July is one of the busiest months of the year when it comes to things to do within the garden. It’s heaven for those that enjoy rolling their sleeves up and getting on with it, with so much work required to keep your beloved plants in tip-top condition. There are a variety of storage solutions out there for gardening enthusiasts, as well as greenhouse staging, made in Wales.

Some vital tasks for the garden this month include:

Transplanting winter/spring flowering plant seedlings into small pots or seed trays to get them started. Don’t put up with a bare, dull garden this winter. Get it done, and your garden will stay beautiful in all seasons.

Encourage further flowering in your bedding plants and roses by dead-headding them now. It’s also prudent to start using sprays on your roses to stop their beauty being tarnished by rust, black spot and mildew. For shrubs, we encourage you to prune early flowerers such as philadelphus, ribes and weigela, but only after they’ve blossomed. Furthermore, lupins, delphiniums and geraniums should be looking a little past their best at this time of year, so cut them back down and they’ll resprout soon enough.

For fruit and vegetables, watering and feeding everything regularly avoids problems. This is especially true with tomatoes. Keep an eye on your apples and plums to make sure there are not too many on one stem – thinning your fruit trees lightens the load and prevents branches from bending and breaking off. Furthermore, lighting your trees load removes competing fruit, which results in larger, better quality yield.

This time of year is also perfect for harvesting strawberries and other soft fruit; they should be perfectly ripe. Keep an eye on other fruit, though! Gooseberries, cherries, peaches, and early plums may be earlier than usual.

In regard to watering, it’s generally known as something that’s easy to do, in theory, but even easier to get wrong. The main problem at this time of year is under watering. If you spray an area for a minute and move to the next patch, you have to consider that the water is highly unlikely to have gone deeper than a few millimetres into the soil. This, of course, is not even close to the roots.

Consider yourself a raincloud. Our favourite tip is to put a jam jar in among the plants you’re watering and stop when there’s roughly 2cm of water in the jar. That’s around 10-20 minutes on each garden (and possibly more, depending!) and is understandably a big deal with it comes to the fact that it’s July, you’re going to be doing this 2-3 times a day. That’s the reason why “leaky hose” systems are so popular – it does it for you.

July is our favourite month for the garden, there’s so much to see and do, and so much work that can be done at this time of year. What will you do in your garden this July?