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 Bordeaux Mix or Lime Sulphur. Protect ground with newspaper and keep chooks locked up if spraying with Bordeaux and also continuously stir mix and de-clog nozzle.
• 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