• Roses need regular deadheading to keep them healthy and to encourage further flowering. Give them a light prune at the same time to encourage them to stay bushy and to put on new growth in the right places. If you keep a cardboard carton at your side and cut the prunings to fit, they will dry out quickly so you can incinerate them in a few days. Never put rose prunings in the compost heap.
• Primula heladoxa is the common, vigorous yellow primula which has now finished flowering. If you have them planted on the edges of waterways, make sure you deadhead them to prevent spreading the seed. While you may like them, your neighbour downstream may not and Regional Council certainly won’t.
• As citrus trees finish flowering, get a copper and summer strength oil spray onto them to keep disease at bay.
• If your hostas look really tattered and holey, you can give them a radical haircut, feed them and give them a good drink and they will produce new growth. However unless you take steps to reduce the slugs and snails, they will just eat the fresh leaves again.
• As hybrid clematis finish their first flowering, you can cut them down almost to ground level, feed them and water them and they will spring into new growth and flower again for you in six to eight weeks time.
• Keen brussel sprout fans will be sowing their seed now. We are not brussel sprout country (they prefer colder, drier climates) but we grew Maxim last year and it did very well for us.
• Keep up with sowing corn, green beans, lettuce, leeks and carrots. All can be done from seed at this time of the year which is a great deal cheaper than buying plants.
• Keep pinching out the laterals of your tomatoes to encourage the plants to be bushy. They are growing like mad at this time. You can still put in plants of tomatoes (and cucumbers) for a late crop.

The closing quote this week is from the inimitable but late Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter fame:

There is a psychological distinction between cutting back and pruning. Pruning back is supposed to be for the welfare of the tree or shrub; cutting back is for the satisfaction of the cutter.