Gardening with Pat Duke: Bedding plants add splash of summer colour to flowerbeds

It won't be long now until people are camping outside garden centres in the hope of making sure they get the bedding plants they crave.

The last week in May is the start of filling out flowerbeds and covering bare earth with established colour. Forget about the pretentiousness of Chelsea and create your own drop in Eden.

It's almost like a sub-culture if you go to any garden centre in the next few weeks where you'll find people paying whatever it costs to obtain petunias, geraniums and Busy Lizzies. You can, of course, buy smaller plants and nurture them at home, which is much cheaper if you can be bothered to wait a month.

I find keeping them near to the house is the key as you can keep a watering can of feed close by and nip out after work just before your first glass of wine in the evening sun (there has to be an incentive). You can, of course, enjoy them when you’re indoors that way too.

Bedding plants are highly sought after because they are easy to just drop in and provide an instant hit of colour that will keep providing cheery petals until September as long as they are dead headed and given enough food and water.

They can be posted as a thematic repeated planting approach in different areas including pots, window boxes and hanging baskets.

If you are thinking of packing window boxes with bedding plants then remember that you'll need to be prepared to water them almost daily as well as giving them a fortnightly all-round feed. Use a compost with high water retention and mix some some bonemeal in there.

In addition to those mentioned above, marigolds and small Antirrhinums seem to love being shoulder to shoulder in small areas. Petunias can take being neglected quite well so will usually survive until you get back from holiday.

Tobacco plants aren’t often seen in window boxes, but seem to be ideal given they thrive with being well watered. They have the added incentive of having fantastic scent in the evenings that will attract moths more than your granny’s wardrobe.

ON THE PLOT

In the same way there is a big push to flesh out the flowerbeds at the time of year, the same applies to planting vegetable seeds.

Cauliflower, peas, beans, carrots and chard can all be sown and kept watered if you can find a ready supply that isn’t from a hose.

If you’ve been keeping cabbages and leeks in a cold frame then you can probably take the small risk and start planting them out in succession now. You can never be sure when the last frost has finally disappeared, but the risk is small now and there’s always risk in life somewhere, so crack on with it as long as you leave some to plant out in fortnightly intervals.

Peppers, tomatoes and chillies need to be in their final position now so they can all start to set fruit and be protected from blight.

Salad crops are starting to produce leaves rapidly, so keep sowing them in trays for replacing those you have cut. Most varieties are cut and come again but you’ll want the young leaves to keep coming.

Keep finding innovative but effective methods of slug and snail defence. I'm finding rings of sharp sand and coffee grounds encircling plants certainly deter the ones I haven’t airlifted away in midnight raids after rain.

Not addressing pests will lead to a spring of wasted effort if you’re not careful. Netting and traps are all part of a successful vegetable garden.

Encouraging wildlife higher up the food chain is a great help, too, as well as being able to leisurely watch them all interacting while you sit and soak up the sunshine with a cold drink.