July is a brilliant month to really enjoy the garden, but it’s also a key time to stay on top of a few important jobs. Plants are growing at full tilt, borders are bursting with colour, and the kitchen garden’s coming into its own.
But if you want those flowers and crops to keep on performing right through the summer, a little timely care now will make all the difference.
This month is all about keeping things tidy, healthy and productive. Deadheading, pruning, watering, and keeping an eye out for pests all come into play. It’s also the ideal time to plant a few last-minute summer performers and give existing plants a bit of a boost. Even the most well-behaved borders can get a bit wild in July, so a gentle tidy-up helps everything look smarter and puts less strain on your plants.
Whether you’re growing roses, runner beans or just a few pots on the patio, there’s plenty you can do now to keep your garden in tip-top shape. With a little effort this month, you’ll set things up for weeks of colour, fragrance and harvests still to come.
Where better to begin than with the summer garden staple, roses? Be sure to spare a thought for the various varieties of roses growing in your garden.
Keep roses flowering for longer by removing blooms as they you notice them fade. Use a pair of sharp secateurs to cut back spent flowers to a pair of outward-facing buds. Leave the flowers on wild roses to ensure a great display of hips in the autumn.
Your beds and borders may start to look slightly more tired by the middle of summer than they did when freshly planted. Inject some colour by filling any gaps with late flowering plants, such as anemone, crocosmia, rudbeckia, aster, coreopsis or canna lilies.
Guarantee your eagerly anticipated late Dahlia display doesn’t grind to a premature end by tying in shoots to supportive canes. Lock in moisture and prevent weeds from germinating by spreading a 7.5cm layer of bark mulch over borders.
To rejuvenate a border, remove tatty foliage from early flowering perennials. Peonies and some hardy geraniums may even respond with a flush of fresh leaves, which continue to look good across the rest of summer.
Give asters and other late-flowering perennials a boost by scattering general fertiliser across the soil and working it into the ground gently with a rake.
As we said earlier, now is the time to reap some rewards from the work you have done in your garden already in 2025. This means a trip to the kitchen garden!
Trim herbs to ensure a regular supply of tasty leaves. Completely remove flowering shoots from parsley, sorrel, marjoram and sage, and pinch back shoots of thyme and rosemary to encourage more branches to grow.
Hungry caterpillars will ruin many leafy vegetables, so check and dispose of any pests you find. Also, look under leaves for any cleverly concealed eggs. Potatoes should be watered regularly, especially those growing in pots.
To grow masses of runner beans, pinch out the tips of the plant when they reach the tops of supports. This will encourage lots of flowers, carrying side-shoots to grow further down the plant.
Prune summer fruiting strawberries. After the last fruit has been picked, gather the leaves together and cut them back, 7.5cm above the crown. New foliage will soon grow and encourage the development of next year’s flower buds.
Eating apple trees will naturally shed some developing fruit in early summer but may need further thinning to ensure large fruit and a healthy crop. Remove any damaged or misshapen fruit, leaving one roughly every 15cm.
Please Don’t Forget!
Do you have plenty of tasks to be getting on with in the garden now? Alright, we have a few more for you!
Fast-growing conifer hedges should be pruned to keep them within bounds. Start by cutting the top flat and then trim the sides, making the top narrower than the base.
In hot weather, the water level in ponds will drop. Top it up once a week with rainwater from a water butt, or water from the mains. If you keep fish, use cold mains water little and often to prevent a shock to livestock.
There may be some signs of a clover infestation on your lawn. If so, now is a good time to control it by spraying it with herbicide.
Strip stems from bamboo. The showy canes are often hidden beneath leafy foliage, so either snaps off side branches or remove with secateurs to expose the bottom third of canes. At the same time thin out congested clumps by cutting dead, and some of the weaker shoots, to ground level.
Tidy up Wisteria by tying in any side shoots you want to keep for filling gaps on walls or trellis, then prune remaining shoots, leaving four leaves.