SEEDS TO SOW IN JULY

My favourite biennials for flowering next year

/ Foxgloves, of every colour, but I adore Sutton’s Apricot. Grow the perennial ones for low maintenance flowers; Digitalis lanata ‘Café Crème’ is exceptional.

/ Honesty. Because truly, there is nothing like the lunar seed heads. I have then in wreaths all year round.

/ Hesperis. The white one. The scent is utterly wonderful.

/ Aquilegia. Sow in early July is the latest you can sow them because they need to be a good size to make it through the winter to flower next spring.

/ Stocks. I grow the apricot and the copper double varieties. Beautiful.

/ Anthriscus sylvestris ’Ravenswing’. Black cow parsley. Whatever you have read or heard about what I said was my favourite flower, I was lying. It’s this. Weed out seedlings that come up green.

Starting perennials :

My flower field, Malus Farm, is being guided more and more by regenerative principles and that means the surface of the soil should be covered, and the underneath of the soil should be as undisturbed as possible. & that means as much permanent planting - perennials - as possible.

/ Achilleas

/ Verbascum

/ Hollyhocks

/ Dianthus (Try D.carthusianorum)

/ Echinaceas (I favour E.pallida)

/ The big textural plants such as Echinops and Eryngium

/ Baptisia

/ Bupleurum

/ All the heucharas

/ Rudbeckia triloba - hardy enough for overwintering

Harvesting in July

All the flowers

Everything should be looking glorious right now. I have roses and honeysuckle and achillea and drying ammi. The grasses are in their first flush (many are better if you leave them to grown on and then start to dry). There are sanguisorbas everywhere, reaching the sky. Teasels.

Seed saving

The opium poppies are tantalisingly not quite ready yet, which is annoying because I am itching to make lemon and poppy seed cake. (I am having to make do with violas.) However, the ravenswing is in danger of taking matters into its own hands if I don’t capture them in an envelope, and the earliest of the grasses are very much ready to fly. The ammi is in full flower and I have tied a red ribbon around a few of the best plants to remind me not to cut them.  One sweet pea plant has scrambled sideways into a hedge of beech and honeysuckle and the other has obligingly set pods. I am keeping an eye on them and just as they start to brown and crackle, I will catch them.

The early tagetes in the Dyeing Garden were looking distinctly unattractive and dishevelled when I returned from holiday. Deceptive, because splitting open the old flower heads revealed the most perfectly packed torpedo-like seeds. How can anything be so satisfying?

Now is the time for starting your seed collection. Once you are self sufficient for seed, you have everything you will ever need.

Top tips for seed saving:

1.         Pick your moment

Too early and the seed won’t be ripe. Too late and your precious seeds will be scattered to the four winds. Collect seed when it comes loose with a light touch, when they rattle, or when there is a change in colour.

2.         Handle with care

Seed wants to be dispersed so it can be quite tricky to catch. Use a paper bag and a lot of care to maximise your harvest. Putting the bag over the seed head before cutting the stem will help for poppies. Label immediately.

3.         Be mindful of moisture

Harvest on a dry day, and make sure the seed is free of insects and completely dry before storing. Keep in paper bags or envelopes in a cool, dry, frost free place.

4.         Abundance

Plants are generous and you will quickly accumulate more seeds than you need. Share them freely.

OTHER JOBS

Fruit trees

If you have any plum or damson trees, prune now. If you have apple trees and you are feeling replete at the prospect of a bumper harvest, thin now. The June drop means that there are tiny apples scatted all along the paths. These aren’t windfalls, they are too early and are good for nothing but compost. Not that compost isn’t inherently wonderful anyway.

Do not grieve the loss of fruit, the tree is simply shedding what it cannot support and you will get much better fruit from what is left. Have a look at what is left, you should only have two apples max in each cluster. And this is where flower growers have the advantage over non; your sharp-nosed snips will make short work of snipping out small fruits and trying to do it with secateurs is a nightmare.

Softwood cuttings

Cuttings are a magical way of propagating plants. One of my earliest memories is my mother being given bags of twiggy leaves every time we visited anyone’s garden.

I have just bought a lot of new plants. One of each, which is hopeless for a good planting design. But they are not destined to live alone; I will be harvesting them for cuttings, and creating clones from the stems. In a year’s time, I will have created a wonderful collection of plants.

Softwood cuttings are taken in early summer from the tender new growth of the season and will develop sufficient roots to survive the winter.

I am taking these cuttings in early July:

/ Roses (especially R. glauca)

/ Physocarpus

/ Hydrangea

/ Honeysuckle

/ Jasmine

/ Salvias (so excited about S. uliginosa)

/ Viburnum

Softwood cuttings are very easy but I have some tips. Firstly, work quickly. Secondly, cut don’t crush the stems. Thirdly, label. One cutting looks much like another.

How to:

Remove shoots, longer than the finished cutting, just above a leaf on the parent plant.

Aim to make a cutting not more than 10cm long. Use clean, sharp snips to cut just below a leaf joint. Strip off the leaves from the bottom half of the cutting.

Insert cuttings into pots of moist compost with lots of added grit, keeping lower leaves just above compost level.

Push twigs in around the edge of the pot, then cover with a clear polythene bag held in place with an elastic band. Label.

Place cuttings in a warm position, out of direct sun. I put them on the lower staging of my greenhouse which is perfect.

And just wait. You will know that the cuttings have taken if you see white roots at the bottom of the pot, or new growth in the leaves at the top.