The Vegetable Plot - July

Salad days are here again 

The keen vegetable gardener will be harvesting globe artichokes, broad beans, French beans, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, marrows and potatoes now.

Others of us are content with tending our tomatoes, harvesting our shallots when the leaves yellow and digging up the garlic when the tips turn colour. Remembering most vegetables are going to be thirsty in dry weather and will need frequent watering, so a water butt to catch the rain off the shed, the greenhouse roof or a downpipe will come into its own.

Successional sowings of lettuce, endive and summer spinach will keep the salads coming and as tomatoes swell they will benefit from a layer of well-rotted compost around the plants.

Feed and train cucumbers, grow herbs in sunny spaces, pick courgettes before they turn into marrows, treat apple scab, harvest lettuce, radishes and early potatoes. And you thought you would be taking it easy. Well, it’s entirely up to you, you’re the gardener after all.

• Damp down the greenhouse on hot days but don’t spray the plants or fruit
• Tend the tomatoes
• Feed plants in growth and thin seedlings 
• Continue successional sowings
• Plant celery from late sowings
• Plant out winter greens and March sown leeks
• Keep watering
• Tend tomatoes
• Feed and train cucumbers