garden This week’s checklist

Our gardening expert John Stoa has a list of tasks for June.

THE VEGETABLE GARDEN

The first salads of the season (radish, lettuce, rocket, spring onions and baby beet) should be ready for picking, and if you are growing early potatoes such as Casablanca, lift a few to try them out. It is still early, so these salad potatoes may not be huge, but they will be delicious. Other potatoes will need earthing up as they grow to support the stems and kill weeds.

Carrots, beetroot, parsnips, turnips and salads sown outdoors in April will need thinning out to give the selected ones room to grow. Water recently planted courgettes, pumpkins and sweetcorn if it is dry, as these all enjoy plenty of water and a good feed.

FLOWER GARDEN

Now the summer flowers have taken over from the spring display, any crocus, daffodil and hyacinth bulbs that have been removed can be dried off. These will flower the following year and will continue to do so for many years to come if you can find a spot for them in a border. Doing this every year will create a mass of spring flowers.

Annual flowers are easy to grow and if you are growing from seed, they will now need to be thinned out. Use some of the thinnings as transplants for bare patches or another empty space.

Azaleas, rhododendrons and camellias should have all the old seed heads removed when they have finished flowering so the bushes can reserve their strength to produce strong growth that will ripen up in autumn and produce flower buds for the next spring.

IN THE GREENHOUSE

Grape vines and tomatoes are growing strongly, so keep them well watered, and feed tomatoes weekly with a liquid feed high in potassium. Occasionally give the grape vine a similar feed up to late summer. Remove all sideshoots on cordon-trained tomatoes and cut all grape vine sideshoots to one leaf to reduce vigour and encourage fruiting.

THE FRUIT GARDEN

Put nets on strawberries and dwarf cherries to prevent birds getting the fruit. Dwarf cherries on modern Gisella 5 rootstocks can be kept at six feet tall.

Lay straw up the rows of strawberries and tuck under the leaves to prevent rain splashing on the fruit. You can remove this at the end of fruiting and add to the compost heap.

Keep a watch out for blackfly attacking the young shoots on cherry trees. It is normally an annual pest attack, so either spray at the first signs with an approved insecticide, or if the tree is not too big, rub them off with your fingers.

Blackberries produce long shoots in summer which are the fruiting shoots for the following year, so tie these in to a framework support or wires on walls and fences.