Tom's Top Tips for July

Garden Tips for July from Tom the Gardener

1.Vegetable sowing
Sow Spring Cabbage.
It's your last chance this season to sow peas, french beans, turnips, carrots and beetroot.
Many salad crops sown now will be ready for Autumn and might even last into Winter with a little protection (using horticultural fleece) – rocket, swiss chard, spinach beet, spinach, non-hearting lettuce, pak choi, chicory, chinese cabbage (grown for leaf rather than firm hearts), mizuna, oriental saladini (which is a mixture of oriental salads)

2.Early Potatoes
As a general rule, you can start lifting early potatoes once they have flowered. Just dig what you need, unless there are signs of pests and diseases (scab or slug damage for instance), in which case it might be better to lift and store all of the affected variety.

3.Tomatoes
Pinch out the growing tip once the plant has set 5 or 6 trusses. Pinch out side shoots as they develop. Feed weekly with a suitable liquid feed, and water water water, then water some more.

4.Rhubarb
Pick one last crop of rhubarb then give your plants the rest of the year off. Too long a cropping season will weaken them for subsequent years. If flower stems are produced, cut them out.

5.Cabbage White Butterfly and cabbage moth
Your brassicas may have survived the rabbits, pigeons and snails but their greatest enemies await – caterpillars of the cabbage white butterfly and cabbage moth. Check your plants regularly for the tell-tale notches in the leaves and little black droppings. The caterpillars will be found on the undersides of the leaves and will have to be picked off by hand.

6.Fruit Thinning
Pears, apples and plums often benefit from having their fruit thinned. Too much produce on a tree will give fruits that are undersized and will not ripen properly, place excessive load on branches and may adversely affect fruiting in subsequent years.

7.Soft Fruit Harvest
The amount of soft fruit produced in July by mature plants/bushes – strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, etc – can be almost overwhelming. Be prepared. Collect tubs and punnets for use in fruit picking (and to offer some protection during the potentially hazardous journey from allotment to home); make room in the freezer; collect and sterilize jars for jam making; get your wine making gear dusted down.

8.Water Preservation
July is a very dry and hot month (well, sometimes anyway) so regular watering of vegetable crops is essential. A mulch around your plants can greatly aid moisture retention in the soil and there is no more readily available mulch than the remains of all the weeds you are continually pulling up, so put them around your plants instead of on the compost heap.

9.Make Hay Whilst the Sun Shines
Well, straw actually. You might find yourself cutting back a flower meadow or, more likely, an area of grass that's got totally out of control. If so, leave the cuttings to dry under a few days of hot sun to produce straw. This can then be placed under burgeoning courgettes and squashes to stop them rotting, or around lettuces and herbs to stop them getting splashed with mud.

10.Sow Biennials
Biennials – plants that grow throughout this season, overwinter and then flower next year (usually in the spring or early Summer) - can be sown now. Familiar examples include forget-me-not, wall flower, sweet william, foxgloves and canterbury bells