Summer Gardening, June, July, August. Help. Advice. tips, hints, answers, a seasonal guide to summer gardening

August is still holiday month for many people and while you are away your plants may need some attention, if you have a neighbour or friend who can give your plants some water in hot weather all the better. Failing this, wood chippings or peat spread around the plant roots, then soaked with water will help prevent too much moisture evaporating during a hot summer day.

If you have plants in the greenhouse, they must have regular attention. Tomatoes especially must be watered on a regular basis, in fact irregular watering will cause the fruit to split.

Now is the time to pinch out the centre shoot of your tomato plants, in order to concentrate the plants growing energy on filling out the existing tomatoes, rather than producing more growth and more flowers.

Bedding plants should be covered in flowers at the moment and to maintain this show they must be fed with a liquid feed. Read the directions as to application because overfeeding can encourage too much leaf growth, rather than flowers. Hanging baskets and tubs need a weekly feed, the feed in the compost will now be exhausted and being confined to a container the plant is unable too send out roots to gather nutrients from the surrounding area.

Always remove the dead flowers on your bedding plants and other decorative plants, if they are left to go to seed the plants will stop flower production before the summer is over.

Daffodils and other spring bulbs are best planted this month, give the ground a good deep digging and try to mix some form of food into the soil, farm yard manure is best but failing that a good general fertiliser will give you flowers to be proud of in the spring.

Winter flowering pansies can be sown in the greenhouse, but be warned, do not keep the young plants inside any longer than is absolutely necessary or they will develop long lush growth in the summer heat. The winter pansy plants that you buy from the garden centre are treated with special dwarfing compounds to restrict early growth.

Finally, to give a bumper crop, it is essential that you give your runner beans plenty of water at this time of year.