June gardening tips from Barnsdale Gardens

June gardening tips from Barnsdale Gardens: Ahhhhhh June! Time to sit back and enjoy those blooms…but hang on a minute, this is no time to put your feet up and relax! There is plenty of work to do and the team at Barnsdale Gardens offer a whole host of tips below for the garden this month which will be handy for growing spaces all over the UK!

Spray Roses Against Aphids

As organic gardeners the team’s most important weapon against pest and disease is vigilance, because catching both pest and disease as soon as they appear makes controlling them so much easier. At this time of year the roses are very succulent and a real feast aphids, so as soon as these are spotted start to spray with environmentally friendly washing up liquid, diluted in water at a rate of approximately one teaspoon per three litres of water. This will break down their outer protective coating and they then succumb to the general environment. Spraying before they have a chance to lay eggs is important, as the spray will not kill the eggs, so you would have to re-spray every 7-10 days.

Prune Flowering Cherries

The best time to prune flowering cherries is just after they have finished flowering. It is important to prune when they are in growth so that the wounds heal very quickly, thus minimising the possibility of being infected by the silver leaf fungus.

Dead-Head Tulips

In order to prevent a tulip wasting energy on producing unwanted seed and therefore not putting all its energies into bulking up for a good floral display the following year, it is important to dead-head them once they’ve finished flowering. Because, unlike daffodils, the leaves are much lower the team prefer to cut back the whole flower stalk as far back as they can, without damaging any leaves. This will go a long way to guaranteeing a good display next spring.

Pinch Out Broad Beans

To ensure a crop of full pods and good sized beans it is important to pinch out the growing tip from your broad bean plants when the first set of flowers at the base has produced small pods. These tips can be steamed and eaten as a leaf vegetable. It will also vastly reduce the problems of blackfly.

Keep Sowing

The Barnsdale team are  great lovers of veg generally and really like salads, not just in summer but at any time of the year. For this reason they  like a constant supply of salad crops, which means successional sowing. The regularity of this sowing very much depends on the crop, space available and the speed you eat them! In order to ensure the crop is young and tender when harvested, and therefore has the best taste possible, they like to sow radish every week, lettuce every two weeks, carrots and multi-sown beetroot, kohl rabi and turnips every three weeks. This means that at any time throughout summer you can go out and find just what you need!

There’s plenty to see and do all year round at Barnsdale Gardens!

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