Jobs to do
This is an odd month in the garden. Very pleasant because there is
time to lie around getting a tan, sipping chilled white wine and cooking
barbecues, but there are still jobs to be done.
Lift and ripen shallots. If you can ripen them outside in the sun so
much the better, but if the weather is unsettled dry them in the greenhouse
or on a windowsill.
Cut back the dead flowering stems of herbaceous plants.
Dig up horseradish roots, cut off the tops with about an inch of root
for replanting and use the rest to make horseradish sauce and bottle it for
future use. Also make and bottle fresh mint sauce.
Harvest herbs like sage, thyme, summer savory, marjoram and basil for
drying.
Put straw under bush tomatoes to protect fruit from being damaged on
damp earth, and to keep it clean.
Give a final main crop potatoes a final earthing up. If there are any
signs of blight in the top growth cut it off and burn it.
The final natural fruit drop from apple trees should be complete. If
there are still clusters reduce them to single fruits. This is
particularly important with cookers like Bramley's Seedling so that the
ripe fruit will be clean and undamaged and store well. Support heavily
laden branches with a prop to prevent branches breaking.
Harvest the last of the blackcurrants and prune the bushes into an
open goblet
shape.
Cut out the old canes of the summer fruiting raspberries.
Once the crop of stone fruit, cherries and plums, and the plums
include greengages and damsons, have been picked, prune the trees. This is
important because it will prevent disease getting into the open cuts which
will happen if the pruning is left until the autumn or early winter.
Keep the onion crop weed free for the final fattening before
ripening.
When you have picked the last of the strawberries, clear out the
straw, cut off old leaves, and weed through the plants. Leaving them still
attached to the parent plant peg down the strongest runners in three inch
pots filled with potting compost and plunged to the rim in the strawberry
bed.
Lift and dry the garlic crop as soon as the tips of the leaves start
to turn yellow. Left too long in the ground at this time of the year they
are very vulnerable to grey mould which attacks the base of the bulb. Hang
them up to dry.
Tip layer dessert blackberries, and the other hybrid berries to
produce new plants.
If the weather is dry, give lawn mowing a rest. If you have to water
the grass, and it is about the last thing you should water in even a
mini-draught, water in the evening to minimise evaporation.
