Summer Pruning

July has flown by. There’s been plenty to keep us busy as harvesting of fruit and vegetables gets underway, and the weeds keep insisting on growing! Harvesting in the pest and disease control garden started with broad beans, peas and strawberries, and has now moved on to French beans, potatoes and barrow loads of courgettes and the inevitable marrows. One thing that I’m particularly excited about is our experiment growing melons in straw bales. Beth, who previously looked after the garden, carved planting holes in the bales and soaked them with water to start decomposition. I’ve planted melons in peat-free compost in the bales, and the heat produced from decomposition of the straw should help the melons to grow. So far I’ve spotted two golf ball-sized fruit and am keeping a close eye on their progress.

The main tasks in the soft fruit garden this month have been summer pruning and fruit picking. Summer pruning of gooseberries and red and white currants is something I hadn’t done before. It involves cutting new growth on side shoots back to five leaves, but leaving leaders, which are the shoots that extend the main branches, un-pruned. This reduces shoot growth and concentrates the plants’ energy into the fruits. A RHS fruit group visiting the gardens this month enjoyed sampling all the different soft fruit varieties on offer.

I attended a really interesting workshop on green manures a few weeks ago, which covered the different plant species that are used and the benefits of using each. This is something I will definitely be putting into practice in the future. I’ve also had training on using garden machinery this month, which I found surprisingly good fun!

I’m looking forward to another bountiful month in August, and making lots of preserves with the harvest.