* If you growing rhubarb, you may well still be harvesting it now. Food TV’s Delia recommends adding a little chopped fresh ginger as you stew or bake it and we can endorse that recommendation. Alison Holst’s technique of stewing rhubarb with sago used to make this fruit more palatable to our children when they were very young. Rhubarb is a perennial plant which is a gross feeder – in other words it grows best in rich, well nourished soil conditions. It needs feeding and watering to keep it producing and to maintain strength in the plant as you strip its stems and leaves.
* South Taranaki gardeners on town water supplies are facing their usual summer water restrictions. As this is now an annual feature, gardeners should have the message by now that their practices must take into account the certainty of watering restrictions. Much of this preparation takes place in advance. Plant trees and shrubs in autumn and winter(not spring) so they can get established and not need summer watering. Cultivate soil well so it is friable and rich in humus and can hold moisture, and get a mulch on before the soil starts to dry. Plant hard wearing lawns and accept that a brown lawn is a sign of summer. Devise techniques for recycling household grey water or collecting rain water. A lush green garden at this time is more likely to be a sign that you are breaking the rules and lacking in civic spirit than that you are a great gardener.
* As you harvest stone fruit (most likely to be plums in this climate, but also including peaches, apricots and nectarines), prune the trees. This encourages them to form fruiting spurs for next year, rather than leafy growth.
* Don’t delay on doing any tree surgery and pruning on cherry trees. Fruiting cherries are different to ornamental cherry trees . Alas it is unlikely that you can successfully grow beautiful Black Dawsons or similar in our climate. They do best in poorer soils with cold dry winters – such as in Hawkes Bay and Central Otago. Ornamental cherries will flower well here but tend not to be long lived. If anyone has a wonderful fruiting cherry, please let us know.
* If you have green tomatoes which have holes in them, the likely culprit is the green loop caterpillar. There is not usually a heavy infestation so shaking the plant or picking it over carefully will uncover the culprit and avoid the need for resorting to insecticides. If you need to spray, there is an approved organic spray available. It is specifically for caterpillars and will not attack beneficial insects. Ask at your local garden centre. It will contain a bacteria (bacillus thuringiensis) as the active ingredient. Keep fortnightly copper sprays on tomato plants to stave off blight.
* Mark proudly announced that we have attained self sufficiency here – but alas it is only in garlic, courgettes and cucumbers so far. The juicing of courgettes (flavoured with fresh orange juice) was reasonably successful last week. This week’s juice is cucumber and fresh lime. Fortunately the garlic keeps well so there is no need to devise a juice based on garlic.

*Summer is the rest time in the ornamental garden. There is not a whole lot you can do in current conditions beyond routine maintenance, weeding, deadheading and summer pruning roses and clematis. However, the harbingers of seasonal change are already starting to appear in the shops -spring bulbs which are sold dry at this time of the year. Anemones and ranunculus are being advertised and I am guessing that other spring bulbs will be appearing for sale soon. If you have clumps of spring bulbs in your own garden which you have been planning to lift and divide, you can do this at any time now. If you heeded our advice in this column last year, you will have marked their location so you will know where to dig.
* If your lawn is starting to look brown, don’t worry about it. It will green up again with the autumn rains. Grass is a resilient plant but we remind you again not to cut the lawn very short at this time of the year because that may cause it to cark out.
* Last call on sowing corn for coastal areas. It is too late now for cooler inland locations. Sown now, the plants will mature just before winter and will hold for several months for eating fresh through June and even into July. All areas can continue sowing beans now. These are a rewarding crop for the home gardener and give excellent yields for very little effort.
* Now is the important time to be starting work for the winter garden and this cropping is the most important one for saving money on grocery bills. If you missed sowing the summer garden but are thinking you would like to try growing some veg, get started now with brassicas from seed. Broccoli, cabbage and cauli can all be sown, as can spinach (winter or summer types), silver beet and beetroot. It is the very last opportunity for putting in brussel sprouts and you will have to do it from plants now, not seed.
* Keep sowing lettuce to keep a succession going.
* Maintain good water levels in the vegetable garden. If you can avoid it drying out, then a little water often is more effective.
* A quote this week from Charles Elliott, himself the editor of “The Quotable Gardener”: One thing that’s nice about vegetable gardening is that design does not come into it. I’m aware that there is a movement in favour of ornamental vegetable beds – potagers and all that – but I’m not tempted to get involved. There is something seriously perverse about forcing such an earnest and innocent plant as a stalk of sweet corn to take centre stage in a composition suited to the eye of a Renaissance Frenchman. And the box hedging! If life is too short to peel a grape, it is certainly too short to grow cabbages in the form of a quincunx.

