Heat stopped play in the garden mid-afternoon on Sunday, and I was, for once, grateful for my perpetually chilly house. Watering is proving to be one of the most time-consuming gardening tasks for me at the moment. Try lightening the watering burden by dividing the garden into, say, four sections and give each section a really deep and thorough soaking once every four days; evenings are best, to avoid water loss by evaporation. You can also retain water in the soil by applying organic mulches on your borders.
Lawns
Let your grass grow longer and keep mowing to a minimum; I’m aiming to mow no more than once a month at the moment. Cut on a high setting, and try ‘grass-cycling’; leave the box off the lawn-mower so clippings are spread over the lawn, acting as a mulch and returning nutrients back to the soil.
Shrubs and climbers
Water newly-planted shrubs daily, until their root systems get established. Continue to tie in new growth of any climbers and keep dead-heading roses to encourage them to flower for longer; use sharp secateurs to cut down to the first leaf below the flower.
Prune spring-flowering shrubs that flower on the previous year’s growth, such as Wiegela (see last year’s blog) and flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum). This gives new growth enough time to develop and mature sufficiently to bear next year’s flowers. It was my intention to cut back my own Wiegela this Sunday, but it was in full sun at the time, and I didn’t fancy sweating it out.
Fruit and veg
Continue to make successional sowings of spinach and salad leaves. I found that my mixed salad leaves bolted pretty quickly (you need to keep thinning, watering and harvesting to avoid this) but my ‘Red Salad Bowl’ lettuce has been great, and is still going strong. I’ve just sown some Lollo Rosso as well, although it has been sabotaged by a squirrel already.
My ‘Red Salad Bowl’ lettuce has been really successful this year
I note that my RHS magazine instructs me to keep birds off my berries ‘by netting tautly and securely’. Unless you already have an all-singing, all-dancing fruit cage, netting fruit bushes properly is a lot of work and I don’t have either the skills or the patience for it. Moreover, I am haunted by tales of gardeners finding dead birds, ensnared, inside fruit netting.
My approach is to pick the berries the instant they ripen, before the birds notice. Slightly underripe fruit is better for jam-making (my main reason for growing fruit) because it has a higher pectin content. Prune this year’s growth on red and white currants, and also gooseberries, back to five leaves.
My first red currants; I shall be trying to pick them before the birds find them.
Support single-stem tomatoes with canes, and regularly pinch out any side-shoots. When indoor-grown tomato plants have set seven trusses of flowers (four trusses for outdoor-grown plants), remove the growing point of the main stem, leaving two leaves above the top-most truss.
Temperatures are now consistently above 10 degrees centigrade, both during the day and night, so now is the time to start gradually hardening off tender and indoor-raised plants, ready for planting out. I shall report on my first-hand hardening-off catastrophe in another blog!