July means holidays, long days, and (fingers crossed) plenty of sunshine - the perfect excuse to spend proper time in your garden. Between the watering, weeding and deadheading needed to keep things looking their best, make sure you carve out a moment to sit back and enjoy the blooms too. Here are our top 15 gardening tips for July.
Top 15 gardening tips for July
- Get a head start on next spring's colour by sowing biennials such as foxgloves and wallflowers into seed trays or modules in the greenhouse.
- Deadhead roses regularly to keep the blooms coming. Sweet peas and cosmos respond the same way, rewarding you with months of flowers and plenty to cut for a vase indoors.
- When hardy geraniums start to look tired and straggly, cut them back hard. They'll reward you with fresh foliage and a new flush of flowers.
- Once bearded irises have finished blooming, lift and divide any overcrowded clumps. Replant with the rhizomes sitting partly above the soil so they can bake in the summer sun.
- Give your wisteria its summer prune, trimming this year's long, whippy growth back to 5-6 leaves from the main stems.
- On cordon tomatoes, pinch out the side shoots so the plant channels its energy into fruit rather than foliage.
- Water tomatoes consistently, particularly those grown in containers, keeping soil moisture even helps prevent the fruit from splitting.
- In dry spells, water container plants regularly. Where you can, use stored rainwater, and water in the morning or evening to cut down on evaporation.
- Sow salad leaves like lettuce every couple of weeks to keep a steady supply going through summer. To stop lettuce bolting in the heat, give it some shade during the hottest part of the day.
- Give tomatoes, beans, courgettes, peppers, blueberries and gooseberries a fortnightly feed with a high-potash liquid fertiliser (tomato feed works well) to encourage more flowers and fruit.
- Keep picking courgettes and beans regularly, the more you harvest, the more the plants will produce.
- Once pods appear on broad beans, pinch out the growing tips. This encourages bushier growth and helps ward off blackfly, which tend to target the tender young shoots.
- Earth up maincrop potatoes by mounding soil around the stems, which stops light reaching the tubers and turning them green (green potatoes are toxic, so this step matters). For first earlies, dig up a plant or two to check they're ready. If the potatoes are still small, leave the rest to grow on a little longer.
- Get autumn-flowering bulbs like nerines and colchicums in the ground now for a late-season display.
- Keep mowing regularly, raising the blade height if the weather turns dry.
Whether you're after plants to fill a gap in the border or furniture for a summer get-together, our Carpenters Garden Centre in St Albans has everything you need to make the most of your garden this season!
