Gardening Notes

July

• Arrange scented plants in pots on patio or terrace. 
• Continue programme of dead heading.
• Feed and water summer bedding.
• Attend regularly to container grown plants.
• In warm and dry weather, top up water in garden ponds.
• Give a first clipping to hedges of beech, hornbeam, privet and leylandii. Beech and hornbeam will still make a further growth spurt, so you may wish to leave them till later if you want to clip only once. Nip out the tips of branches on new leylandii hedges to make them dense. You can also give a first clip to shapes of box, yew, phillyrea and pittosporum.
• To prolong the flowering display, keep deadheading annual bedding plants.
• Make sure the long wands of growth on climbing roses are tied in or shortened, before winds can rip them down.
• Summer heat means red spider mite in greenhouses.  Ventilate well and damp down regularly.
• Biological controls will do the rest.
• Who is watering your patio pots while you are on holiday? Line someone up to do it or install a dripper irrigation system on a timer.
• Once summer-fruiting raspberries have been picked, prune the spent canes to ground level.
• Here’s an odd thing: cool, rainy weather mean lots of grass clippings to be composted, which means great heat in a compost bin. The heat steams off the moisture and leaves the clippings white and too dry to rot. So turn the compost with a fork and fluff it up, to let the air in, and put on a can or two of water. It will soon come to life again.
• Watch for Clematis montana eating its neighbours for breakfast. Disentangle, peel back and cut off the most wayward stems. More stems will follow, and you can do the same again, as far as September, without any loss of next spring’s flowers.
• In hot weather, raise the blades on the lawn mower.
• Take the first spent flower-heads of buddleia, to strengthen the later ones and show them off better.