly with a high potash feed for maximum flowering.
- Harden off and plant out runner beans, French beans, squash, courgettes and tomatoes.
- Keep on sowing salad leaves, beetroot and carrots to give you a supply all through summer.
- First early potatoes should be ready to harvest this month. Dig up one or two first to check how big they are, and if they’re too small, let them grow on for a few more weeks.
- Feed tomatoes fortnightly with a high potash feed to encourage fruit development. Container grown vegetables like dwarf beans and courgettes will also benefit from a fortnightly high potash feed – tomato feed works for them all!
- Harvest garlic and onion once the leaves turn yellow and start to flop over.
- Net strawberries as they start to ripen so that the birds don’t get to them before you can enjoy them.
- Deadhead repeat-flowering roses and pick sweet peas regularly so that they will keep on flowering all summer.
- Once hardy geraniums have finished flowering, cut them back to promote a flush of new foliage and flowers.
- Mow the lawn regularly, but in long spells of dry weather, mow less often and on a higher blade setting to reduce stress on the grass. If you have space, leave an area of lawn uncut to provide a home for insects and other garden wildlife.
- Weeds grow fast in summer, so keep them under control. On dry days, run a Dutch hoe over the soil to cut down annual weeds like spurge, chickweed and hairy bittercress, and leave the weeds on the soil to wither.
- Give Wisteria its summer prune, cutting back all this year’s long whippy shoots to around 20cm long.
- Trim evergreen hedges to keep them neat, but always check first to make sure you aren’t disturbing any nesting birds.
- Prune summer-flowering shrubs like Philadelphus (mock orange), Weigela and Forsythia once they’ve finished flowering, cutting back the flowered shoots to strong buds lower down and removing one in every 3-4 old stems to encourage new growth.
- Water in the early mornings or evenings to reduce water loss through evaporation, and install waterbutts to conserve rainwater for use on the garden.
Whether you’re planting, weeding or simply relaxing in a deck chair, you’ll find everything you need in our centre, so pay us a visit soon!