Cottage Garden Secrets: July Blooms & How I Get Endless Flowers!

We are at the peak of the summer garden and in July I find some things get a bit overgrown and can kind of overshadow some other plants. So to get the most of my garden this time of year, this is the time I do the most deadheading and cutting back to keep everything flowering for as long as I can. In the front raised bed I have this absolutely stunning geranium which I love and for the past month it has been flowering and it's been, as soon as I drive into the driveway I just see it and I love it. So I think it's a meadow crane spill geranium and I think the name is cloud nine. This is a tall flowering geranium so you'll have some of them that are great as filler in a flower bed so they spill out and they're really good ground cover but this one is great for height and it's a really nice cut flower as well. Now because it's starting to go over and look a bit shabby and starting to flop I'm actually going to cut it right back in the hopes that it may flower in early autumn so that it will come back in a couple of weeks and I'll get a second flush on it. There's also some verbascum and penstemon in here and I want them to get some sunlight and I'm also going to trim back some of the verbascum because that's another great one for keeping flower until early autumn. So I find this time of year I have to do a bit of cutting back to get more later. I've also had grey flowering on the roses so I need to do a good bit of deadheading on them as well so that I can get more roses and if you've been following the garden videos for a while you know one of my dreams is to have flowers that I can have to cut and bring them into the house so lots of cut flowers in the garden and in the flower beds and this time year is my peak because I find in spring I grow things for cut flowers and then they end up looking too pretty and if I cut them most of them are bulbs so they're not going to reflower until next year. This time year there's lots of stuff that actually benefit from being deadheaded so the don't let them go to seed if you keep cutting them back they will keep flowering so the more you cut back and deadhead the more you will get. Same with things like cosmos your annuals as well so if you're ever unsure I'm like a google gardener I'll just google what can be deadheaded to encourage flowering so you can bring your cut flowers into the house and enjoy them or you can just pop the deadheads into the compost. The mini meadow in the front has also gone so wild it's gone so tall because there is a lot of I think it's called Queen Anne's lace is it wild carrot so I sowed those seeds last year and I didn't think I got any last year but there is loads this year so maybe they're a biennial. So my best tip for gardening this time year is when you come home from work make yourself a cup of tea and just potter around the garden with your clippers and clip back where you see any spent flowers because that little it's like a nice meditative task it's not a too strenuous of a garden job you will continue flowering right the way until September October time depending on the plant and I know a lot of new gardeners they tend to just pop a plant in it will flower then it will die back but some of them you can actually keep deadheading because I know when I was a beginner gardener I didn't really get the whole deadheading thing and I wouldn't get the most out of my plants so for example dahlias don't let your dahlias go to seed if you keep cutting back your dahlias you're gonna get them flowering until the first frost so I have pictures from even early November where I've still had dahlia flowers and then I'll cut them back and mulch them because they're not frost hardy so yes deadheading if you are a beginner do it once a week or whenever you have a spare 10-20 minutes and you're pottering in the garden but that one thing this time of year will make the most of your garden so cut back to get more. Another thing I'll do this time of year is if I have some gaps I will stick in some plants that I know because we're at that turn of the year so the solstice we are the other side of the solstice so I want to plant any plants that will flower into autumn so this time of year you can't be a dahlia for that and I did lose some last year I was a bit late mulching them and some of them got a frost but there's one in this cauliflower bed that has a big orange flower on it and thankfully that did not die and you can see all of the foliage for that is coming back but I have a little gap here and Toffee who lives next door this is where he likes to have a nap so I don't know if he's going to be a bit annoyed at me for planting it but I'm going to pop in two dahlias and I got some marigolds because last year I had a lot of aphids on my dahlias so far it's okay maybe it's because I released all of the ladybug larvae back in springtime but to encourage ladybugs to visit this corner of the garden I'm going to plant some marigolds in here I know they're not the sexiest of plants but marigolds and campanulas they are great for attracting ladybugs Good morning I'm going on my jog it's raining we still show up but on the way I'm going to get my coffee and let's go to the walled garden I think the rain is due to stop in 20 minutes but the walled garden is going to be beautiful because unlike some of the things that are grown in my garden I got inspiration from there and I was last there in May and so much changes in your garden in like a few weeks so let me unlock the door sorry for this unflattering angle I just have a bit of tinted moisturiser on my face we are going out bare into the world I think it'll be nice to see the walled garden and I have a little story to tell you because I actually back in May got into the house beside the walled garden I was on a beekeeper's day out so I'll insert some pictures of that as well I love to visit this garden at different times throughout the years because it really is a skill managing your garden so that you have something flowering all of the time and we are so lucky in Ireland and if you're in the UK as well because we have mild enough winters like we rarely get heavy snow for weeks on end it will just be a flurry or a storm but we have flowers I mean literally snowdrops start popping up January February in March we are in full bloom with spring bulbs daffodils April is a beautiful time because you've got all of the flowering trees and then you'll have tulip season and May is stunning so we've such a long flowering season so it's nice to see how they manage it here so when I was back here February March time you'll find some footage from that in the cottage garden videos on the cottage garden playlist but if you remember some of those videos you can see the areas that had a lot of spring flowers they're transitioning into that summer flowering but something I've noticed is so the areas where there was lots of spring flowers they're not looking too fresh but then there's other beds that were quite plain in spring and now they're the showstoppers and they're the stunners so might be worth kind of zoning areas in your garden so instead of trying to have every corner in full flower and perfect at every time maybe have areas in the garden where that will look amazing in spring and then this area will look amazing in summer so something I've noticed with this garden just from comparing it to some of the areas in spring versus some of the perennial borders then that are stronger in summer so back in May I got to get a tour of the gardens from the head gardener because I was with my beekeeping group and they organized this day out but there is a house right beside the Shackleton garden and I actually won RTE's home of the year back in 2020 so I'm sure if you went down to the RTE player you might be able to see that episode it's owned by a beautiful lady called Ethna and she kindly let the beekeeping group into her courtyard garden and look around her home and she gave us like tea cake we had like a little afternoon there so I got a little bit of footage because I didn't want to I wanted to enjoy the experience and I didn't want to have a camera in people's faces but this house is stunning and it was a beautiful day when I was there and I felt like I was in the south of France. I'll link to an article because this house was actually for sale recently but I don't think it's for sale anymore and some of the units in it are actually rented out I think you could stay here at one point like Airbnb style but I just checked there and there's no listing for it so I think the accommodation are now permanently rented out I don't think it's guest accommodation anymore but it was an absolutely stunning day and a stunning property. I hope you enjoyed this little video if you want to see more check out the cottage garden playlist don't forget to subscribe and cheeky thumbs up for my regular viewers I'll see you in the next one.