What to do in your garden in July?

High summer is a wonderful time to enjoy your garden. The kids are off school, you’re in a holiday mood and the sunny days linger long into the evening. Make the most of it and get outside every moment you can with our garden jobs for this month:

 

General tasks:

• Remove blanketweed from the pond using a cane to twirl the strands around before pulling them out of the water. Let the weed sit on the side of the pond so creatures can crawl back in.
• Keep watering pots in warm weather – if you’re struggling to keep up, consider putting them on an automatic dripper system, available from our garden centre here in Pickering.

Ornamental gardens

• Deadhead dahlias daily to stop them setting seed and keep new blooms coming, cutting back spent buds to the next bud or leaf on the stem.
• Cut back foliage of spring-flowering perennials like pulmonaria – with luck it will bounce back with a fresh flush of growth and look much better for the rest of the season.
• Watch out for fuchsia gall mite, a nasty pest which has only recently appeared in gardens. Signs of infestation include distorted shoot tips and flowers – pick them off to limit the spread.

Kitchen garden:

• Harvest redcurrants snipping or pinching off whole strings of fruits in one go. Eat fresh, or lay berries flat on trays and freeze them for using later.
• Dig up elephant garlic on a warm, sunny day and leave it on the soil to dry out in the sunshine (if that isn’t possible, bring it under cover into a greenhouse to dry on racks).
• Water tomatoes carefully aiming for a constant moisture level in the soil while they are forming fruit – if you flood them and then let them dry out, you might make the fruits split.