Summer is here to encourage regular outdoor living, eating and entertaining. Keeping the lawn and flower beds looking great is number one priority although this needs to be achieved with the minimum amount of time. Relaxing and enjoying the garden is more important than hard work.

BEDDING PLANTS

All your summer bedding including busy lizzies, petunias, marigolds, geraniums and antirrhinums should be a riot of colour. To prolong their life they need dead-heading to prevent seed setting, and regular feeding so they have the energy to keep producing more quality flowers. Apply a soluble fertilizer such as Miracle-Gro Plant Food over the leaves and around the roots once a week, choosing a time in the evening when the sun is unlikely to scorch. Top tip from award winning growers of monster vegetables is to feed after dark. The liquid feed stays on the leaf for much longer and the plant is able to absorb much more of the nutrients overnight. This is even more important with hanging baskets and patio plants that have a restricted root run.

Feeding in this way is quick and easy if you use the Miracle-Gro Feeder. This fits easily to the end of a hose pipe and automatically dissolves the feed sending out a spray for large shrubs or a fine sprinkle for tender flowers.

Dead-heading, like feeding, needs to be done as a weekly routine. It keeps all the plants tidy and also gives you the opportunity to check for pest damage. Greenfly and blackfly are the most common sap-sucking pest. Once they have set up home they multiply to prodigious numbers, twisting and disfiguring leaves, stems and buds. As soon as you see the first signs of these aphids spray them with a general pest control product such as BugClear Gun! or BugClear.

Holes in leaves and general shredding of foliage usually indicate that slugs or snails are on the warpath. The brave gardeners who prefer not to sprinkle a few SlugClear Mini Pellets sparingly around their plants may be tempted to take direct action. For them the nightly vigil with a torch to find, pick up these slimy pests and dispose of the bodies is the only way forward. Remember that slugs and snails have a good memory for their favourite food and will travel good distances to re-visit the site of a gourmet meal. With this in mind don't throw the offending pests over the garden fence into your neighbour's garden. The slugs will surely remember where they recently ate well and will return to plague you again.

ROSES AND SHRUBS

Most flowering shrubs started to bloom early this year and many rose bushes were in bloom well before the Chelsea Flower Show towards the end of May. The warm and wet May and early June ensured that if blackspot had been a problem in previous years then this year's roses were well infected by July. Heavy rain causes splashes that move disease spores onto the new growth and you can expect to see signs of this disease soon. To keep the spread of the rose blackspot under control spray your rose bushes thoroughly with a good fungicide. There are plenty to choose from. If you have a sprayer then use either Fungus Clear or Roseclear2 – if you want a ready-to-use solution then Roseclear Gun! is the best one to choose.

As the summer progresses and the soil becomes consistently dry, the white spots of powdery mildew may well appear. In my garden, climbing and rambling roses first show symptoms of the disease – but that's because the roots are close to a wall that sucks up soil moisture. The remedy is a few buckets of plain water at the roots and a foliage treatment to stop the spread of the disease. For rose powdery mildew use FungusClear Gun! or RoseClear Gun!

WEEDS

At this time of the year weeds are a big problem. The weather's warm, the soil is moist and these natural invaders are having a field day. Dealing with annual weeds as they pop through on patios, paving, paths and between flowers is not difficult. If you have the time and a strong back simply pull them out or if you want to do the job in next to no time then wet the weeds with Weedol or Weedol Gun! and they will be dead within days.

On the other hand the deep-rooted perennial weeds, like couch grass and bindweed, need a different treatment. All too often they invade from next door's garden where they are allowed to run riot, unchecked. These weeds have a brittle, creeping root system that can be dug out, but any tiny pieces left behind in the soil will regenerate to become a totally new weed plant. The most thorough way of dealing with the problem is to kill the weeds right down to the deepest root with Roundup GC. This glyphosate weedkiller goes in through the leaves and moves through stems and roots to eventually kill the growing tips of the roots. As you can see, if the leaves are in your garden and the roots are next door then here you have the ultimate stealth weapon.

The Roundup range of weedkillers comes in various forms and sizes, depending on the size of your problem. There are 1 litre bottles of Roundup Ultra 3000 that will treat more than the area of four tennis courts (3000 sq. m) down to 1 litre hand sprayers of Roundup Tough Weedkiller Ready to Use that will control smaller patches of difficult weeds.

The real bindweed control product however is Tumbleweed Original Extra Strong Gel. This comes in a convenient 150 ml pot that has an integral brush in the cap for spot treating individual weeds growing amongst and through desirable plants. It is simple to paint individual leaves of bindweed and to see with its red colouring which of the foliage has been treated. Even if you are clumsy it is a quick job to pick off any leaves of the wanted plant accidentally treated with the gel.

