Summer Gardening Tips

Summer Gardening tips

Use grass cuttings to mulch around plants – retains moisture and stops the weeds growing.  Use on runner beans, peas, broad beans

French beans – and I use straw once the beans start to grow to keep the pods off the soil.

 

And fruit bushes

Don’t mulch potatoes – I found out (to my cost) that it encourages blight – earth up instead to encourage more potatoes – and suppress weeds at the same time.

Use straw around strawberry plants to keep the fruits off the soil – the straw helps to deter slugs as well.

In late spring when you repot and split houseplants you can plant the extra plants outside – they won’t be frost proof but they will last all summer

This is Kalanchoe – this year I planted out pink Streptocarpus too.

Once the first broad beans are ripe, cut off the tops of the plants – it stops them growing too tall – and getting blown over – and it also helps prevent blackfly.

And cut off the tops of runner beans when they reach the top of the poles – stops them becoming top heavy and susceptible to windy days – and if you can’t reach them you can’t pick the beans anyway!

Grow nasturtiums alongside runner beans – helps deter blackfly – not sure whether it’s the smell of nasturtiums that overpowers the bean scent – or whether the blackfly just prefer nasturtiums – but it certainly seems to work – and they look pretty too.

Grow purple flowers to attract bees and butterflies – and put out a shallow dish of water filled with pebbles for the bees to drink from.

Onion Sets and Early Potatoes

Time for planting onion sets and chitting potatoes.

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Onion sets are basically partly grown onions – but most gardeners find them so much easier and quicker to grow that they buy these tiny onion bulbs, plant them in February – or as soon as the ground is workable – and by June they have usually grown into good size onions ready to eat.

Egg trays are ideal for storing onions until you are ready to plant them – and also for ‘chitting’ potatoes  – this means putting them in a light, frost free place rose end upwards so they can begin to sprout while you wait for the right time for planting.

No-one ever really explained to me what the ‘rose end’ of a potato was but I have eventually discovered that it’s the opposite end to the ‘stalk’ end – where the potato was attached to the mother plant.  So one end will have one mark with sometimes a tiny bit of stalk attached –and the other end with several marks where the new sprouts (chits) will grow from.  Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to tell the difference – but if you put them out in trays, they will begin to sprout –and you can soon see whether you have put them the right way up!

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