Your GARDENING FORTNIGHT
Ruth gets on with pruning, planting, dividing and watering
As June moves towards its end,looking after the garden is a bit like herding catseverything is going on everywhere, growing in all directions and the gardener is hard-pressed to know where to turn first. The beds need weeding, the greenhouse needs cooling and shading, containers and baskets need watering and feeding and the first early crops need harvesting. All this before we start planting out the seed-grown flowers and vegetables, and tender plants that we have been nurturing through the winter.
One of the main jobs is to cut back any shrubs that flowered in early summer, such as weigela and philadelphus. They are pruned now to give them time to grow before going dormant in the autumn, because each year’s flowers are produced on stems that grew the previous season. If you delay pruning, they won’t have time to put on enough growth for a stunning show next spring.
Pruning involves removing any dead or damaged wood, as well as diseased stems that are cut back to healthy material. Then take out any stems that are spindly or growing inwards, to create an attractive open shrub with a strong framework, and remove any branches that are crossing or rubbing as they will damage each other. Then feed and mulch your plant to help them recover.
We have found that one way of removing some of the strain is to turn No Mow May into ‘No Mow Summer’, and let the lawns grow with only a few access paths mown around the edges of borders and through the middle. The bisected back lawn, which is full of ox-eye daisies, salad burnet, clover, buttercup and scabious, looks like a pair of lungs breathing life into the garden. It is full of insects, including the rare and
