Categories
Gardening Tips

Grow-How Tips for High Summer

Elaine

The summer rolls on, and what a scorcher we’ve had so far! Water-preservation has been the order of the day round here and the drought-tolerant plants have had a field day while much else has struggled. To take your mind off miserable mimulus and such like, here are a few tasks to be getting on with:

HELPING THE HERBS

Cutting back your herbs

I wonder if your herb-patch is starting to look a bit woolly and floppy by now – ours certainly is!  – this is a good time to cut it back and encourage fresh new leaves to form before the end of the summer. Do this with all sorts of things like thyme, marjoram, rosemary, chives, sage and mint. If you want to intensify the flavour of your herbs (and who doesn’t?!), try not to let them flower.

THAT’S SHALLOT
Onions and shallots will be ready to harvest as soon as their stems have browned and fallen over. Dig them up without cutting the stems off and dry them for a few days – this will seal the flavour in the bulb and prevent rotting. When they are dry, it is really important to keep them that way, and it always looks impressive if you string them.

Loop a strong bit of twine about a metre and a half long round, somewhere dry and a little bit above your head – I use a handy nail in a stone wall. Tie both ends of the twine together, then take an onion/shallot with its dried leaves on, and weave the leaves in a figure of eight around the twine. I like to start with the biggest bulb first.

Tying onions – it’s easier than you think!

Take another one and do the same, and just keep going to the top. A quick tidy-up at the end and – Voilà! A lovely string of onions worthy of any beret-ed Frenchman on a bicycle, and you don’t have to tell anyone how easy it was!
Hang your onion-strings in a dry place, and whenever you need some for cooking, just snip them off the loop. Here’s exactly how

WONDERFUL WISTERIA
It’s been a great year for wisteria – we have even had a good second flowering on our Wisteria sinensis ‘Prolific’ (it has really lived up to its name!) Now is the time to get up the ladder and prune all the whippy shoots not needed for structural purposes. Cut them back to 5 or 6 leaves from the main stem, and you will create perfect spurs to carry next year’s flowers. If you don’t do it, a vigorous wisteria can quickly become a mass of tangled green growth, and this will affect future flowering.

It’s time to give the wisteria a really good haircut
You can start collecting the seeds of annuals like Cosmos.

GARDENING SHORTS

Start thinking about saving some seed of your favourite annuals – cosmos, cleome, nigella etc. Make sure the seed-head is ripe, snip it off and put it into a paper-bag or envelope, label it and keep the bag cool and dry, ready for sowing in autumn or next spring.

Take a written or pictorial note of what in your garden took hot, dry weather in its stride, and what has hated it. I promise you, you will forget come the depths of winter and this amazing summer is but a distant memory.

Cut out the old fruited summer raspberry canes and train in the new ones to carry the crop next year.

More NB If you’d like a bit more gardening chitchat from the3growbags, please type your email address here and we’ll send you a new post every Saturday morning.

By the3growbags

We're three sisters who love gardening, plants and even the science of horticulture but we're not all experts. We'd love everyone even remotely interested in their gardens to be part of our blogsite.

2 replies on “Grow-How Tips for High Summer”

What a great blog, Elaine! Good reminder, sound advice, and, haphazard gardener I am, so far, I’ve learned something new with each instalment (have cut the flowers off my mint, basil, thyme etc).
Shallots didn’t do too well this year, so, can’t try out your way of stringing this year.

By the way, my cosmos plants, called ‘purity’, absolutely loved the hot weather, having grown ( on chalk!) a meter high, it is covered with blooms. I shall certainly collect some seeds from them.

Nearly into August, enjoy the rest of this fantastic Summer!

Teda x

Thanks Teda – I am so glad you are enjoying it and finding it useful. Quite agree about the Cosmos this year – they are revelling in the blazing heat, aren’t they! I personally am beginning to wilt a bit, but I am sure Caroline would call me a lightweight…Happy August!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.