Here comes Summer

Summer's really here and your garden is the best place to enjoy it. Trees and shrubs are covered in leaves, flowers and plants are flowering profusely and the roses bring colour, shape and beautiful fragrance. Butterflies and birds relish all the delicacies that the garden has to offer them. This is the time to get into outdoor living - with friends or family round for lunch or supper outside, or enjoying a cup of coffee in a sunny corner whilst your children play on the lawn.

A gardening gift for Dad

Don't forget Father's Day in June! What about treating him to a new tree or attractive shrub to add to the garden or go shopping for a useful gardening tool? At this time of year there is plenty to prune and dig in the garden!

Planting & Sowing

Nature is flowering profusely now, but there is still time for planting: what about some stunning pot-grown roses. Summer flowers are blooming even faster now than they did in May. Do you fancy creating a new border? Dream up some good combinations and take your shopping list to the garden centre. At the end of the day you will have added a new area to your garden.

• Plant roses - If a rose is pot-grown it is very possible to plant it in full bloom. To help it along, place special rose compost in the planting hole.
• Plant summer flowers - Summer flowers grow even faster in June than May. If plants are in pots, don't forget that pot soil only contains six weeks' worth of nutrients. After that you will need to feed weekly to get the sort of outstanding performance summer flowers are capable of.
• Biannuals are magnificent. Think of wallflowers (Cheiranthus), honesty (Lunaria) and other varieties. You can sow them now to flower next year.

Cutting & Pruning

• June is the month for pruning cherries, but never remove heavy branches because of diseases like silverleaf and gumming.
• From 21 June hedge plants go into a second period of rapid growth. They will rapidly recover after pruning and form many young shoots. Prune taxus and buxus hedges when it is cloudy.
• If you cut delphiniums back after the first flowering, they will flower again in the autumn.
• You can still prune the spring-flowering shrubs which have finished flowering now. If you wait too long with this, there is a risk that the new flowering branches for next year will not ripen sufficiently and will not be winter-hardy.
• Tie climbing roses - You should not prune climbing roses now. Leave them to develop and grow plenty of new shoots. Tie them to prevent the plants from ‘falling over'.

Maintenance

• Rhododendrons finished flowering - To guarantee profuse flowering next year, it is best to ‘dead head' (pinch out the dead flowers). Pull them off with a little bit of stem: the flower buds for next years are directly underneath. Most varieties have finished flowering by June. If you pull off the dead flowers now, this will prevent seeds from forming and the plant will invest even more energy in producing new flower buds for next year.
• Weeds grow fast in June! If you trim your hedging plants now, they will enjoy a second period of growth.
• Mowing or mulch mowing - You can mow the grass and remove the cuttings, compost them or scatter them between the ornamental plants, or you can ‘mulch mow'. A special set of cutters on the mower chops the cuttings up so fine that they can remain on the lawn as mulch and thereby act as a direct fertiliser.
• Cut a play lawn to three centimetres and an ornamental lawn to two centimetres, but set the mower a bit higher during dry spells.
• Dig up bulbs once the foliage has died back completely.
• Give support to perennials that need it. Careful not to bind the stems together into bunches. Place canes in between in the direction of growth and tie them to those.
• Stubborn weeds - Continue to weed. They grow vigorously in June.
• Demanding roses - Roses exhaust the soil in which they are growing quite quickly. So it's ideal to give them special rose fertiliser which contains trace elements and magnesium.

Lawn Care