As we move forward into August the abundance of harvests is at its peak, the flowers are blossoming beautifully, and we are still blessed with long days of light and hopefully more sunshine. To keep your gardens and allotments in top shape you can follow these 5 top tips to help keep everything flourishing.
Watering
Our allotments, gardens, pots and containers all need to be kept watered during the hot months. As the plants grow more established root systems and start to grow fruits and flowers its important, they are taking in enough water. You will find that pots, containers and hanging baskets will require more watering during the warmer months to help stop them drying out. Borders, allotment beds and any growing ground will require some watering, but this is always less as you can reply on the rain to soak the ground. The best way to help the ground retain the moisture under the soil is by using mulch. Mulching the ground in the autumn or spring and then mulching around the base of plants after planting them out will help retain the moisture in the soil helping keep plants alive during hot weather and lowering your workload in the garden.
Rocket Gro have created a wonderful product called Magic Mulch which is perfect for adding to your soil preferably in the autumn, not only will this help mulch the soil to help retain moisture, it will work a natural weed suppressant, feed the soil and add natural fertiliser rich in N:P:K, it works as a slug repellent and will also help change the structure of the soil.
Harvesting
As the wonderful fruit and vegetables grow it is important to harvest them regularly to stimulate new growth on plants and in turn this will create more bountiful harvests. This will also mean the quality of the harvest is not diminished by leaving it on the plant for too long. Crops like tomatoes, cucumber, chillies, beans, courgettes and many more will produce more fruits if they are picked regularly.
Deadheading
Just like harvesting, deadheading flowers regularly will help stimulate new growth and in turn produce more flowers. Make sure that you deadhead spent flowers on your plants with snips, this will direct all the energy to grow a stronger plant with more blooms. If you would like to save seeds from some of your flowers you can leave the flower heads on the plant to die back and dry and them you can successfully save your own seeds.
Weeding
Keep on top of weeds in your gardens by hoeing and pulling out weeds as often as you can during the summer months. Weeds will compete with your plants and draw up vital nutrients and water from the soil, they can block light from plants and certain weeds can smoother plants so by removing these in an organic way (removing by hand) it will help your plants flourish.
Feeding
The last but important step is to feed the plants in your gardens and on your allotments once a week throughout summer. Feeding the plants helps gives them the perfect amount of nutrients to help them grow healthy, strong and produce fruits. Rocket Gro provides a fantastic plant feed called Plant Fuel. Plant Fuel is a chemical free liquid feed with high levels of N:P:K 4-2-6 a perfect organic feed to help boost plant growth.
The next blog will be out in the first week of September and will be called moving into autumn. It will focus on what you can grow, how to grow it and jobs to be thinking about for the autumn months.
Happy Growing
The Rocket Gro team
