July

Top tips for growing flowers; pruning, seed saving & reviewing in the slowest month of the season.

We are nearing the end of the growing year, school’s out for the summer yet we are only half-way through. There is little to define July beyond the memories of halcyon days; egg & spoon races, plump sweet strawberries, billowing gladiator style fields of golden barley, ice creams by river hangouts and welcome shade from ancient trees. It’s a mid year crescendo.

Bar successional sowings of beetroots, carrots and radishes with salad leaves and certainly basil, always basil, there is little else I sow this month. A welcome breather after months of propagation. The big push between March and June is over now, more time in the hammock, more watering with a cold drink in your hand. It doesn’t matter what didn’t get done for now I take in and enjoy what did. It’s giving post prandial in the year’s afternoon.

July continues to be a big harvest month; thankfully stems are tougher than their spring cousins with far less searing going on for conditioning flowers, and quicker cutting too. Show stoppers will be the elegant foxtail lily (eremurus), scented lilies and alliums but for mid summer, there are few focal blooms. Rose flushes slow (cut back now for more in September), and perhaps some foxgloves with dahlias beginning to flower. July is a jumble of meadow style annuals and clutches of smaller stems for ‘bung in a jug’ kitchen table style arrangements. Some of my favourites are coreopsis, cephalaria, gaura, scabious and multi stemmed sunflowers in lilac, golds, plums, dark pink and browns. All continue to flower for months if you keep deadheading. 

Flowers compete in performance with heady release of scent in a‘pollinate me! pollinate me!’ cry. And our gain is long summers nights with tobacco flowers, honeysuckles, jasmine and sweet peas filling the night air with heady fragrance. Enjoy these with the two essentials this month; firstly a weekly deep watering of all plants (daily for pots). Encourage strong water seeking stable roots by not watering until you see fresh growth on newly planted seedlings (water well the night before). Watering little and often breeds soft sappy growth and weak plants reliant on the gardener, prone to pest attack.

And secondly, the other essential task is to eat outside as often as possible. Bring the garden to the plate too, with many flowers being pretty as well as edible; cornflower is a favourite pinched off and petals pulled, sprinkled over salads and into drinks for a delightful finish. Also good are snapdragons, borage, anchusa, nasturtiums and calendula with herbs tops of mint, basil and dill floating sitting pretty on cakes. I love the delayed gratification of effort in anticipation of July, and enjoyed from the hammock as the bats dance above me in the long lasting evening light and the inky blue summer nights when it never truly gets dark.

July is the best time to plan. Right from where you sit. Forget about January nights by the fire and seed catalogues. Look at your garden right now. Where are there gaps? Where would some climbers or small fruit trees add height, shape and punctuation marks? What seeds worked, what did not. Note this and more. I have a wish list on my phone of plant’s I’d like and seeds to try, good ideas from gardens I’ve seen. This serves as great inspiration. Gardens never stay still, but this month you can, and plan the next. 

---

JULY FLOWER GROWING TASKS

The gardens are a little parched. I am spot watering by hand at night and adding a little seaweed feed or my own comfrey mix in. The wind is so wicking and the air warm so much will evaporate during the day. Perennials are doing so well this year.

1. Sow Biennials for flowers this time next year
   Still time to do this over the next few weeks, especially sweet rocket, honesty and foxgloves. Right now those in my garden are going to seed but not ripe enough to collect and sow yet. These are bound to drop and self seed (the easiest way to get new plants) so you know there is still time to order and sow yourself.

2. This years biennials

   I’m leaving sweet rocket and sweet williams where they are to bulk up for next year and collect their seed for the following one after that. In particular apricot wallflowers which are marvellous and come true from saved seed.

3. Save seeds
   Which leads me on to collecting those that are drying on the plant to sow later this year or next. I wrote how your own saved seed is superior to any bought this week and how to do it.

4. Stake those annuals
   Do it now, as soon as you plant out. It is so dull and like planting bulbs, I can find almost any other task preferable and more urgent to do, but am I smug once I’ve done it. And you will be too in the August storms.

5. Pruning Shrubs

   Now that the ‘great plant out’ has been completed, most plants needing it have been staked and netted, I’m bored of weeding and now need some woody stems to create some ‘carbon’ for a new compost heap (to balance all those weeds). It is still a good time to trim hedges and in our new garden, there are a couple of very mature spring flowering shrubs that could do with renovation.

   Anything that flowered in spring is mostly good to prune now. Double check the pruning group here if in doubt. Otherwise a good rule of thumb is to cut plants hard into the plant (philadelphus or lilac) or to the ground (Kerria). In our garden we have a huge chanomeles that was utterly magnificent in flowering this year. It is enormous.

   

   Enormous Chanomeles over 2 metres deep and much more high.

I will go slowly and prune gently over the next few years. Pruning will always stimuate new growth and I think we can agree this is not the result we are after here! I will take any very horizontal or cross branches (well choose a couple!) right back into the shrub, open it up a little and give the branves a little more space. It is a huge lump in the garden. I am sure I will take loads off it next spring. Flowering quince with a bright cherry blossom is so desirable in April when there is little else flowering.

What plants have you got in your space that could do with a renovation? Pruning spring flowering plants now will improve the shape and growth, and encourage fresh stems for flowers next year.

6. Review

   Take photos of the garden now, make notes, sketch out beds. What has grown and flowered really well. What hasn’t? I’ll be sharing my ‘want list’ on Tuesday. It’s a really good time to take stock, and think about the next growing year (which starts in September as far as I am concerned, and with the new Grow Your Own Course!)

   Harvesting

Shrubs - Physocarpus, continus, beech, roses and fruiting bushes like currents and berries.

Perennials - Last of the ladies mantle and eremurus. Echinops, sea holly, cephalaria, lysimachia (all), canatache,

Biennials - Sweet williams and others coming to an end.

Annuals - Almost all of them (my half hardies were late to germinate and will be later to flower - like zinnia, sunflowers and rudbeckia) nicotiana, achillea, cosmos, florists dill, snap dragons, cornflowers, silene, coreopsis, calendula, nasturtiums, sweet peas, cerenthe, nigella, feverfew, dianthus. Keep cutting and dead heading to prolong flowering.

For more on all of these tasks this month, upgrade for weekly emails. Every Tuesday, I take you through growing flowers step by step with my full harvest list direct into your inbox. Each month there is a floral recipe with combinations and methods for growing, cutting and conditioning for you gather the same.

Cutting Eremurus. Fantastic harvest this year.

Planting out last of the annuals and clearing spring green manures from the beds.

July perennials in the Long Border

Midsummer Table

Staking and netting dahlias. We’ve also experimented with drip hose under the dahlias this year, with various lengths of pipe. I will be sowing green manures this week too. The mustard and buckwheat great well around them last year and really reduced the weeds.

At last I can slow down a little this month and spend as much time as possible in the hammock.