Hello everyone! Hasn’t the weather temperature been lovely? The continued warmth mixed with recent wetness is promoting a lot of growth that your plants may not be able to control. This means your plants will need help with supporting their own weight, as well as being in need of a little trim.
Bring the outdoors indoors by picking all the flowers from your sweet pea plants! It’s a win- win as it also helps 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 the bunches of fragrant blooms you can place around your house.
Now onto the perennials. Early flowering perennials may start to look quite tired, with browned foliage. If you cut them back close to the ground, you can wait for regrowth and a new flush of flowers in a couple of months’ time. Remember to continue feeding and watering them as necessary, they’ll need it for the serious regrowing that they’ve got to do!
July normally brings a surge of growth that means sometimes plants cannot support themselves. This can cause damage to your plants, and they can 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. A tip of mine is to try keeping looking natural as possible, so you can fully appreciate your planting scheme.
Finally, you can now begin to safely cut hedges, as all young birds should have left their nests. If you have an overgrown hedge, now 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.
Willie the Worm
