June delights with colours, scents of spring
June, for gardeners, is a month of opulent delight. Our personal Edens, large or small, reward our efforts with beauty of form, colour, fragrance, and fresh, life-enhancing food.
There are big, crinkly Oriental poppies, stunning peonies, and fragrant roses, pinks, and honeysuckle. Climbing hydrangeas form glorious towers of green, hung lavishly with large, lacy flower clusters.
Popping the first fully ripe, sweet and juicy, sun-warmed strawberries into the mouth is a memorable yearly rite for gardeners, an experience well worth the work of tending the berry patch.
It’s Christmas in June for growers of salad greens. Just-picked lettuce, spinach, early cabbage and bok choy pack vivid flavour and health-boosting nutrition into our salad bowls. At this time of year, I become wildly enthused over dinner salads that combine tasty greens with other ingredients that turn a green salad into a whole meal.
The most recent such salad I created had mini-romaine lettuce (Little Gem), early cabbage (Caraflex), a few kale leaves, and shredded carrot, tossed in a vinaigrette that combined apple cider vinegar, olive oil, Dijon mustard and finely grated ginger root. Atop the salad I placed caramelized onion, small sweet potato cubes fried crisp in butter, and toasted sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and cashews. The salad was a nutritious, satisfying meal.
Think about this. Because salad greens of all kinds are among my favourite foods, I was delighted to come across an article in the Times Colonist late last year about salad greens such as lettuce, kale, and spinach, consumed daily, being a “fountain of cognitive youth.”
The article describes a fiveyear study of mental aging in older people, who were divided into two groups. The group that ate a large serving of leafy greens daily showed a rate of cognitive decline half as steep as the group that rarely ate greens. Those who ate greens “enjoyed a mental edge that was the equivalent of 11 years in age.” So, let’s dig in and enjoy our “salad days.”
Something to try. If you have a large clump of a perennial that grows like garden phlox, tall types of campanula, echinacea of heliopsis, consider applying the “Chelsea Chop” to it early this month.
Leave the back of the plant to grow naturally, and cut a front portion back by a third. Make the cuts right above a growing point. The back portion will bloom at the usual time. The front will bloom later, on shorter stems. Following the cutting back, mulch the clump with compost and water deeply. The procedure produces a layered look, and prolonged flowering.
Cutting border sedums back by a third now will promote bushiness and help to prevent flowering stems from flopping over with the weight of the blooms in late summer and early autumn.
Between breaks. Days are blessedly long now. Savour the time outdoors. Take rest breaks, and bask in the loveliness of June. Between breaks, consider these projects: • Dead-head repeat-flowering roses. Make cuts directly above a five-leaflet leaf stem to promote the best new flowering growth. • Plant a succession of lettuces, spinach and other greens in lightly shaded, cool sites such as the shaded side of vining peas and staked tomatoes for a continuous supply of salad greens. • Freeze a few containers of sliced strawberries layered with a little sugar for making quick, small batches of jam in winter. • Weed, thin, water and mulch rows of seeded vegetables. Use a nourishing compost as mulch. • Prune lilacs when flowering has finished. Cut away the flowered stems. If it is desirable to reduce the shrub's size, make cuts immediately above a point where two nodes (points of growth) are positioned directly opposite each other on a stem.