PG Tips: June

General Maintenance

It’s dead-heading time.  Perennial wallflowers such as Bowles’ Mauve are coming to the end of their first flush of flowers.  Cut back the spent flower spikes and feed them lightly to produce a further crop.  Deadheading also reduces the weight and helps them to remain stable.

Aquilegias, large or small-flowered, are lovely cottage stalwarts, but they do seed like mad. Take the flowered stems out of your least favourite colours so that only your best-loved can get about.

If you grow variegated ground elder, a tramp in a party frock, take off all the flower stems or it will seed like a plain green tramp.

Trim fast-growing hedges, such as Ligustrum ovalifolium (privet) and Lonicera nitida (evergreen honeysuckle), with hand shears or a powered hedge cutter.   Shred the clippings and mix into the compost heap.   Give the hedges another haircut in four to six weeks’ time.

It’s aphid time, too. Look out for those big, fat, ruinous ones on the spikes of lupins.  Watch out also for the distorted young leaves on beech hedges that mean those woolly white aphids are busy under the leaves.  Old hedges cope, young ones suffer.

In hot weather, check the water level in the garden pond and other water features, topping up as necessary. Where possible,  use collected rainwater rather than mains tap water.  If you want to enhance the pond, there is still time to introduce new water lilies, as well as marginal plants and submerged aquatic plants.

Beat the Credit Crunch

Container gardening is a great way to grow flowers and produce if you have limited space or inhospitable conditions.  Many urban gardeners rely on pots and containers for all their plants, but growing in containers can also be a great way to add seasonal interest and a real “wow factor” to even the largest garden.

Terracotta and lead planters are classic choices, but just one of these elegant containers can swallow up the entire budget of a thrifty gardener.  With a bit of imagination, however, almost any object can be transformed into a garden container — just make sure that it will hold enough soil to support your plant choice and remember to create holes in the base for drainage.

Objects that you stumbled across in different places can make some of the best planters and garden containers. Try planting up an old pair of wellies or an old watering can with some trailing lobelia or tumbling tomatoes for summer interest.  Alternatively, an old tin bath or bucket makes an excellent planter.