Sarah Raven

July is a brilliant time for your garden or allotment - abounding with delicious edible produce, and beautiful scented flowers for cutting for your kitchen table or to create bunches for friends.

Sowing and Planting

Edible Crops

Last sowing of French beans

Lift and divide rhubarb plants. Discard old clump centres and replant divided outer growth.

Plant out purple sprouting broccoli and winter leeks.

Sow your autumn and winter Swiss chard towards the end of the month.

Flowers

Thin biennials

Last planting of acidanthera and gladioli for late autumn-flowering.

Prune lavender

Start taking cuttings of tender perennials such as salvias, pelargoniums and penstemons.

Harvesting Food – Things to pick and eat this month...

• Brassicas: calabrese, kale
• Roots: radishes, carrots, early Maincrop potatotes, onions and beetroot
• Salad crops: salad leaves, pea tips, all lettuce
• Edible Flowers: borage, marigols, 1st nasturtiums, runner bean and courgette flowers
• Leafy greens: chard and perpetual spinach (ordinary spinach bolts as it heats up)
• Legumes: peas and broad beans, 1st French and runner beans
• Squash: courgettes and Pattypan
• Fruity veg: 1st cherry tomatoes and cucumbers
• Other veg: globe artichokes
• Herbs: ALL
• Fruit: strawberries, cherries, peaches, nectarines, currants, gooseberries and raspberries, pick and prune blackcurrants in the north, early plums

Harvesting Flowers – Lovely things to pick and arrange from your garden in July

• Bulbs: alliums, lilies, eremerus
• Annuals: tons of them, keep picking or they will run to seed
• Biennials and dahlias: most are in flower now
• Perennials: cynara (cardoons and artichokes), phlox, Euphorbias sikkimensis and E. Ceratocarpa, English garden pinks, alstroemerias and penstemons
• Shrubs: roses

For more gardening tips by month visit, This Month in the Garden.