• Garlic should be harvested now if the tops have fallen over. Don’t leave it too long as they can start rotting. Clean the bulbs up and dry them thoroughly before storing in a dark but well ventilated area. Long plaits of garlic look very stylish but mesh onion bags will also do as long as you don’t pack the bulbs in too closely. Stored well, they will last the full year though they can lose some potency and most of their special healing properties apparently evaporate after six months.
• Gaps in the ornamental garden can be plugged with annuals but make sure you water the little plants in well and remove all flowers and buds when you plant them so they put their energies into getting established and not into flowering and setting seed. Stay on top of the summer weeds and do not let them go to seed.
• We don’t encourage watering in the ornamental garden or on lawns, but sometimes it is necessary to water the vegetable garden. Keeping moisture levels up is a great deal easier than trying to soak gardens which are dry as a bone. The rains this week will have helped – keep onto it and lay mulch as appropriate.
• You may need to cover tomatoes with bird netting to keep the pesky blackbirds from beating you to them as they ripen. Keep an eye out for equally pesky sparrows eating the male flowers of corn. They can wreck the pollination and this results in patchy cobs. Drape netting over the corn at the vulnerable stage. Mark would like to repatriate all blackbirds and sparrows back to their homelands.
• If you have a very small garden and are looking for things to do, stop your pumpkin vines from setting flowers and fruit ad infinitum. Keep it down to a few pumpkins per runner and pinch off subsequent flowers. Pumpkin tendrils can be eaten like spinach and are very tasty. The flowers can be stuffed in the same manner as courgette flowers.
• Don’t delay on pruning your flowering cherry trees. As plums finish fruiting, you can give these a summer prune also. Really organised gardeners prune the raspberries as fruiting finishes, taking off all the long canes which carried fruit this summer but this is not an urgent task. Keep grape laterals trimmed back to six leaves beyond the bunches of fruit which will have formed by now. Look out for mealie bugs (woolly aphids) and if you notice this white infestation starting, you will need to get a spray of oil on. Fresh grape leaves can be used to make dolmades (rolled around a rice and minced lamb mixture in the Greek or Turkish style).
• Before the motor mower came the push mower and in 1841 Jane Loudon wrote (in The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden, no less): A substitute for mowing with the scythe has recently been introduced in the form of a mowing machine which requires far less skill and exertion than the scythe, and answers perfectly where the surface of the soil to be mowed is perfectly smooth and firm, the grass of even quality, and the machine only used in dry weather. It is particularly adapted for amateurs, affording an excellent exercise to the arms and every part of the body; but it is proper to observe that many gardeners are prejudiced against it.

