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July: Companion Planting and Other Summer Tips

I was planning to write about fennel, but until someone can tell me how to stop it from going to seed I do not feel qualified to tell you how to grow it!

I do however like to grow companion plants with my vegetables. These are plants that are beneficial when grown alongside the veggies, and I tend to let them self-seed, so that by July my vegetable garden is a riotous mass of colour.

Coriander is popping up everywhere this year, along with fennel out of my homemade compost, while chervil and parsley are both forming seeds ready to start again. Marigolds of all sorts come up year after year, and I transplant a couple of each sort into pots to go into the polytunnel, along with basil (sown from seed - it is not to late to sow now), to help keep the tomatoes happy.

Marigolds and nasturtiums are particularly good alongside the brassicas, and you can eat the flowers as well (marigold calendula officinalis)! Chives make great edges to beds (try them or parsley with roses), and if you chop them down after flowering they will grow and flower again. Chives and wild rocket, both perennial, can become weeds as they self-sow so freely, but you do have fresh rocket leaves virtually year round. Borage comes up massively, but keep chopping off the outer branches and they are great on the compost heap. Chamomile is another self-sower and is universally good for vegetables.

Alongside the herbs I let poppies, nigella (love-in-the-mist), antirrhinums, pansies, polyanthus, teasels, valerian, and sunflowers pop up where they will - they all attract the ‘good’ insects and provide food for bees and birds.

It is time to think about collecting seed for next year. I like to mark a few of the longest, straightest runner beans with some coloured wool for leaving to fatten up, if you have any lamb’s lettuce/mache it will have seeded now, and you can successfully grow your own plants from chilli, tomato, pumpkin, pea, and bean seeds.

Keep ‘pinching out’ and tying-in tomato plants, and keep sowing and picking lettuce leaves. To stop red spider mite in the greenhouse, wet the floor down as often as you can, preferably when it is hottest in the middle of the day - mites do not like the humidity.

Lastly, have a great summer, admire all your hard work and enjoy eating the produce from your garden!