This month, take time to revel in the garden, smell the roses and take every opportunity to sit outside – even if you only have room for one chair and a pot of petunias! Think of nurturing your mental health: it’s like taking a tonic.

Plants like rudbeckias, asters and heleniums, which flower after the longest day, can grow rather straggly. To thicken them up, pinch out the tips now and that will branch them out and ensure a good late summer and autumn display. These are good perennials to have in the garden to help you get colour well into the autumn.

Growing gooseberries

Gooseberries are a great option for the garden, as they are expensive and difficult to buy but easy to grow! I like growing them as standards (a bare leg with a bushy crown like a pom-pom) because they look more ornamental. They fruit best in the sun but will tolerate light shade. They are the earliest cropping soft fruit of the year and are so delicious in a crumble! They fruit on wood at least one year old and are pruned to allow light and air to get to the centre of the plant, cutting shoots crowding the centre back to five leaves.

Leave a patch of wilder meadow on your lawn

If you took part in ‘No Mow May’ you may now want to give your lawn some attention. Don’t cut it really short straight away, but take it down in stages. You may wish to keep the idea of a wilder meadow by only mowing an area closer to the house and leaving the rest, perhaps with paths mown in it. This is probably not practical if you have a small garden and need the grass shorter to allow for kids to play on it, etc. but we can all leave a small patch and see what happens!

The most delicious things to grow

I think I have mentioned this before, but as it’s June and I’m thinking of strawberries – and that they are just the most delicious things to grow in the garden and eat fresh – I have planted up some ‘living wall’ boxes from Growing Revolution. They are made from fully recycled plastic with an ingenious inbuilt watering system, and they stack up one upon another so they take up virtually no room. I’ve planted them up against a sunny wall in my garden with a mix of strawberry varieties to crop from May through to August. Yum yum!