Plant yourself some sunshine

Find room for sunflowers Sunflower seeds can be sown from August until January (when soil temperatures are between 10C and 30C), and take between 50 and 100 days to flower, depending on the variety – the skyscrapers obviously take a tad longer than the littlies so should be sown in spring and early summer whereas you can keep sowing and planting cute dwarf varieties until early January.

Sunflowers like good soil as well as the next plant, but will get by in surprisingly mean conditions. However, they are far less forgiving when it comes to sunshine. They need lots of it – and not just for growth. Sunflowers are heliotropic, meaning their flowers follow the sun from east to west, so consider this carefully when planting.

Sow seeds about one knuckle deep, or buy a punnet of them from your garden centre. Protect seedlings from snails, slugs and birds. Water them regularly but don’t be too fussy as sunflowers are relatively drought tolerant.

Create your own microclimates

Plants respond to soil temperature more than air temperature, so summer heat lovers such as tomatoes and capsicums are best nurtured inside for another month but hardier vegetables such as celery, peas and cabbage can be planted direct and protected with a cloche or plastic cover.

Plastic juice or soft drink bottles, with the lid removed and bottom cut out can be repurposed and placed over individual plants. Three or four little bamboo sticks can make a frame to prop up a recycled plastic bread bag. Or you can more efficiently cover a whole bed with a large sheet of plastic, horticultural mesh or even microclima if there is still a chance of frost in your area.

Later in the season I replace the plastic with bird mesh, which keeps white butterflies off the brassicas as well as stopping blackbirds from taste testing the strawberries.

Black irrigation alkathene pipe makes perfect hoops to support the cover. An old hose can be repurposed to do the same job. Alternatively, wire hoops or fibreglass rods can be purchased to do the same thing. Anchor the sides down with soil, planks or bricks and clip the ends shut with clothes pegs for easy access. Whatever cover you use, it will also keep the rain off, so remember to water underneath regularly.

Feed your summer seedlings

Even in warmer parts of the country it is still a little too soon to plant out the summer heat lovers: tomatoes, chillies, capsicums, cucumbers, courgettes, pumpkins and eggplants unless you are prepared to coddle them under individual cloches. Seedlings transplanted into cold garden beds sulk and are often overtaken by those transplanted two or three weeks or even a month later.

You could have substantial seedlings raring to go. It’s important not to check their growth in any way. If the weather and the temperatures mean you have to hold them back for a while, give them something to be getting on with, or they’ll fade and lose their drive to do their best.

Give seedlings regular doses of liquid fertiliser. Even grass clippings, steeped in a bucket of water, produce a nitrogen-rich plant food that boosts growth.

Leave foliar feeds sitting in the sun to warm up before applying – no small plant, newly introduced to the world, likes to be drenched in cold water. If you’re pouring liquid fertiliser onto the soil, the need to warm it is not so essential.

Weed out the competition

Weed your nursery, if you have one, and if you don’t, consider how useful a propagation section might be. Multiplying what you have growing already is very satisfying and takes up very little room, especially if you have shelves you can use for pots of cuttings and seed trays.

Split any dense perennial favourites and redeploy them elsewhere in the garden or in the gardens of friends. Hostas, sedums, goldenrod, achillea, Japanese anemones, daylilies, clivia, oregano, comfrey and many more are easy to divide. Overcrowded clumps thrive when thinned out and the best pieces are replanted.

It’s easy enough to do. Slice with a sharp spade blade into the crowns as they begin to produce top growth, or prise them apart with a couple of garden forks working back to back for leverage. A bit of rough treatment doesn’t seem to upset most of the vigorous perennials.

Gardening by the maramataka

Whiringa-a¯ -rangi is the fifth month of the maramataka and the time for final land preparation for crops.

In Ko¯ anga (spring), it is not only plants that reawaken: insects and animals such as manu (birds) change their behaviour.

For summer crops, this is the time to open the ground, turn the soil to expose it to the warmth of the sun and to allow nature to assist in pest control.

Birds will gravitate to feed on beetle and moth larvae. – Dr Nick Roskruge