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Each month, receive tips on the top jobs needed in your garden as well as a wealth of information on a range of gardening topics. From sowing seeds to picking fruit, each month get access to information on the care and maintenance of your flowerbeds, vegetable plot and lawn. As with your own gardening diary, the journal is split into separate sections, each covering a different area of garden care.

Tuesday 3 June 2014

This Month in your Garden – June


Enjoy your garden....


A little and often is a good gardening tip. Not trying to do too much all at once is a rule worth following.

As summer borders begin their colourful impact it’s all the more pleasure to take a break and enjoy the fruits of your labours. 

When you’re ready though you can get on and trim hedges, make successional sowings to follow on from last month and catch up with little jobs like starting propagation for next year and staking border carnations. 
A tip here is not to make ties all the way up the stem causing rain to collect in the flower, which will also be damaged by the sun. Let them arch naturally. If you’re growing hybrid tea roses for exhibition you need to disbud side stems to attain one big terminal flower. For the not so ambitious there’s sowing biennials from seed such as polyanthus and pansies for planting out in October.

Hardy winter pansies will bring you that splash of colour when it’s dull. Feed vegetables and fruit in full growth with quick acting fertiliser or weak liquid manure. Stake peas sown last month and earth up March and April planted potatoes and dig up some autumn-sown onions when you need them, but not the whole plant if the bulbs are not all properly ripened. If you have oriental poppies (Papaver orientale) they will need tidying after flowering. You can plant containers, prune spring flowering shrubs, train climbers, spray raspberries if you have trouble with fruit maggots. 

Easy perennials to raise from seed are aquilegias, lupins, oriental poppies, hollyhocks and delphiniums. Not to dampen your spirits but what about the weeds? Ground elder, dock, creeping buttercup, bindweed, perennial nettle, couch grass and thistle should all be dug up to stop them from spreading. Now have a cup of tea or a favourite tipple and enjoy your garden. 
  • Sow Alyssum saxatile, anemones, Campanula carpatica
  • Plant out bedding such as dahlias and begonias
  • Take cuttings of pinks 
  • Pot cyclamen and repot auriculas
  • Cut back aubretias, arabis and perennial candytuft in late June
  • Cut off faded flower trusses of lilacs, rhododendrons and azaleas
  •  Prune Clematis Montana and Chaenomoles speciosa grown against walls
  • Examine grafted fruit trees for signs of scion growth
  • Start to bud rose stocks
  • Start to prune gooseberries, red and white currant bushes
  • Sow primulas
  • Finish thinning peaches, nectarines and apricots grown against walls.


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