Swaffham Newsletter

Ashill & Holme Hale Garden Club
Website: ashillgardeningclub.wordpress.com/
Email: ashillholmehalegardenclub@gmail.com
Enjoy Your Blooming Harvest
While the gardening club is currently not able to hold
monthly meetings we are providing gardening advice
via newsletters and our website (address above) to
keep everyone active with gardening tasks. The RHS
website (rhs.org.uk/) is also a good source of jobs
you should do each month in your garden, as is the
BBC’s Gardeners World on a Friday evening on BBC2.
Summer is a time to enjoy your garden with many
flowers in bloom and your vegetable garden starting
to provide you with lovely home grown produce.
Gardening jobs for July and early August
Vegetables, Fruits & Herbs:
• Check your fruit trees such as apples, pears and
plums after the June drop, where trees naturally
discard excess fruit. However, it may still be necessary
to thin small fruits further to improve the size and
quality of remaining fruit. Ideally no more that two
fruits per stem.
• Continue to provide a high potassium feed once a
week to your tomatoes as they
begin to ripen on their trusses.
A good watering twice a week
is usually suffice unless very hot
weather. From mid-July onwards
you should be harvesting ripe
tomatoes to enjoy.
• If you have not already, now is the time to harvest
autumn planted garlic. Ease bulbs gently out of soil
so as not to damage basal plate so they will store
well. Later this month your autumn planted onion
sets should also be ready to harvest once you see
foliage turn yellow. Place them in a dry sunny spot to
allow them to ripen.
• First early potatoes should have been harvested by
now. These do not store well so enjoy them when
they are in good condition. By the end of July your
2nd early potatoes (e.g. Charlottes) should be about
ready to harvest.
• If you want salad leaves all summer through you
need to successionally sow seeds about every two
weeks to keep a good supply ready to eat. In addition
to lettuces why not try some oriental leaves like
Mizuna or Mustard or the peppery flavoured wild
Rocket.
• Now is a good time to sow turnips, spring cabbage,
fennel and autumn/winter salad crops.
Trees Shrubs and Flowers:
• If you have newly planted trees keep them regularly
watered about once a week.
• To encourage more blooms on repeat flowering
roses prune off faded heads regularly. With roses
that flower only once, leave them unpruned if you
want colourful rosehips later.
• For late season colour, plant autumn flowering
bulbs such as Nerine, Colchicum and Sternbergia.
• Increase your stocks of evergreen shrubs, trees
and conifers, as well as hardy climbers by taking
semi-ripe cuttings. These can be taken from July to
early autumn from growth that has begun to harden
at the base.
• Wisteria is best pruned twice a year to control
its size and promote flowering. Summer prune by
shortening long, whippy, current-season growth to
five or six leaves, or roughly the length of your forearm.
Wildlife Gardening:
•To stop birds getting caught and injured in netting,
such as that over soft-fruit, make sure it is taut, well
secured and checked regularly.
• If you have a wildlife pond do not worry about
removing every last pond weed. Around 25-35 open
water is optimum. Many pond creatures actually
benefit from a vegetation layer for protection,
hunting and breeding.
Swaffham Players
Swaffham Players have not been idle during the
lockdown! To keep everyone engaged and in touch
we have been running weekly play readings by Skype.
This has given us the chance to explore new material
and styles of drama, and for some of our backstage
experts to perform in character.
This has led us to explore the worlds of podcasting
and web design, and we hope soon to have a vibrant
new online presence.
Of course we’re excited about the the Town Council’s
purchase of the Barn Theatre, and we aim to be
involved as far as possible. Still, the project will
probably take some time to bear fruit. Nor is it clear
how long it will be before any theatres at all will be
able to resume live performances.
So in the meantime we are hoping that the chance
of recording audio drama in a COVID-safe way,
and accessing online training materials aimed at
beginners, will encourage new recruits to join us as
we journey back to the magic of the theatre.
Watch this space: we’re bouncing back!
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