What you should be doing in your garden now

Cut me down! Euphorbia and Cranesbill will look great soon if you deadhead.

I hate snails.

1. Deadheading roses, cutting the former flowers down to the first set of 5 leaves. You can also cut any weak or diseased branches. Some types will re-flower.
2. Cutting down cranesbill (hardy geraniums), removing all of the flowering stems down to the ground. You should be left with some healthy leaves that haven't flowered yet. These will produce more flowers in a few weeks.
3. Deadhead other flowering plants. Some of them will also flower again. Butterfly bush is wonderful this way; it will keep flowering till fall as long as you cut off the dead blossoms.
4. If you have raspberries or boysenberry-type plants, cut off the canes to the ground once they have finished fruiting. New canes will come up that you will need to tie to their supports. I try to imitate the commercial growers and bend them down at the top and tie them. I assume they, like other rose-family plants get more flowers that way.
5. Prune anything that looks out of control or dead.
6. It's a good time to prune dwarf trees if they are getting too tall. You can prune apples, cherries, plums, apricots, etc. to a height that you can reach. Summer pruning helps to control height, whereas winter pruning stimulates growth.
7. Water, water, water.
8. Continue to fight slugs and snails. Snails lay around 85 eggs at a time, ever 4-6 weeks. They are most active February - October. In case you didn't notice, that is most active for 9 months of the year. Anyway, try Sluggo. It can be used on vegetable gardens and is non-toxic.
9. Fertilize. I use a great organic mix that I've been using for years. I use it on my vegetable and flower gardens. Here's my recipe, adapted from a book written by Steve Solomon called "Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades." It's a great book, updated frequently with the latest information about our area.  Read more about it here.
   Here's the recipe I use:
• 1 part alfalfa meal
• 1/2 part finely ground ordinary agricultural lime
• 1/2 part dolomitic lime
• 1 part rock phosphate
• 1 part kelp meal

Buddleia with too much nitrogen.
This is about 8' tall and mostly leaves.

I buy these in big bags at the farmer's co-op. You can get small boxes also, but this is a lot more expensive. Mix these all together on a big plastic tarp with a shovel. When well mixed shovel it into a nicely sized garbage can with a lid. It will last a long time. I put 1/4 cup of this mixed into the soil for a gallon pot, maybe a tablespoon for a 4" pot or smaller. Big stuff gets a lot more.

Sometimes this mix has too much nitrogen and makes my plants get more green and less flowers. You can cut down the alfalfa meal to fix this if it is a problem.

Don't whack me down. Flowering onion looks cool even
without the flowers, and you get seeds for more plants.

Solomon also recommends applying a lot of rock phosphate (kind of a small gravelly looking product) on our soils in the Pacific Northwest, because our soils are so deficient in Phosphorus. This makes a lot of the other nutrients in fertilizer unavailable to the plants. You'll have to read Solomon's book to find out how much rock phosphate to add, or you could ask me to look at my book. But remember, I'm lazy this time of year.