Gardening Jobs for July

The garden is bursting with life but you'll need to keep watering and giving flowers and vegetables extra care to keep them growing. Here are the jobs you need to keep on top of as summer is underway.

1. Be sure to keep all new plantings well-watered: shrubs and trees can need much more water than you’d think. A thorough dousing twice a week is better than a little each day.
2. Deadhead bedding plants and repeat-flowering perennials, to ensure continuous flowering and keep plants looking attractive and encourage more blooms, whether in beds and borders, containers or hanging baskets.
3. If you’re growing tomatoes in a greenhouse, be sure to keep it well ventilated, damping down the floor if it gets very hot, to cool the air and raise humidity. Remove yellowing leaves, stripping out the leaves from under the first truss and pinching out the side shoots on single-stemmed varieties.
4. Snip the tops off climbing beans when they reach the top of their supports, to maximise cropping on the sideshoots.
5. Keep an eye on your pond, removing any dead or dying vegetation and treating it with barley straw if blanket weed is becoming a problem. Top up if necessary: raising the hose high above the water or fixing a spray attachment will both increase the oxygen in the water.