With the high temperatures, we’ve been experiencing over the past month around the country, sitting in the garden under a little shade with an ice-cold drink feels just as good as a holiday abroad! Enjoy as much time in your garden as you can, keeping housekeeping duties to a steady minimum to keep your plants happy and your garden looking its best.
Once the flowers on your plants have spent, ensure you nip off the heads to encourage more buds to bloom. Sweet peas will continue to produce abundantly until October allowing you to have fresh flowers indoors and get stuck into using your herbs to help them increase in size.
As well as deadheading your roses, make sure you’re getting rid of any suckers (usually found on grafted plants, these grow from the rootstock and their leaves can look paler in colour to the rest, literally sucking the nutrients from your plant yet producing no flowers). Make sure you dig down into the ground to remove the sucker from the base as trimming is will only allow it to regrow again. This is also your second chance to get pruning your wisteria by removing the new, green shoots, typically past the second or third bud from the base.
Don’t wait for your vegetables to get too big before harvesting to ensure they are at their most flavoursome. These include French beans; radishes; carrots; mangetout; potatoes and courgettes (unless you’re trying to grow marrows!).
It’s peak butterfly season (keep an eye on our Facebook page this month to see how we’re celebrating The Big Butterfly Count this year) so you should be seeing plenty around your garden. If not, its not too late to fill a few pots or gaps with some buddleias or valerian. If you’re looking for more inspiration, our ‘Perfect for Pollinators’ plants are all labelled around our outdoor plant departments. Butterflies enjoy sweet food, so overripe bananas and slices of orange will prove a real treat – place them high above the ground so as not to attract unwanted pests such as ants. As well as keeping your plants well-watered, keep an eye on the water levels of your pond and bird bath for your other garden inhabitants.