July’s gardening tips

· Keeping your pot plants and shrubs watered while you go on holiday can be a problem unless you have a kind neighbour to tend to them. Simple measures such as wrapping large earthenware pots in a water proof membrane, keeping them in a shady spot, placing stones on the surface of the soil all help to conserve moisture. You could also try burying the pots. Make sure of course that if it does rain your plants will benefit. As a last resort there are various inexpensive products on the market for automatically watering your plants.

· Water containers every day in hot weather. Hanging baskets can be watered twice a day if you've got the time and energy. Feed all containers once a week with a suitable hanging basket and container liquid feed. Never let your grow-in bags go short of water as you may find it hard to re-wet them thoroughly.

· Regularly water trees and shrubs that were planted last autumn and winter. Their roots won’t have had a chance to fully develop yet.

· Check for signs of aphids (more than 500 species in the UK) in the growing tips of all plants. As well as weakening the host plant, they transmit diseases so it is important to eradicate them as quickly as possible. The simplest and cheapest method is to use finger and thumb to squash infestations as soon as they appear. There are several chemical products on the market for combatting infestations. They, and that includes systemic insecticides, are not as effective as the instructions might suggest, and these persistent little creatures will develop immunity (survival of the fittest) after a year or 2 of use.

· If aphids are a problem on water lily foliage try and knock them off with water spray from a hosepipe. Don't use a greenfly killer anywhere near a pond as it will harm fish and wildlife.

· Pond fish eat more in the summer than in the winter. We recommend that you feed them little and often say, twice a day. If the food has not been eaten within 30 minutes, remove the excess to prevent it from fouling the water.

· Mowing should now be done with the blades set low, unless the weather is very dry – in such conditions a medium setting will be better for the grass. If the your grass has grown long while you have been on holiday, give it a cut with the blade set quite high and then lower a few days later, this reduces the chance of the grass going into shock and allowing weeds to get established.

· Add mulch to the base of your sweet peas, remove the tendrils and pinch out side shoots, enjoy picking the flowers. My house is already full of them!

· Continue to trim back and feed roses that have finished their first flush of blooms and spray as necessary against pests and diseases.

· Cut back the side shoots by half of any trained fruit trees.

· Prune apple trees to encourage swelling of the fruit, by removing weakly growing stems.

· Trim your privet hedge on a regular basis. Don't let it get too long and out of control as frequently trimming your hedge will create a good dense growth.

· Pick strawberries daily once they begin to ripen, and remove any over ripe fruit to prevent mildew and other diseases from developing. Remove any diseased or old plants before re-planting in September.

· Continually remove side shoots from tomato plants, to increase the amount of food available to fruit baring branches. Remove the growing tip after the plant has produced 3-5 fruiting trusses, depending on the season.

· Remove seeds heads of annuals to encourage the plant to produce more flowers.