The Garden Year: June 2021

Hello there and welcome back to my garden linky, which opens on the 1st of the month and stays open for the whole month - you can link up at any time. You’re welcome to link any posts that have a garden theme - this could be your garden, the plants you’re growing or the gardens you visit, or anything in between - just so long as it’s related to gardening.

I’m continuing with inspiration from the gardening legend Alan Titchmarsh and collating information in these posts which is widely available in the public domain.

June is the start of what Alan refers to as the “blowsy season” when big over the top summer flowers make their first appearance, they may be later than usual though given the bad May we’ve had here in the UK.

It’s a busy month, so let’s get on shall we?

Plants in their prime this month

• Roses - today our first Gertrude Jekyll bud flowered, it’s definitely the month for roses and there’s so many different varieties I’m sure you’ll find one you love.

• Philadelphus or Mock Orange - ours is in bud, and the tree is huge - mainly because we haven’t had it cut for a year or two. Once the flowers are done, this year it’s for the chop.

• Bedding plants - look out for alyssum, aquilegia, calendula, dianthus, violas and more. They’re a good way of adding an instant shot of colour to your garden.

What to do in the garden this month

• Water and deadhead plants regularly, and plenty of weeding. If your garden is anything like mine then you’ll be discovering weeds almost in every place you look.

• Remove suckers from roses - they’ll suck the life out of your rose if you don’t, and you’ll miss out on many beautiful blooms.

• Sow some salad, including lettuce, rocket, spring onion, radish and oriental leaves - your future salad bowl will thank you for successional sowing.

Watch out for, get ahead and last chance

• Watch out for lily beetle; blackspot, powdery mildew and rust on roses; black fly on broad beans and anthills and nests around your garden, especially in paths and patios.

• Get ahead and protect any soft fruit from the birds before the fruit starts to ripen.

• Last chance to plant peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes in the greenhouse or in pots.

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Post Comment Love 28-31 May

Welcome to this week’s #PoCoLo - a friendly linky which I co-host with Suzanne, where you can link any post published in the last week. We know you’ll find some great posts to read, and maybe some new-to-you blogs too, so do pop over and visit some of the posts linked and share some of that love. If you were here last week it was great to have you along, if you’re new here this week we’re pleased you’re here. It’s a bank holiday here in the UK so the linky will stay open until 11pm on Monday evening to give a bit more time to link up.

This week, by the time you read this post, I will have ventured out and socialised twice. That’s twice since the latest lockdown restrictions have eased. I don’t even know myself! Last weekend we headed out for afternoon tea with MOH’s family to celebrate my SIL’s milestone birthday - in 2020. It was peculiar wearing proper shoes, heels at that, but good to be out in the West Sussex countryside having posh sarnies and cakes.

And last night I met up with some colleagues, some whom I’d not met before despite working with them for a good six months. A trip to the pub after work has never been more momentous, especially as I’m still working from home.

My photo this week is from last weekend and is of some wooden coat hangers complete with their price tag from Woolworths. I shared it on Instagram and it has been getting some love over there. What’s puzzling me is that the 15p label looks more pristine than the 22p one. Not withstanding the actual price, I’m trying to work out if there was a price reduction or a jump in inflation. Who knows?!

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Looking back at my garden in September

I’m not wishing the yet-to-arrive summer away, though I am looking forward to some warmer weather, but this post is one which takes a look at my garden and prompts some memories from last September. As you’ll know somehow I missed a whole series of posts at the time, but I don’t want to miss them from this space completely.

The patio remained lush and the white roses kept on flowering. These roses have multiple blooms which seem to last forever, but shed their petals in an instant almost if you look at them too hard. I think the insect in the photo above is judging if they’ll do that before making its move.

The sedums were starting to turn pink, whereas the geraniums which are now a few years old were already a faded pink.

Outside the greenhouse our baby squash was still going strong and looking promising. However - spoiler alert - it didn’t make it dropping off the plant without growing or ripening further. We didn’t have much success with courgettes, squash or tomatoes last year which was a shame, but something to work on.

Elsewhere in the garden the leaves from the laurel were already falling and turning brown. These were just the first of the leaves we collected over the winter months, and which we store to make leaf mulch making use of one of those very large builders bags. It’s big and bulky but thankfully relatively easy to shove and lug out of view.

We had more success with our runner beans and like in other years a steady supply kept up our bean levels up. Even these weren’t as prolific as usual and we think that’s probably because the light levels in our garden were lower than in previous years as our trees are at their largest having not been cut for a good few years. They’re even taller this year, so I’ll be choosing what we grow carefully to maximise the potential.

I almost can’t believe it was last September that our lighting masterplan was formed, on a post-it naturally. We bought the lights, and the hooks to put them up with and with a few days of them arriving the weather changed - sorry! It was only recently that I found the hooks again, but as the weather has been so bad we haven’t got around to putting them up. Given the winds last week, where we had a few branches down, that seems to have been a good decision.

Let’s hope we’ll get them up soon, and that we have plenty of opportunity to use and enjoy them.

The year was good for our ornamental quince though, these are the largest I’ve seen since we’ve lived here. I don’t think it was just the good weather though, the previous year it had a really good prune, so both probably contributed to its very good year!

MOH is very fastidious about picking up leaves, and clearly at one point I caught him sweeping the grass - too good not to include here!

I grew some sweet peas from seed and this pastel pink one was a particular favourite. At the back of the garden the pear tree had a bumper crop of pears, though unfortunately even the squirrels reject these as they’re often like bullets, and usually there’s not enough pears to bother cooking to see if that makes a difference.

We weren’t the only one to enjoy our garden during the month, our neighbour’s cat definitely made itself comfortable and made the most of the warmth from the roof of the little shed. It’s a tough life, hey?