All the Gardening Jobs You Should Do in June
June garden work is always marked by berries. June strawberries, oso berries and currants are ripe and ready to pick. The first raspberry harvest will arrive at any moment, and the fruits on the earliest blueberry bushes will begin to turn blue. Tulips, peonies and irises are finishing their flowering cycle, and summer is already in full swing. Everything you haven’t planted should go into the ground, and we support and nurture the plants that are already planted.
Trimming
Once your lilacs stop blooming, you should consider pruning them so you can have a second bloom this fall. You want to take up to ⅓ of the plant stems to encourage new growth each year. This applies to all early summer flowering shrubs and trees such as azalea, forsythia, kerria japonica, weigela, deutia, mock orange, St. John’s wort, viburnum and red or yellow dogwood.
Pruning should also apply to tomatoes already rooted in the ground. You will need to trim the suction cups depending on what kind of grating system you have installed. If you allow indeterminate tomatoes to have only one strong “leader” or stem, prune them aggressively, but you will need tall trellises. Also be sure to cut off any diseased parts of the plant, but remember to only touch the tomatoes after the morning dew has dried and with clean scissors. Spray Lysol or another disinfectant between plants to prevent you from spreading the fungus or virus yourself.
Once your strawberries stop producing fruit, mow and mulch them so they don’t continue to waste energy on growing shoots and can focus on root growth next year.
Fruit thinning
Your pears, apples, stone fruits like peaches and nectarines, and even fig trees have already set fruit and also fallen, which is normal for trees to drop something they can’t handle. While the fruits are still on the tree, you must decide on their quantity or quality. Thinning the fruit on each branch will allow the tree to produce larger, tastier fruit. At this point, you can also cover the fruit with gauze bags to protect it from any aggressive insects or animals.
Fertilizer
It is important not only to water the vegetables in raised beds, but also to remember to feed them. Your plants can benefit from a treatment like fish fertilizer at least once a week, but if you haven’t fed your vegetables since planting, June is the time to start. Apply a vegetable-specific fertilizer, which is usually a balanced 4-4-4 fertilizer, at least once or twice a month. Your tomatoes may also benefit from a Cal-Mag or Rot Stop treatment, which will provide more calcium to the plant, which will help prevent tomato blossom rot on future fruit. Now that the asparagus is harvested, apply a nitrogen fertilizer for next year.
Your lawn should be fertilized with a low-nitrogen fertilizer in June. Your roses should be treated with phosphorus fertilizer after the first bloom, about now. All your trees and shrubs should receive summer fertilizer by July 4th. Your garden center can help you find the right fertilizers, as not all plants need to receive the same fertilizers. For example, blueberries and azaleas need a more acidic fertilizer.
Pests
June is a high alert period for all the insects and critters that love to find and attack our plants. Tomato worms, aphids, bagworms, beetles, borers and all slugs. At this stage, spraying will not be the only solution – you will also have to manually remove pests from your plant. Aphids can be washed off with water, but without treatment such as soapy water or a nearby trap plant such as nasturtium, they will return. If you don’t have nasturtiums nearby, plant them now. Aphids will be more attracted to nasturtium and will choose it. You simply leave the aphid-infested nasturtiums in place. Treatments such as Sluggo can help reduce the slug population, but manual extraction is still necessary. Leave shallow beer or sourdough caps as a trap and collect the slugs that come to it every day. Every plant in your garden has a variety of pests trying to feed on it; A daily walk through your garden will help you notice what may be afflicting your plants.
Diseased plants
Gardens are very susceptible to viruses and fungi, and one of the best ways to prevent this is to water the plants at the root rather than from the top, causing the water to splash onto the ground, causing the water to splash back onto the plants. If you spot late blight or mosaic virus in your garden, you should be vigilant to cut it out quickly, throw these plants in the trash (not compost), and be sure to wash your hands and tools before moving on to the next plant. If you notice powdery mildew on your plants, you can treat it with diluted vinegar. This is when you may notice signs of infections such as curled leaves on stone fruit trees, which can be treated if caught early with copper foliar sprays. Fungicides can go a long way in preventing problems such as black spot on roses. Be very careful when using fungicides and copper sprays: they are mostly preventive rather than reactive. If you’re interested in what you see in your garden, take a photo and head to a garden center to ask.
Landing
By the end of June, all summer vegetables should be in the ground. Tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and tomatillos need to be planted, and if the weather is not yet suitable for planting, you should consider installing a plant protector such as Argibon and planting anyway. The Agribon tent will provide the warm conditions you need, and you can take it down yourself when the temperature gets high enough.
Beans, cucumbers, edamame, eggplant, melons, okra, pumpkins and sweet potatoes should be planted this month. If it is early enough they can still be direct sown, but by mid-June the shoots should be planted instead.
Continue to sow radishes, lettuce, carrots, green onions and beets. Be sure to thin out the seedlings once a week.
Flowers
You can still plant almost all summer annual flowers, including zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, salvia and celosia, from seed or starting. Planting them in waves will ensure multiple successions of flowers later in the season. Be sure to check the seed labels for height when planting these flowers so you can vary it.
Now that your spring flowers are fading, prune them accordingly. Your tulips only need to be cut off the heads, not the bottoms – remember they need to mulch the leaves so they come back next year. Iris stems can be cut back to the ground, but in a chevron pattern to ensure good growth next year. Removing the heads of snapdragons and sweet peas will encourage more growth, but some flowers, such as the rootstock, have single stems so should be cut back to the ground as soon as they bloom.
In June, it is best to walk around the garden once a day, even if it is a short walk. Gather what you can, write down measures such as pest control or pruning, and be sure to take photos and write in your garden journal . Moreover, you planted a garden precisely to enjoy it.