Gardening calendar 4th Week in July 2022
Central to your gardening tasks at this time of year means keeping an eye out for pests and diseases that can destroy all your hard work in your garden earlier in the year
In the garden as a whole keep an eye open for slugs, although its summer and dry a few wet days at the end of July can soon bring slug damage to your plants Learn More
In your vegetable garden Inspect currant and gooseberry bushes regularly for sawfly larvae (caterpillars), which are small, green and well camouflaged. Pick them off and squash them.
Installing barrier netting over your vegetable crops can help protect your crops against such carrot root fly and cabbage white caterpillar
Keep feeding your plants in containers and the garden with a high potash liquid feed such as liquid tomato feed once every two weeks this will encourage flowering and fruit production.
Prop up perennials – stake dahlias and chrysanths which you have not grown through supports installed earlier this year. Dahlias are best supported in a triangle of canes, with chrysanths tied into their own cane. Or, with chrysanths, grow a whole bed through netting stretched horizontally about 18in (45cm) from the ground.
In warm weather watering your flower borders is best achieved with a leaky hose pipe laid into the border at the base of the plants. This slow method of watering your borders is a very effective way to water your plants and waste less water than other watering methods
With pruning now is a good time to prune back the summer shoots on wisteria or fruit trees plus any early flowering clematis such as clematis aramndii
Feeding lavender with a high nitrate liquid feed every two weeks until the end of September will help keep the lavender flowering and produce the new green shoots further down the stems to which the plant can be cut back in the autumn to control the shape and size.
