Gardening: Flowers, bees and salad crops take centre stage

All the delphiniums are out now, looking their best alongside yellow verbascum. There are so many subtle shades of blue delphiniums that you can choose a favourite colour to match the yellow verbascums. Blue and yellow has often been the colour scheme for many a gardens main feature.
Verbascums are a great plant where you need some height, their tall spikiness contrasted with furry stems and almost fluffy leaves in bigger specimens. It's worth having a day out at a large garden to check out verbascums at this time of year. That’s always a great way to improve your own garden and also chat to the gardener about how best to grow a plant.
Verbascums are a tremendous asset in summer because they bloom from now until August. They only open a few flowers at once and are to be slow burner as far as producing petals is concerned.
The pastel yellow ‘V Gainsborough’ is always popular but there are white and pinks around too that seem to hybridise if you have enough of them.
Often referred to as a Mullein plant, their leaves are used in herbal medicine to cure a whole host of complaints from eczema to poor sleep and, fortunately, earache.
It's such a popular plant it even has a moth named after it, the Mullein moth which has bright yellow and black caterpillars and lays its eggs on buddelah and verbascum.
ON THE PLOT
If you’re itching to sow something on the plot rather than harvesting, then most salad aficionados have ‘sow radicchio’ written in their grubby calendars for the first two weeks of July.
Why wouldn't anyone want to grow this most elegant salad crop given its deep crimson leaves contrasting against the cream or brilliant white veins?
Even saying it out loud makes you sound like an extra from The Sopranos. Its Italian anscestory made clear in its sing song type names like ‘Rosso di Treviso Precoce’ or even the popular speckled variety ‘Castlefranco’.
If there was a prize for the most stylish and elegant salad ingredient it would go to radicchio every year without fail. They also add bitterness and crunch to a bland or pointless salad.
They are easy enough to grow once you've got them to germinate, so the key is to keep them away from direct sunlight and in a cool place if you can find one. Pretty soon they’ll look like established seedlings about an inch in height. They can go outside when they start to heart up or look like the leaves are huddling together.
There is still time to sow French beans in the hope that we’ll get at least a touch of rain in the next month or two.
About now strawberry plants are sending out runners so snip off the ones you don’t want and train the ones you’re keeping. You can even train them into a pot.
Throw out any strawberry plants that have been fruiting for three years and replace with captured runners ready for over-wintering.
Keep sowing bushy herbs like parsley, coriander and tarragon, saving yourself a fortune as you go. The cost of food now seems astronomical when compared to only a few years ago so it's well worth growing herbs for all year round flavour and colour.
Sow ‘White Lisbon’ spring onions at monthly intervals and keep watered.
Keep an eye out for potato blight, especially in humid weather, and as soon as you see it cut the tops off and burn them as soon as you can.
Try and accumulate enough veg from the patch for a whole dinner and feel completely smug about out. You've earned it.