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Garden Advice For June
June 11 2008
JUNE
 The month of Midsummer’s Day. The Longest Day, or the Summer Solstice, which this year falls at one minute to midnight on the 20th June.
So we have long days, plenty of light, and given warm air and enough rain, growing conditions are as good as, if not better, than the tropics.
The beginning of the month can still give us a late frost, so keep a few of your tender plants in reserve for a while. In Nottinghamshire we are usually free of frost by the end of first week of June.
Plant out tender veg raised in pots: Courgette and marrow, pumpkin and squash, outdoor cucumber and gherkin, French and runner beans, sweetcorn, and outdoor tomato.
And transplant autumn and winter cabbages and cauliflowers, celery, leeks.
Sow: Apart from planting out the tender vegetables, some can be directly sown in the soil – Runner and French beans for example, and maincrop sowings of other veg can be made now – beetroot, calabrese, lettuce and salad greens, carrots, peas, radish, swede and turnips.
Finish harvesting Asparagus this month, leave the bed weed free with a top dressing of compost or manure, or give it a good liquid feed. There’s not much value in giving it a mulching in winter, as it’s the green ‘fern’ in the summer that needs feeding. If the fern gets rocked by the wind tie it up with twine and canes. Quick salads and herbs can be grown between the rows of fern, making more use of the space.
Also finish harvesting most varieties of Rhubarb this month to allow it time to recover for next year. Two rhubarb varieties that will crop into September are Victoria and Brandy Carr Scarlet. To do this the plants need to be established for at least 3 years, and well fed and watered, and not picked too much in the early part of the year.
The Fruit Garden
Strawberries – the berry harvest starts this month, and also the strawberry runner harvest. Pin down runners to the soil using bent wire or heavy stones. Only allow one plant per runner to root to get the best developed new plants. Sever and move them in the autumn in they are badly placed. It’s a good idea to keep your strawberry patch rotating around the garden to avoid the build up of viruses, and keeping the plants young and productive. A very obliging plant the Strawberry, providing delicious fruit and multiplying itself so readily. If only the birds and slugs didn’t enjoy it too! At least a plastic net over some cloche hoops will keep the birds off, although expect a few kamikaze young blackbirds to get themselves tangled up.
Bush and CaneFruit – these start to crop late this month. The first Redcurrant is Junifer, closely follwed by Jonkheer van Tets.
The first cooking Gooseberries will be ready this month also, though leave some berries as dessert fruit to ripen fully in late July or August.
Early Raspberries start to crop late in the month also. Good early varieties are Julia, with large quality fruit, though it needs a little pampering, and Glen Moy, a smooth stemmed, heavy cropping, well flavoured variety.
Tree Fruit Thinning
Fruitlets should be thinned this month if too many have set. This can’t be done later as the effect of getting larger fruit by reducing the numbers wears off after about 6 weeks from blossoming. This is why I don’t recommend waiting for the ‘June Drop’, which doesn’t usually happen until well into July.
For Apples and Pears:
As a rough guide leave a fruit cluster every 10-15 cms for dessert apples, and 15-20 cms for cookers. Then thin the fruitlets in each cluster – taking out the damaged or mis-shapes first [ including the fat central ‘king fruit’] and leaving one fruitlet for large fruit, or two fruitlets if you want smaller fruits for children.
For Plums:
Thin fruitlets to leave one good one every 5 to 8 cms.
 Codling Moth
This the main cause of grubs in apples, which are unpleasant to find, but it also means the damaged fruit will not keep. The moth is active from late May to August and there may be two generations in some years. After eating inside the apple the caterpillar finds a crevice in the bark to pupate in and spend the winter. A traditional method of control was to wrap hessian sacking or corrugated cardboard around the trunk to provide a home for the pupae. This was then burnt during the winter, and not only Codling Moth but several other nuisance moth pupae would be destroyed.
Pheromone Traps
These hang in your tree and operate using the female sex hormone of the moth as an attraction to the males. These are induced to land on a sticky tray of female-smelling goo, where they die. Commercially they are used to monitor moth numbers, but might help lower numbers to some extent. Hopefully the frustrated females will fly off elsewhere looking for a mate, although the counter argument is the pheromone will attract neighbouring males to your tree, which may find the female before they find the trap.
Apple Sawfly is the other larva that burrows into apples, though it generally makes a ribbon like scar on the outside of the fruit before it enters, and makes a wet area around the entrance hole. It lays eggs in the spring and leaves the fruit in July to pupate in the soil. Mature fruit with sawfly damage becomes mis-shapen. Running hens under trees helps control this pest and others that pupate in the soil, where they may be scratched up to become useful hen fodder.
Phil Corbett, Cool Temperate, June 2008
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