Are you ready to chop and drop? Gardening tips for July

Amid all the sports excitement this week, gardens in the south have been suffering another unpleasant heatwave. Not true of the far north though, and we southerners are very envious of your lush, verdant planting up there! 

Still, there are jobs that we can ALL get on with this month such as trying out a new cutting-back technique, sowing some biennials, and checking trees for unwanted suckers and water shoots……

Chop and drop

When I asked my sisters if there were any subjects they particularly wanted me to cover in my tips column this week, one of the topics suggested by Caroline was about cutting back the early-flowering plants and shrubs. If you’re a regular reader of ours, you’ll know that I’m a very keen ‘hacker-backer’! Almost all plants benefit from pruning at some point during the year – for tidiness, for new wood to flower the following year, or maybe even to flower again this year.

What you may not have heard of is a technique called ‘Chop and Drop’, and I’m starting to use this in my garden, simply because it makes so much sense.

Say you’re chopping back hardy geraniums?  You cut the stems right back,  cart them over to the compost heap, wait for them to rot down, then cart them back to the flower-bed as a helpful and nutritious mulch. Or maybe you fill up your council green bin with it all.  Either way, you are taking away the goodness that was locked away in that piece of plant when it was growing.

More and more gardeners are trying something different: cut down the plant, chop the stems etc. up into small pieces then leave it all on the soil round the plant. You’ve have created:

• An instant moisture-retaining mulch

• Material will rot down in situ putting those nutrients back into the soil from whence they came:

• A sort of mulching that provides precious natural shelter for small mammals, beneficial insects and nest-material for birds in winter and spring – a real boost to biodiversity as well as soil improvement

Best of all, it’s EASY, saving time and effort – you can basically be lazier under the guise of sainthood!

Just a couple of caveats:

If you don’t chop up the cut material sufficiently, it can look pretty untidy and take much longer to rot down. One tip is to keep everything looking super neat at the front edge of a flower-bed, and you can get away with a bit more messy-looking stuff at the back….

Bulky or fleshy leaves can provide shelter for unloveables like slugs and snails and might be better taken to the compost heap. Harmful fungi can also develop in thick mats of damp plant material. Hostas for instance create quite a slimy, stringy mess as they rot (boffin Laura would tell you it’s because they are monocots 🤷‍♀️)

It’s best to avoid chopping and dropping prolific self-seeders – again, let them decompose in the compost bin first. For obvious reasons, don’t use material from a diseased plant, and don’t compost it either.

Hurray for hollyhocks

The final point in my previous topic has reminded me about my hollyhocks and the danger of rust. These are plants I have a particular penchant for, loving their bright colours and strong verticals in the summer garden.

I was thrilled to have some success, finally, with sowing and growing on a pot of hollyhock seeds – it wasn’t easy: don’t sow them deeply, don’t water them much, never touch the stems at any point when pricking them out, etc. etc. VERY fussy bambini!  Anyway, they are now turning into strong good-looking plants having been carefully planted out in their flowering positions. 

The thing is that hollyhocks are very often prone to a disfiguring disease called rust which causes yellow dimples on the leaves and pustules on the underside. The fungal spores travel very readily through the air, unfortunately, to infect other plants.

I, like many other gardeners, have given up using chemicals on my garden plants, so my tactic is to be very vigilant.  At the first sign of attack, I take the affected leaf off and dispose of it (mustn’t go in the compost). This slows the spread of the rust and really doesn’t affect the flowering much.  Like so much in horticulture, keeping an eye on a potential problem and literally ‘nipping it in the bud’, is the best way of controlling it.

Biennials for beauty later

Loving that the tips column this week is all linking up harmoniously!  To avoid disease taking hold of their hollyhocks, some folk grow them as biennials.  This means sowing them one year to flower the next then digging them up, rather than treating them as perennials that flower every year

July is a great time to sow biennial plants, in fact. Foxgloves, honesty (Lunaria), sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis), Canterbury bells, wallflowers, echiums, evening primroses – there are plenty to choose from.

Many of these can be sown in situ or in a spare piece of ground but I find that both can be hard to find in July, so prefer to sow them in pots or containers to be planted out later.

For instance, for my beloved foxgloves, I fill a seed tray with peat-free compost, tamp it down, sprinkle the seeds over the surface, cover the seeds with a thin layer of horticultural grit, and then sit the tray in shallow water to soak the compost. I then leave the tray in a warm, sheltered place for the seeds to germinate.

I only prick them out into individual modules once they are large enough to handle, and plant them out in the garden the following spring for a lovely long-lasting show.

Gardening shorts

• We’ve had another very hot spell here in the south.  I could see that plants in pots and in the greenhouse were beginning to suffer, so I’ve been moving them into more shaded spots until the heatwave is over.  Additional shading in the greenhouse and watering the floor to increase the humidity has helped a bit too.

• If you see shoots coming out of the trunk or at the bottom of an older tree, cut them off cleanly without leaving a stub., as I’m doing in the feature pic this week. These suckers or ‘epicormic shoots’ will divert water and nutrients from the main structure and can even provide a pathway for disease or decay to enter the plant.

• Don’t forget to spend a bit of time taking photos and making notes of things that aren’t QUITE as perfect as you’d like them to be, and should/could be changed for next summer It’s hard to remember such details of design and planning once we’ve into the depths of winter or early spring when a million other jobs are clamouring for attention.  I usually end up with pages and pages!

• The weather is the south calls for a cooling glass of G and T with ice and lemon, doncha think? Or at least some delicious homemade lemonade with your own lemons. There are ways to help your citrus trees through the summer, and Laura gives you lots of useful tips in this video on lemon-tree growing:

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Abutilon – this wonderful plant comes in a glorious array of lovely colours and may be less tricky to grow than you think. Find out why Louise has chosen this variety as one of her Great Plants this Month:

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Do you need a fantastic gift for a gardener? Or for yourself? Trowels, forks and razor hoes are great for all the digging and weeding tasks, but to tidy up beneath plants, especially the prickly ones, you definitely need one of these – a shrub rake:

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We had a terrific response to our article last week about plants we wish we had never planted, with many readers adding suggestions of their own to the list. (click on the link at the bottom to read the original piece). Laura has compiled them all into a list of plants to be very wary of – could be handy for someone new to gardening (as well as causing some knowing looks amongst us old-timers, who’ve made all the mistakes in the book 🤣): You’ll find them here

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