When to start feeding

By now the general borders and lawn in your garden are getting into full growth and you can start feeding them.  Absolutely not essential but you will see a difference if you do.

I am not giving you very detailed instructions on feeding - there is a ton of information if you Google it.  Different plants have different needs at different times and you can finesse it down to the nth degree.  Over the years I have done this or that and bought different foods for different species but now I do just what my (excellent gardener) mom did all her life - one basic food for the lot applied during the summer.

little round grains of food

I have a tub of granular feed that I buy by weight from Gordon Riggs now and again.  Any 7-7-7 granular feed will do - mine is Growmore.  Here's how I use it:

2 oz instruction for general feeding

You may want to weigh and measure what 2 oz a square yard looks like just once but after that you get a feel for it.  Two ounces is a small cupped part of my hand and the fence panels are six foot long and border is about 4 feet deep so roughly that amount twice for each fence panel - easy peasy.  You'll figure out yours in a similar way.  Try to do it on the first or last day of every month and that makes it easy to remember.  First day for me - weather permitting.  

Hanging baskets and other containers get a Sunday dinner every week with any cheap fruit, flower, all purpose liquid feed that I pick up from here and there- mostly Lidl and places like that.

If I am growing any plant which is to flower and then give me fruit or veg from that, they get the same treatment.  

So, basically anything not in the ground gets liquid feed weekly and anything in the ground gets dry granular 7-7-7 monthly.  Couldn't be easier (or cheaper).