TIPS AND TRICKS FOR EARLY JULY GARDENING

• You want a green lawn, but you don’t want to be constantly cutting grass. Use after cut now, it encourages a lush green carpet without excess growth.
• See our Facebook account for details on how to receive a free spreader. Less work!
• Give extra water to ripening soft fruits such as raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, and currants.
• Harvest early potatoes, carrots and salad crops.
• Spray potatoes against blight.

Tasty, Rhubarb is a gem in spring, but at this of the year it gets boast and it takes more sugar than its worth to make a nice pie, but the girls here in the coffee shop have been making rhubarb and ginger jam, which I must say is seriously tasty. Come out and try some, I guarantee you will be planting more rhubarb next year. Our recipe is up on our Facebook page and it's quite easy to make I’m told. The ladies in the shop have all the jam making accessories in the homewares department. I hear rumours of strawberry and rose petal jam, interesting…we shall see.

Come July, especially with the kind of weather were having you will be forgiven if you were not as enthusiastic about your vegetable patch as you were in spring, but persevere and you will be rewarded. Now is the right time to plant seeds for vegetables that will mature in the autumn and in some cases over winter. Cabbage “wheelers imperial” is worth mentioning. This is a select variety that you sow now for spring greens or left longer to develop ahead. This is from our heritage collection which has many varieties well tried and tested in our climate. Sow carrot “mignon” for succession sowings as they mature quickly about 12 weeks from sowing. All types of beans can be planted now climbing, French, dwarf and all year round lettuce. In the garden centre we have a very helpful pamphlet on what to sow and also when to harvest, it’s free, so some time when you’re out, pick one up. 

Anybody that is new to growing potatoes it is now time to spray for blight otherwise, all your hard work will go to waste. If your space is limited traditionally turnips would have been sown in the area where early potatoes will be soon dug up. So get planting, don’t throw in the trowel it’s still only half-time.