• Prune cherry trees now. These have to be pruned in full summer to avoid disease. You can carry out most tree surgery and shaping now (with the bonus of getting the winter firewood done at the same time and in good time to dry out for winter) but this is not the time for clipping foliage. As a general rule, trees are best kept to a central leader. Forks in tree trunks are structurally weak in the long term and can cause the tree to fall apart and it is a great deal easier to shape a tree when it is very young. General opinion now is that branches and limbs should be cut back fairly flush (but not dead flush) to the trunk and it certainly looks a great deal better not to have nasty truncated branch stumps sticking out. You can use pruning paste or paint the stumps if you feel you must. We don’t. However, if it is more than a secateur sized cut on a cherry tree, Mark follows up with a sharp pocket knife to clean the wound and pare back the bark a little to reduce the chances of infection. Cherries are especially vulnerable.
• If you are planning on doing anything to autumn flowering bulbs such as nerines, cyclamen and colchicums, get onto it as soon as possible because they are moving into growth. We have the first cyclamen hederafolium flowers showing already.
• If you want carrots and parsnips, you need to get the seed in as soon as possible. Parsnip seed has to be fresh to germinate so you need to buy it or save seed every year. The trick to sowing seeds in mid summer is managing to keep the bed moist so they don’t fry, without washing out the seed. Avoiding drying out can be helped by covering the row with a board or a narrow strip of nova roof or similar.
• It is down to the last two weeks for sowing late crops of corn to take you into early winter with fresh cobs. Green beans are another good staple which you can continue sowing now. Keep up with sowing salad veg for continued supply. You can still sow main crop potatoes and they will sit in the ground waiting for you to dig them in winter.
• Final call for planting out brussel sprouts if they are to have any hope of getting to a good size before winter. We grew Maxim last year with good results. Brassica seeds (crops including broccoli, cauli and cabbage) can be started from seed now for early winter harvest.

If you are now eating the potatoes you planted in spring, you may like William Cobbett’s quote from 1838:

As a mere vegetable or sauce, as the country people call it, the potato does very well to qualify the effect of fat meat, or to assist in the swallowing of quantities of butter.

• Many succulents and cacti are easy to multiply. Cacti need a very free draining mix which is not rich in nutrients or humus. Succulents can be grown from snapped off stems. Make a clean cut and leave them to dry for a day or two, then replant, staking if needed to keep them upright. It does not take long for them to put on new roots. If everybody knew how easy it is to put roots on aeonium Schwarzkopf (the black-maroon plant of rosettes which is still very popular and greatly overpriced as a result), the market for it would die quickly. Crassulas (jade plants) can be increased in the same way. Just keep these types of plants on the drier side because if you water them too much, they will rot instead of rooting.
• If your wooden outdoor furniture is looking greyed and as if it will soon produce splinters, a deep conditioning treatment helps to protect the wood and make it last longer. You can buy products at hardware stores but we still use a mix of good old fashioned linseed oil and turps. The mix is not exact – usually about 60:40. The turps helps thin the oil for easier application and absorption. It does darken the wood and if you want to keep it closer to the original ginger colour of new outdoor furniture, you are better to pay the extra for the considerably more expensive proprietary products. But if your furniture is already weathered grey and dry, it does not make a lot of difference. If you have algae or lichen growing on the furniture, kill it with diluted household bleach before treating the timber.
• Deadheading renga renga lilies makes them look better and confines their spread.
• The noxious weed undergoing eradication on our coastlines and referred to only by its common name of Chilean rhubarb on the front page of Wednesday’s paper is Gunnera tinctoria. While it is highly prized in the UK as a spectacular ornamental which they go to considerable lengths to protect through winter, it is a menace and an extremely large thug here and gardeners should be acting responsibly and eradicating it entirely, no matter how much they like it.
• Waitara is at its very best at this time with pohutakawa numbering into their hundreds flowering. It is worth a drive to admire the display. Once you have your eye in, you can see big differences in colour. Some are rather brown while the stand out trees are more to the orange or coral red colours. The yellows are not as showy. Some of us may even call them insipid. If you plan to grow some from seed, identify a good coloured form with a mass display of blooms. Seed is ready to gather around May.
• It is the last chance to get deciduous cuttings such as viburnums or roses in. Hydrangeas and grape vines also root easily for the home gardener from summer cuttings.

In 1870, Frank J.Scott wrote (a little pompously, perhaps) in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds:

It is unchristian to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure.

We are guessing that he did not live in a windy area and he had good neighbours!