Gardening: Regular feeding, watering and dead-heading are vital | Brian Kidd

Despite efforts to save water by installing water butts, these are now empty and it will be a nice little job giving them a clean before the autumn rains arrive.

The weeds are doing well though, particularly between the crazy paving, all of which needs re-pointing, but that job will have to wait as there are far more important ones to be undertaken.

This is the time of the year when things start to let us down. Hanging baskets and containers aren’t as good as they were in July and it’s only August, all the annuals should still be looking good.

The main reason for the lack of colour is because the plants have not been fed and watered properly plus a lack of attention to the removal of dead flowers.

I spent several hours dead-heading all the plants last week, every seed head was removed and all the dead flowers too. It took ages and Bidens in particular was difficult because the lovely flowers are on long stems and it is difficult to see whether the rounded flower buds are still to open or whether they are dead heads?

We decided to cut a lot of them back to where there were frills of leaves and then gave all the containers a feed of Maxicrop Complete.

This is quite an expensive plant food but it feeds the compost and the compost then feeds the plants whereas cheaper ones do nothing for the soil and just feed the plants.

In order to save water, I put a bucket below each basket before watering. It's a bit of a nuisance and takes time but does save water.

Within a few days the Maxicrop brought new growth on all the plants and the Bidens are now all shooting again from the frills of leaves. They will still be brilliant right up until the cold weather arrives.

You might probably know there is a little knack when dead-heading petunias of all types.

Have a look at yours and you will see what I mean.

The petunia flower is right at the tip of all the shoots.

The ones below that are all dead flowers although they look as if they are still to come into bloom.

Look further down each side shoot and there are the seed heads.

These must be removed and scissors are very handy for this job.

All annual plants have a natural urge to produce flowers because they are genetically programmed to produce seeds in order for the species to survive.

Once the flowers are pollinated the seeds form and the plant is then quite content not to produce any more flowers unless encouraged to do so.

That’s where we gardeners come into play.

We keep removing the dead flowers and feed the plants. The plants are concerned there are no seeds so they keep growing so that eventually seeds are produced.

The flowers in our gardens must be completely frustrated... if you see what I mean!

THIS WEEK’S TOP TIPS

Now the weather has changed, mow the lawn in a different direction the next time it needs a cut. This reduces weeds because a lot of them lie flat on the surface when the lawn is always cut in the same direction.