In your fruit garden in June

Things to do in the fruit garden

Spread straw under
strawberries to help
retain water in the soil
and prevent soil splash
which may spoil the fruit.

• Apply netting over ripening soft fruits to keep the birds from getting it before you do. A special fruit cage is great, but a temporary structure covered with netting will do just as well.!
• Pick fruit to eat fresh, or for juicing, jellies and jams.
• June can be a dry month. See our top ten tips on how to save water in an organic garden. Give fruit bushes, canes and trees a good soak if the weather has been dry for a week or more as water stress can cause fruit to drop. Newly planted, and wall trained, fruit especially will need water. Apply up to 25 litres/sq m (4.5gall/sq yd) every ten days in dry periods. Water at the base of the plant. Mulch if you can to help conserve moisture in the ground.
• From June onwards, strawberry plants will start producing ‘runners’. This is the name for the tiny plants produced on long stems (stolons), which grow from the main plant. They can be used to produce more plants for next season. Removel the rest as they may sap the energy of the mother plant and reduce the crop.
• It is easy to make new strawberry plants as the runners root very easily. Either
• cut runners off the main plant and put them in a pot to root and grow.
• Use a length of bent wire to staple the runner, still attached to the plant, down to the soil to root

• Use the rooted runners to plant a new strawberry bed in late summer. Or leave them in pots outside over winter, then bring into a greenhouse for a very early spring crop.

  
  A second year rhubarb crop
• If your rhubarb is still growing you can continue to harvest it into July. Harvest the stalks with a gentle ‘twist and pull’ motion, rather than cutting the stalks. The leaves are poisonous to eat, but quite safe to put in the compost heap. Don’t  pick first year plants, and only take a few sticks from second year plants.
• Keep rhubarb well watered in dry spells, particularly younger plants.
• Loosely tie in strong new raspberry canes as they grow. To obtain the maximum yield of fruit it is a good idea to thin out the number of new canes to approximately seven per stool. Dig or pull up the excess.

• 
  The new raspberry
  canes are green in colour.
  
  

• Train in new shoots of blackberries and hybrid berries, such as tayberries and boysenberries. Train the young shoots to wires against a fence or wall in one direction and the older fruiting canes in the opposite direction. This method makes picking and pruning simple.
  

• Use a foliar spray of liquid seaweed extract to achieve fruit with enhanced colour and storage quality. Seaweed extract contains natural growth stimulants and a variety of trace elements. Besides improving the quality of your fruit the plants become stronger and healthier so are less susceptible to pest and disease attack. Liquid seaweed is available from The Organic Gardening Catalogue.

Pruning

Top fruit

• Peaches and nectarines
  On wall trained peaches and nectarines rub out buds that are growing directly towards the wall. Tie in the selected shoots and thin the fruits.

• Cherries
  Fan trained cherries and plums should have any shoots growing inwards towards the wall removed. Badly placed shoots also need removing. Pinch back other lateral branches to five or six leaves and tie in.

• Grapes
  Remove the tips of laterals on grape vines three or four leaves beyond the developing fruit clusters. Any side shoots (sub-laterals) on the side shoots need to be pinched back to one or two leaves. Keep vines well trained or you will get a lot of lush growth at the expense of the fruit.

• Plums
  In June, shoots with at least 6 new leaves - pinch back to 6 leaves
  In early September - prune back those shoots to 3 leaves

Soft fruit

Prune red currants, white currants and gooseberries. Prune bushes and trained forms once the plants have stopped growing for the year, usually in late June.

Identify the leading shoot on each branch, and leave it alone. Prune all side shoots growing from the main branches back to 5 leaves.

Fruit thinning

Thin overcrowded
fruit clusters

Fruit trees are laden this year after the cold winter and warm spring. But now is the time to be cruel to be kind. If you leave all the fruitlets to grow, individual fruits may be small, branches may break under the weight, and you risk not having a crop at all next year while the tree recovers.

You may have to take several goes at thinning out fruitlets. It can be difficult to make yourself remove enough to make a real difference the first time round, and it is easy to miss a few clusters.

Top fruit

• Apples and pears
  To increase fruit size, thin within 6 weeks of petal fall, remember that the earlier the thinning is started the larger the remaining fruit will be. If larger fruit size is not your aim, thin after the 'June drop'. This is a natural process that takes place around June - when trees, of their own accord, will shed small, diseased and pest ridden fruits.

  Aim for 1 fruit per cluster, with fruit spaced 10-15cm (4-6in) apart. If fruit is sparse, leave 2 per cluster. Cooking apples, thin to 15-22cm (6-9in) apart.

• 
  A peach ready for picking
  
  
  Gooseberries ripening on the bush

• Plums and gages
  A plum can set so much fruit that its brittle branches may break under the weight of the crop. To prevent damage to the tree, thin the fruits in two stages. Firstly, when the fruits are beginning to form, remove damaged and diseased fruit. Then let the tree shed some of its crop. After this has happened a second thinning, usually mid-July can be done. You should ideally aim for a minimum of 4in (10cm) between fruits. Don't be tempted to leave more.

  Where thinning is not practical - on a large tree for example - prop up branches to support them if the crop is heavy.

• Wall trained peaches and nectarines
  Thinning is essential to get good quality fruit. When fruitlets are grape-sized, thin to one fruit per cluster. When walnut-sized - thin to 15cm (6in) apart.

• Soft fruit
  Gooseberries can be thinned too in order to achieve desert quality fruit. The unripe thinnings can still be used for cooking although they will be quite tart.

Pest & Disease Watch

• Spells of wet weather encourage the spread of Botrytis cinerea (grey mould), especially on strawberries. Inspect fruits regularly, removing any that are infected. Ensure plenty of air circulates around the plants and keep developing fruit off the soil by putting a straw mulch underneath. This stops the soil being splashed on the fruits by rain, which can also spread the mould. It also has the added bonus of keeping the soil moist and aids ripening.

• 
  Gooseberry sawfly larvae

• Inspect gooseberries. Concentrating in the centre of the bush for larvae of gooseberry sawfly. Pick off and destroy.

• Check all fruit trees and bushes regularly for aphids.

  See our Aphid factsheet for more information.
  (Online access to factsheets requires members' password. Find out about becoming a Garden Organic member here.)
• Cut out apple shoots  and leaves infected with powdery mildew. Put the diseased items straight into a plastic bag to reduce the risk of spreading mildew spores to other parts of the tree
  See our powdery mildew factsheet.
  (Online access to factsheets requires members' password. Find out about becoming a Garden Organic member here.)

• Look on apples and plums for faded, speckled leaves with a fine webbing on the surface. This indicates fruit tree red spider mite. Pick off and destroy the leaves if there are only a few. There are numerous predatory mites and insects in the garden that control them.

• 
  Codling moth pheromone traps
  available from the
  Organic Gardening catalogue
  
  
  Pear midge damage

• Continue hanging up codling moth and plum fruit moth traps. Codling moth larvae tunnel into small fruits, spoiling a lot of the flesh.

  See our codling moth factsheet.
  (Online access to factsheets requires members' password. Find out about becoming a Garden Organic member here.)

• Collect up and destroy all June drop fruitlets as these may be harbouring sawfly and pear midge larvae.

  See our pear midge factsheet.
  (Online access to factsheets requires members' password. Find out about becoming a Garden Organic member here.)

• Hoe off or pull out raspberry suckers. This will help reduce overcrowding and avoid fungal disease.

• Net soft fruit  before it begins to ripen to prevent it being eaten by birds.

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