You may have noticed that I haven’t produced a blog for my jobs of the month for either May or June as I was caught up in watching the mens cricket world cup. I was lucky enough to attend a few of the matches and the atmosphere was amazing – especially at Edgbaston when England beat India.
My mantra for the summer months is ‘prune, water, weed’ and repeat.
Prune covers various tasks:
- Deadheading either to encourage new flowers on plants such as dahlias, or to keep the plant looking tidy such as daylillies, and to stop the plant putting energy into producing seeds.
- Cutting back certain perennials like some geraniums and oriental poppies to ground level once they have finished flowering to encourage new foliage and the possibility of a second flowering. It also stops them looking untidy. A few years ago one of my oriental poppies decided to flower on Christmas Day!
- Prune wisteria by cutting back the whippy shoots to about five leaves which restricts the amount of foliage and encourages short, flowering spurs.
- Cutting the lawn. I have to be honest and say that this is one of my least favourite jobs in the garden. To make it more interesting I have patterns in the lawn. I will be writing a blog in the future on this.
- Trimming hedges. This is something I carry out in August so I will cover this in more detail in my jobs for August blog.
I water all plants in pots, both indoors and outdoors, and those plants in the raised vegetable beds. I don’t water anything planted in the ground unless it has been recently planted – my approach is that the plants in the garden have to get their roots down and find their own water sources. I aim to water every two or three days depending on the temperatures, and include a feed once a week.
At times in the past I have felt that weeding is an ongoing battle that I will never win. But I have found a technique to employ so that I don’t get too depressed about the weeds. When I’m weeding I either focus on one particular part of the garden, or on one particular type of weed such as nettles where I need to wear thicker gardening gloves. That way means that I can look back and feel that I have achieved something. I also remind myself that a weed is simply a plant in the wrong place, so what I might consider to be a weed in one part of the garden isn’t necessarily a weed in another part of the garden.
I aim to deadhead in the early morning, water in the evening, and fit in the other tasks as and when I can if I’m around during the day.
