Urgent jobs in the garden for July

• Make compost.
• Plant out second crop of autumn/winter vegetables.
• Cut strawberry runners and pot up in potting mix. Cut back leaves of strawberries – you can even mow them down on a high blade – and dispose of them. Divide them in spring if they are too crowded.
• Provide trellises for climbing peas.
• Net garlic to protect against corella and cockatoo attack.
• Prune fruit trees once they have lost their leaves; remove all mummified fruit from the branches.
• Spray peach and nectarine trees a full 360 degrees to cover every face of every branch, and the trunk, once bare, with Lime Sulphur.
• Mulch around all fruit trees. Remove any prunings from beneath trees.
• Place hessian or cardboard around apple, pear and quince tree trunks for codling moth to lay in (remove and burn in 4 weeks then replace).
• Cut autumn raspberries to ground level, remove dead leaves from the soil and cover ground with compost. Prune currant bushes and other berries.
• Plant bare-rooted fruit trees.
• Clear garden beds of dead plants and test pH for suitability for subsequent crops. Adjust pH if necessary (with compost and/or dolomite to make beds more alkaline or sulphur to make them more acidic).

Written by Robin Gale-Baker