the Summer Solstice

Tomorrow is the longest day. The fast flush of the spring has mellowed into something more steady. It feels like the work of getting each flower from seed to seedling, seedling to plant, has been done. All there is to do now is to watch them come into bloom. When I say ‘all there is to do’, I mean apart from weeding obviously. Hasn’t it been a good year for bindweed?

Deadhead bearded irises

One of the top tips from India has been to not just deadhead flowers to keep the next buds going, but to cut the flower spikes right back to the base when the spring flowering has finally done. Not only does this feel much tidier (not often my primary motivation admittedly) but I am maximising the chances of getting a second flush of flowers later in the season.

Keep cutting roses

There is deadheading roses and there is cutting roses. Snapping the heads off when they have gone over is absolutely better than nothing, and some days all I can manage as I dash past on my way to something else. But if you want to prolong your roses well, then get your secateurs or snips right down the stem, to a point where you can see a bud, preferably facing outwards, and cut there. The cut will trigger growth at that bud and, fingers crossed, you will get a whole other flower stem. The outward facing bud means that the stem will grow up and away from the centre of the plant, reducing the chances of it all getting a bit congested in the centre.

The success of the guide to irises has prompted me to write one on roses. If only I hadn’t lost half my labels… This one is Fighting Temeraire. Unmistakable.

I should hate it but I absolutely adore it.

 Sweet pea admin

If your sweet peas are flowering, cut them and feed them. I would usually say water them, but the rain is hammering on the windows as I write this. If it isn’t raining where you are, water. A drop of comfrey tea, seaweed or fermented nettle juice in the water won’t go amiss. Unless you want seed (see below) cut, cut and cut again.

Some of my late sowings of sweet peas are still only a handful of inches tall. They are looking green and lush but they are flopping all over the place. I usually roam the field with a pair of snips in my back pocket, at this time of year it is a roll of string. Tie in everything. Sweet peas, beans, even tying a climbing rose back to a fencepost makes all the difference. Tomatoes.

The circle turns and the cycle never pauses, not even at this turn of the year. My first flowers have bloomed, been photographed, appreciated, sniffed and left. Left because the first flowers on a vine make the best seeds. The fattest, strongest, more perfect seed will come from these ones. If you cut your first ones (and I don’t blame you if you did) then maybe leave one or two vines just for seed.

Sowing seed

I know, just keep going. A pinch here and a pinch there. I am still throwing in marigolds for the dyeing garden, a little cosmos because it flowers so fast. My book launch is the middle of September and Matt Austin is coming again on 14 September. The field is more poppies than anything else at the moment but I am focusing everything on peaking late in the season. All dahlias and rudbeckias, nasturtiums and coreopsis. There are a lot of flowers with a seed to bloom time of around 65 days. Cornflowers are around 65-75 days. Nigella is 65. Poppies can be even less, touching on 60. Sunflowers, for their size, are surprisingly rapid; 50 to 60 days. I might have left it too late to get everything in flower by the middle of September, but I would love one last throw of the dice.

And how else do I know that we are coming into peak sowing time? Because the flowers are setting seed. If you wait until a seed head is ripe and simply tip is upside down on some relatively bare ground, you will have the absolute best, most trouble-free flowers you could ever imagine.

You don’t even need to do this for poppy seedheads; trust me, they’ll do it for you.

And on Monday night, stay up late and look at the sky. It’s all downhill until Christmas now.