How to Achieve Summer Success in Your Garden

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Fulham Horticultural Society offers top tips for local gardeners in July

It's high summer - a time when our gardens are at their blooming best.

To help keep them that way, Fulham Horticultural Society is offering local gardeners this advice on looking after your plants in hot weather- including your own fresh veg and salad.

Regular deadheading bedding and perennial plants directs energy into stronger growth and more flowers. Once the flowers are pollinated; seed heads, pods or capsules form at the expense of further growth and flower development. 

However do not remove the faded flowers on plants that produce seed loved by birds, including Rudbeckia, cornflower and sunflower, or plants that have ornamental seeds or fruits; examples include alliums; love-in-a-mist (Nigella), stinking iris (Iris foetidissima) and bladder cherry (Physalis alkekengi).  There is also no need to deadhead rose cultivars that bear hips or other plants that bear berries in the autumn.

Keep up with the harvesting of all crops. Lift early potatoes and carry on earthing up the rows. When the potatoes are 10cm tall, the leafy shoots can be mounded around with soil to their full height, this process is known as 'earthing up'. Earthing up potatoes will increase the length of underground stems that will bear potatoes.

Harvest garlic and shallots as the foliage begins to become yellow and straw.

July is the start of globe artichoke season. If your plant is into its second year then cut off the top bulb once big and swollen with a couple of inches of stem attached.

Lift autumn planted onions for immediate use. Continue to pick rhubarb until the end of the month and begin to harvest the main crop of your strawberries. Start to pick plums, early pears and apples.

Start sowing the seeds of the overwintering crops of kales, spring cabbage, radicchio, chicory, spinach beet and a hardy type of onion to mature in the early summer of next year.

Now is the best time to sow the main crop of carrots to avoid attack from root fly.

Continue with successional sowings of beetroot and lettuce. Follow the instructions on the back of the seed packet, and sow every two to four weeks for a continuous supply of crops.

Aim to keep the hoe moving at every opportunity. Water all crops at least once a week. Start to draw the soil up around the base of Brussels sprouts and sweet corn plants to encourage extra roots.

Fulham Horticultural Society welcomes new members and says benefits of the FHS include a monthly newsletter, free gardening advice via email, group entrances to RHS gardens if trips can be organised (volunteers welcome!) and entrance to its annual show in September.

Find out more about the society here.

July 13, 2018