Back in Bloom: Tips on keeping plants flowering during the hot weather (From Richmond and Twickenham Times)

Back in Bloom: This week The Richmond and Twickenham Times' gardening column discusses maintaining roses and bedding plants through the hot weather

2:00pm Tuesday 24th May 2011 in News

In the seventh weekly gardening column from Reg Leach, Richmond Council's head of parks operations, the plant-lover offers tips for gardening in the hot weather.

Now that your roses are flowering well - be it Hybrid Teas; Specie roses or rambling roses - make sure you regularly deadhead them to keep your roses flowering throughout the Summer.

Carefully tie in the new shoots on your rambler roses which will train them to give a larger framework.

Now that you are planting out your bedding plants, and with the unusually dry Spring that we are having this year, make sure that you have well-watered the soil in the beds before.

Don’t use strong water pressure as the water will just run off and won’t penetrate through the soil surface.

Before you plant your bedding give them a good watering in their containers, making sure the water penetrates through all the root ball – plunging them in a bucket is a good way of ensuring the root ball is wet enough before planting.

Once you’ve planted your bedding, water in the evening after the sun has gone down.

As with roses make sure you regular deadhead your bedding plants to keep them flowering and regularly use a balanced fertilizer to keep them healthy.

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on your lawn during this dry weather.

I expect your lawn is like mine – the grass has gone brown and the weeds are flourishing!

It’s a good idea to wait until the weather changes and we have had a little rain and then apply a selective weedkiller to your lawn that is combined with a lawn feed so you can get rid of those unwanted weeds and feed the lawn at the same time.

Happy gardening!