• Give roses a summer feed. These are plants which put on a simply astounding display of flower power based on pathetically little root systems and they appreciate a helping hand. While some rose enthusiasts maintain a traditional and rigorous spray programme, if you are less than enthusiastic about this dodgy environmental practice, take stock of which roses are still looking good in your garden and which ones are looking poorly, diseased or starting to defoliate. Our advice is to take out and burn the latter and nurture the former. Roses vary hugely in disease resistance and we strongly advocate picking the varieties which will stay acceptably healthy without chemical intervention. If readers wish to email us with recommended varieties which they have grown without sprays, we would be happy to disseminate the information. Contact us on jury@xtra.co.nz
• Keep a weeding bucket on hand so that as you pull out weeds, you can dump them in the bucket. Weeds tend to be hardy survivors by definition and can still ripen their seeds if you leave them lying on the garden.
• Set the lawnmower height a notch or two up so that you are leaving more length… Scalping the lawns is never good practice and stresses the grass even further as the heat and dry of summer hits. It is a fallacy that cutting the lawn very short reduces the time between mowing. It just kills the grass and allows weeds to get away instead.
• It is all go in the vegetable garden with planting out salad veg, beans, corn, carrots and peas. Leeks can be started now from seeds or plants, in preparation for winter harvest. Keep pinching out the laterals on tomatoes and giving them a copper spray. They will need this after the recent rain to keep blight at bay. Grapevines also need attention, thinning out the laterals and reducing the young fruit to one bunch per stem (or lateral). You will get better flavour if you sacrifice quantity for quality.
• Thin apples if you have a heavy fruit set. Give the plants a light summer prune. This can be done with hedge clippers.

Quotes this week courtesy of the Macbird Floraprint calendar which arrived in the mail (all from that prolific Anon):

Lawnmower: a magic wand for making teenagers disappear.

Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it.

When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.