“What is one to say about June - the time of perfect young summer?” Gertrude Jekyll
Gertrude Jeckyll’s quote goes on to talk about June as ‘the fulfillment of the promise of earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.” This year it seemed spring would never come, but June is showing us how quickly the garden catches up with a little sun and green fingers.
Whilst we can be planting out plants we’ve raised from seed and summer bedding, we can equally be direct sowing for late summer colour and cut flowers. Perennials and spring bedding can be sown now for next year. You will have a display to look forward to with hollyhocks, lupins, delphiniums, wallflowers and pansies if you enjoy a cottage garden theme.Back to the present and some tidying up to be done, cutting back faded bulb foliage, dead heading roses to encourage more summer flowering, training climbers and trimming hedges once birds have flown the nest. Those gorgeous dahlias can be planted out now but watch out for signs of the enemy, snails, slugs, and earwigs. The former two can be dealt with using organic slug pellets, which stop gastropods feeding with no harm to birds.
The old tip for earwigs is to suspend a pot filled with straw upside down on a bamboo cane and catch them napping in the early morning. Another trick is to cover the main stems with Vaseline. Above all, this month we can be out in the garden with (hopefully) the sun on our backs every day we enjoy the young beauty of June.
- Direct sow hardy annuals such as Calendula, Clarkia, Godetia
- Hang out your hanging baskets
- Pinch out the side shoots on your tomatoes
- Fill in herbaceous border gaps with annual bedding
- Cut back trailing and spreading plants after flowering for more growth and flowers
- Harvest Hellebore seed to sow immediately
- Plant out begonias, salvia, cannas and cordylines
- Raise aquilegias, oriental poppies, Alyssum and Campanula carpatica from seed
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