While we do have more time to hang out in the hammock with a cool drink and a Saltscapes magazine, there are plenty of puttering "to-do" chores for the summer months. So go ahead, get dirty-you can always return to the hammock afterwards to read and relax, congratulating yourself on a job well done.

Garden to-dos: July

• Keep planting! Seed small amounts of beans, radish, and salad greens so that you don't have to harvest all your vegetables all at once. Seed more basil if you are a big fan of pesto. Thin plantings of carrots and beets if you haven't already done so.
• Remember that you can continue to plant perennials, shrubs and trees for many weeks to come. Just because bigbox 'garden centres' have shut down doesn't mean planting time is over. Good local nurseries will still be carrying a fine variety of plants, including some later-blooming perennials for late-season colour. 
• Remove some of the suckering branches from tall, ongrowing (indeterminate) varieties of tomatoes, so they'll put more energy into setting fruit than into creating new growth. 
• Get out the shears or pruners and deadhead plants that have bloomed already, such as some of the true cranesbills, delphinium, lupins and euphorbia, especially if their foliage is looking tired. Cut them back to about a third of their normal height, and they'll resprout a fresh crop of foliage, and may rebloom a little later in the summer. 
• If spring bulb foliage is now quite yellow or brown, you can mow or cut it down. It's done its job of preparing food for the bulb for next year's flowering.
  While you're at it, deadhead your container/annual plantings and refresh them with a little organic fertilizer such as liquid seaweed, compost, or manure tea. Shear back each plant by about a third of the plant to a third of its height, and it will put on new, fresh growth. Repeat this process with other sections of the plants in following weeks.
  
• Harvest your culinary herbs before they flower; they'll have the best flavour before they start putting energy into making blooms. 
• You can divide your bearded irises once they've finished blooming. Trim off any rhizomes that are mushy, dried out or showing any sign of insect or disease damage. 
• Deadhead your repeat-blooming roses to prompt more blooms from them. 
• Remember to provide supplemental watering to newly planted trees and shrubs, and to any perennials that you recently divided and replanted. 
• Weeding can be highly therapeutic, so don't be reluctant to wander through and remove weed seedlings, especially of plants like sorrel (Oxalis) and chickweed (Stellaria) which produce prodigious amounts of seed, all of which seem to germinate.
  

Garden to-dos: August   

Keep planting! Now it's time to return to seeding cool-season vegetables like spinach, beets, peas, cabbage, broccoli and (more) salad greens, to produce later crops of these as fresh produce in the autumn.

• Raise your lawnmower's blade/cutting deck up high and don't mow grass too short, especially in hot weather. Leaving grass blades longer helps to cool its roots, keeping it green, and helps to shade out weeds from germinating and growing. Leave grass clippings on the lawn as a source of organic material and nutrients.
• Put away the fertilizer for another year. Trees, shrubs and perennials shouldn't be fertilized after about mid-August; we don't want them putting on a burst of tender new growth that won't be sufficiently hardened off before cold weather. 
• Top up mulch around newly planted shrubs and trees, and water new plantings weekly.
• You can continue to fertilize container plantings to keep them flowering until a hard frost. Don't forget to deadhead your annuals to help promote new growth.
• Deadhead perennials such as echinaceas as flowers fade to keep them blooming.
• Resist the urge to prune shrubs or trees UNLESS you see dead or damaged limbs. Pruning now will promote a flush of growth that could be killed off by winter cold. 
• Have you added ornamental grasses to your landscape plantings? They make excellent, colourful displays through late summer, autumn and right through winter. 
• Late-summer/autumn-flowering perennials to look for include Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium), fall-flowering asters, Japanese anemones, black cohosh (Actaea), Helen's flower (Helenium), brown-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia) and echinaceas.
• Looking for latesummer colour? Hydrangeas, butterfly bushes, caryopteris, and hibiscus are flowering shrubs that bloom late into the season.