With the recent dry spell coupled with strong easterly winds pots, hanging baskets newly planted bits and pieces will all dry out pretty quickly so please check regularly.

Having mentioned hanging baskets, yes go on spoil yourself they are easy to create and look great. Use summer bedding plants, especially trailing ones. When making up hanging baskets (and there are plenty of guides how to) one of the most important things is to remember to mix water retaining gel in to the compost. This prevents the baskets drying out too quickly.

As well as keeping an eye on pot plants for lack of water you should also feed them because the original feed in any compost used will have been used up, especially with watering. This is easy to overdo and when you see water running out of the bottom, it is taking the feed with it. So replace it. Place some succulents below your hanging baskets and the dribbles will keep them happy.

One thing about dry spells, it slows down your grass growth unless you are watering it regularly. However you will need to mow your grass, for those good gardeners amongst my readers (yes I am referring to you Mrs T**st****e) this can be called a lawn and as I said last year, my grass, despite years of tender loving and having been shown colour photos in numerous lawn care books, still refuses to behave like a lawn. You should have started cutting it more often by now and be lowering the cut height on your mower.

I mentioned summer bedding earlier re hanging baskets, now is the time for hardening off bedding plants raised under glass and plant these once done. Water in well and give them a little fertiliser but not too much nitrogen.

I am pleased to say that protecting my nectarine and peach trees from the rain has worked and I have only had to remove a couple of leaves infected with peach leaf curl (latin taphrina deformans). This is easily recognised as the disease causes blistering and deformed leaves. If you have these wonderful fruit trees growing under glass it is less likely that you will suffer (or more accurately your trees) from problems. The spring rains make it worse and trees/bushes sheltered from the rain don’t get it anywhere near as bad. Chemical treatments include Bordeaux mixture (copper based) or Dithane. Seek advice before using.

For the environmentally aware, biennial flowers such as evening primrose, foxglove, great mullein, honesty, sweet rocket, angelica, teasel and wallflower are all valuable for wildlife. Night-scented plants for moths such as evening primrose, sweet rocket, jasmine and honeysuckle.

Don’t forget it is easy to grow plants from plug plants, these are already rooted, so give it a go and you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Summer proper should be here in July and in the papers the weathermen are all talking about a “Barbeque Summer”. We shall see. Til then.