June is a month to be enjoying the garden but with a little bit of care and some snipping and deadheading you can keep those flowers going often into late summer
- Water and feed bedding plants as they are particularly hungry and thirsty. Liquid tomato feed or seaweed are excellent to use.
- Feed your garden borders with a general feed like a slow release pellet or a box of ground up fish, blood and bone.
- Hoe down the weeds as they grow rapidly and to do so eat a lot more than plants and often harbour pest and diseases and as a result plants fail to thrive.
- Dead head everything as flowers finish this will prolong the flowering period.
- Cut back herbaceous plants that are fading and many will repeat flower. You have the option to:
a) Chelsea chop which is to cut back perennials often to as
low as 3in off the ground for late flowers or to encourage continuous flowering
of a particular flower like salvia nemerosa.
b) Chop back the first flowers to enjoy a stronger slightly
later flush. Reduce the flowers on sterile hybrid plants in their first year to allow them to establish. Pinching out the tops will also encourage a bushier plant.
c) Cut back floppy foliage by about half on plants like
sedum and they will grow back making much sturdier specimens and it will make
very little difference to the flowering time. This can be very effective with
floppy nepeta (cat mint) and taking a chop at the front half of the plant will
strengthen the stem and encourage them to act as supports for the tall rear
foliage.
d) Take back tatty leaves from early flowering herbaceous
like brunnera and pulmonaria and fresh leaves will emerge.
- If your garden lacks colour or drama punctuate it with pots of bright bedding. I would suggest hiding pots within your borders. I recommend dahlias, marguerite daisies, salvias, cosmos and red geraniums.
- Feed you roses as they are exhausted following their first flush of flowers. They need the boost to avoid feeling stressed which makes them more susceptible to aphids and black spot. Then hopefully they will continue to flush with flower.
- Prune the spring flowering shrubs like deutzia when they finish.
- Get the hedges lightly trimmed so they don't appear like a bad hair do. Don't do a heavy cut in case of birds nesting.
- When you need to water soak the ground do not drip water as this encourages roots to the surface.
- Plant out your marrows, courgettes and pumpkins its June you can officially put tender plants outside.
- Outdoor tomatoes can now also go outside.
- Time to seed a few more rows of root crops and continue with your cut and come again lettuce and spinach.
- Easy edible herbs to sow in pots are basil and coriander. Reseed regularly as you will use them up quickly once grown. You can also grow quiet a few things in containers patio bean and tumbler tomatoes are easy and remember small tomatoes will ripen more easily.
- Having a bed where you grow flowers for cutting can be an easy and productive thing to do. If you don't have room there are lots of flowers you can include within your borders suitable for cutting. If you would like more ideas click here
- If you have lots of easy herbs ready like sage, thyme, bay marjoram and rosemary, dry them or freeze them now to use later.
- Watch out for vine weevil and if you see it take action. Sprays are available. You will notice they start munching leaves.
- Scab and leaf blotch may appear on your fruit following the wet spell this year. Both are fungal and can be treated with fungicide. Diseased foliage should ideally be removed, though realistically on a large tree its not possible. I am raking up fallen leaves and am also going to throw down some fish blood and bone feed as a boost.
