Gardening expert and TV presenter Diarmuid Gavin has told Brits to get their pruning tools out for these four shrubs that may need trimming back
Gardeners need to prune their spring-flowering deciduous shrubs as soon as they are finished flowering. That’s according to Diarmuid Gavin who listed the main ones to keep an eye on this month.
Among my weekly list of jobs for the garden, gardeners should be pruning spring-flowering deciduous shrubs such as kerria, forsythia, ribes and weigela as soon as they are finished flowering if they are outgrowing their space.
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But the jobs don’t stop there. Gardeners should be paying extra special attention to their houseplants as well as those outside.
Jobs inside and out you need to complete this week
- Most houseplants are in active growth, so need regular watering and fortnightly feeding.
- Feed tomatoes once a week.
- Check your cabbages for butterflies laying their eggs – often you will find them on the underside of leaves. Remove by hand as their baby caterpillars can completely denude your plant.
- Fruit bushes need lots of water in dry periods to allow fruit to swell. Plums, pears and apples can be thinned out this month. This will happen naturally as well – it’s called June drop – but if you want bigger fruit, remove some of the smaller fruitlets.
- Ornamental lemon trees can vacation outdoors for the duration of summer.
- Plant some seeds – nasturtium seeds are easy and can go straight in the ground now or pots for a cascade of flowers in late summer.
- Continue successional sowing of salads and sow outdoors cucumber, sweetcorn, squash, French, runner and broad beans.
- Continue to earth up potatoes. New potatoes may be ready to harvest, depending on when they were planted.
For anyone who is concerned over their bearded iris not blooming so far this year, one fellow gardener asked me for some advice.
They do need dividing every few years to revitalise them, and now is a good time to do this once they have finished flowering. Gently dig up with a fork and split the thick rhizomes into a few separate plants, making sure each has a fan- shaped leaf.
Replant them in a shallow hole so that their rhizome is still proud of the soil as they like to bake in the sunshine. Cut the fan-shaped leaves in half as newly planted rhizomes can be susceptible to wind rock until they anchor themselves in again
