I love the month of June. The weather is starting to warm, everything is growing quicker, the risk of frost diminishes and interesting looking crops such as coloured beans and squash can be planted out or sown. You may even be harvesting potatoes, broad beans and peas along with salad leaves and ripening summer strawberries.
Jobs for June:
- Plant out or sow runner and French beans (if you haven’t done so already), courgettes and squash
- Plant out sweetcorn, pumpkins, kale and purple sprouting broccoli
- Start feeding tomatoes, pinch out side shoots on cordon varieties
- Snap off onion and garlic scape (flower spikes) as they appear
- Keep the hoe and watering can busy!
- Keep sowing carrots, beets, salad crops, spring onion and radish
- Make June the last month to harvest your rhubarb, allowing it to rest
- Pinch out the growing tips of broad beans once the pods start to form to discourage black fly
- Harvest peas, early and second early potatoes, autumn sown broad beans, salad crops and strawberries
- Tie in Runner Beans as they grow
- Sow Florence fennel where they’re to crop
- Plant a herb bed
- Ventilate the greenhouse
- Transplant or ‘dib in’ leek seedlings once they’re the width of a pencil.
- Keep sowing beetroot, kohl rabi, radish, spring onions, lettuce and peas every two weeks
- Weed in-between onions and garlic
- Plant the last of your seed potatoes
- Cut out flower spikes from the middle of rhubarb crowns
- Check support for summer raspberries, blackberries and other hybrid berries, tie in canes.
- Thin out crowded raspberry canes if you didn’t do it last month
- Plant out sunflowers and other half-hardy flowering annuals
- Thin carrot seedlings and consider sowing more rows
- Plant out sweet pea if you haven’t done so already
- Harvest crops when ready and enjoy!
Let’s just pretend the weather is how is should be for June and that we can actually get on with most of the jobs on this list !!!
Jo Ann Abell
/ June 24, 2012Sounds like you have a great garden, Karen. We don’t have much of a garden this year (US, Virginia) since we only recently moved here and the soil is very poor (clay). We’re spending our time getting the planting beds ready for next spring. I did plant tomatoes in pots, which turned out great and are ready to eat :) Also picking wild black berries for jam.
compostwoman
/ June 24, 2012Thanks karen – you reminded me I had my version in draft and I have got on and posted it now – I have linked to you as a credit for the kick up the backside!
Flighty
/ June 25, 2012A helpful list as always, not I have many to do from it. I’m glad that you included the last sentence! xx
dvotee
/ June 26, 2012What a great list. Fortunately for me I don;t have to worry about half of it.
So you can sow runners now can you? I thought I’d missed that window!
Anna
/ June 30, 2012As the weather improves, it seems there’s more to do than ever. Thanks for this post, I thought it was getting far too late to sow more peas and beets, but I feel very encouraged to do keep going now.
Karen
/ June 30, 2012I have yet to sow a runner bean seed! I must get some in tomorrow.