July

Pick your Sweet Peas

Pick all the flowers from your sweet pea plants to extend their flowering season. Cut the flowers before they have chance to develop seed pods, which will take away energy from producing more flowers. Cut the stems as long as possible and enjoy bunches of fragrant blooms you can place around your house.  

Cut back early flowering perennials 

Cut back, to the ground, early flowering perennials such as hardy geraniums and oriental poppies to encourage fresh growth and new flowering in a few months’ time. This also creates space for annuals and perennials in boarders and beds. 

Provide extra support 

July normally brings a surge of growth that means sometimes plants cannot support themselves. This can cause damage to your plants and they can also fall over and cover other surrounding plants. The best way to tackle this is to add new support, by easing plants upright and providing the underpinning that they need. 

Feed containers 

Plants grown in containers and pots will now need extra feeding, as they will have most likely used all the nutrients available from the compost they were originally planted in. A weekly feed with liquid seaweed or proprietary liquid tomato feed works well. Just remember too many nutrients is also damaging to your plants.  

Cut hedges

You can now begin to safely cut hedges, as all young birds should have left their nests. If you have an overgrown hedge, it is the best time to reduce it in size. But if you have a hedge that needs reviving wait until winter to trim it hard, as this will stimulate more growth next spring.