LAWNS

Trim the grass as often as you have the time. A twice a week race over the surface with the mower taking off very little cuttings is the way to encourage a good thick turf. It's less of a shock to the grass and helps to keep weeds at bay. Trim the lawn edges regularly to give a neat appearance and remove moist hiding places for slugs and snails.

If you are going to water your grass during any subsequent dry spells then now is the time to build up the moisture reserves. Fork over the turf so that any artificial watering or rain can penetrate deeply. Also remember to water either early in the morning or late at night to reduce evaporation. The early birds will find that mains water pressure is better at 6 am rather than 6 pm – especially in a warm spell of weather.

Forget applying dry granule lawn treatments if the weather is hot and dry. Many people unfortunately ignore the instructions on most packs that tell you only to apply when the soil is moist and the weeds and grass are actively growing. Under dry soil conditions applying a liquid treatment is best. First water the lawn so the soil is moist and the following day apply a soluble treatment such as EverGreen Lawn Food Liquid or Miracle-Gro Water Soluble Lawn Food .

A week or so after the lawn tonic is applied check the lawn for weeds. The small-leaved weeds, such as black meddick, common mouse-ear and lesser trefoil are notoriously difficult to control. Ordinary selective weedkillers advise several treatments to get the spread under control. However the new lawn weedkiller from Scotts called Verdone Extra is even better. It kills many weeds in lawns with one treatment and the list of weeds controlled includes these small-leaved weeds as well as white clover, daisy, dandelion and plantains. Do not mow the grass for three days before or after treatment – for best results leave it even longer for the weeds to grow. This interval means there is good leaf coverage to absorb the weedkillers and enough time for them to be absorbed before the next cut. As the lawn weedkiller could be harmful to surrounding plants only spray on a calm day when there is no likelihood of drift on the wind.

FRUIT

Now that I have finished picking fruit from the summer raspberries they are being dug up completely and disposed of. In their place will go even more autumn fruiting canes that I find provide a tastier and bigger crop. My method of cultivation and removal of canes is different to that of the traditional one so that I get two crops a year. Instead of removing all canes that have fruited early in winter, I leave them on until next spring and summer. These canes then produce a summer crop in June. While the old canes fruit the new ones for the September crop are growing through.

Perhaps my raspberry plot needs a little more feeding than normal, but I don't begrudge this tastiest of fruits some lavish treatment with Miracle-Gro Controlled Release Plant Food in spring and the occasional dousing with soluble Miracid or Miracle-Gro Ericaceous Plant Food over the foliage. Instead of growing them in neat rows which to my mind takes up too much valuable space, I grow the Autumn Bliss variety in a block and keep heights down to below 1.5 m (5ft). The number of canes is not controlled so they need no tying in as they hold each other up. Now that's what I call a fruit that is well worth its space.

Apples and pears will have finished dropping any surplus fruitlets and the remaining fruit should now start to swell. Some gardeners worry that this premature fruit drop is a symptom of disease although in most cases it is a natural phenomenon that happens when trees set too many fruits to ripen successfully on the plant. Only worry about disease if you see powdery mildew on the leaves. Then get out the sprayer and treat with a carbendazim fungicide such as Spotless.

VEGETABLES

Some early crops should be ready for the kitchen during July. Early potatoes should be big enough to start digging and although small, beetroot will provide a very tasty treat for summer salads. Broad beans, early peas and French beans should also be ready for picking.

To keep broad beans clean pick out the top of the plant to deter blackfly. If your actions are not sufficient and blackfly take hold, spray the plants with a product with a 0-day harvest interval. BugClear or BugClear Gun!, for example can be safely used on listed food crops right up to the day of harvest.

Water runner beans if the soil is dry to encourage fast growth. A feed every week over the leaves and around the roots with Miracle-Gro Plant Food will encourage more flowering and the early set of beans. Unfortunately high temperatures do tend to inhibit the setting of the flowers. Some people blame the lack of bees or the wrong species of bee – but runner beans are a crop that just stop setting seed when its too hot, although white flowered varieties do not seem to be as intolerant as the red flowered ones. French beans, on the other hand, thrive in hot continental weather, so make sure you sow another row for a late crop in September.

Other seeds for sowing now include carrots, spring cabbage and an early wrinkled variety of pea such as Kelvedon Wonder or Pioneer. Plant out seedlings of winter brassicas including kale, purple sprouting broccoli, sprouts and both autumn and winter varieties of cauliflower. Planting out seedlings of leeks into their final growing position needs to be completed early. Recently turned soil that has been enriched with Miracle-Gro Controlled Release Plant Food is easier for making the right planting holes. My dibber is the handle end of a broken spade that has had the stem sharpened. This tool makes excellent holes that are about 15 cm (6in) deep and 4 cm (1 in) wide.