Carol is now harvesting the first of her carrots and has been dining off an abundance of chard for weeks! A visit to some native foxgloves thriving in a nearby hedgerow reveals the secrets to success with growing these wonderful plants, and kicks off a look at the whole family of plants to which they belong. This includes snapdragons, verbascums and penstemons — some of our most useful garden plants, all well loved by gardeners and insects alike.

‘Hedges and edges' get the limelight this week, too. Carol looks at their importance to the style and layout of a garden, advises on how to grow your own wildlife-friendly hedge and shows us the best way to take stem cuttings from honeysuckle. And a new raised bed offers the opportunity to demonstrate the best planting design for very tall plants, even if you have only a very tiny outside space.

Summer at Glebe Cottage sometimes means changeable weather — sultry, showery and altogether typically British! But this never daunts Carol, who takes the opportunity to investigate one of our richest plant habitats: watery wetlands and bogs. The pond at Glebe Cottage is now lush with rich green foliage. Back in the spring, Carol added plants that would thrive in this shady, boggy area. Now, these are living up to their promise, and none will be more spectacular than the native yellow flag irises she had dug up and moved from elsewhere in the garden. Ubiquitous and easily recognised in the wild, she shows us how it frequents waterways throughout the British Isles. This moves Carol to celebrate the iris family — a group of plants that brings elegance and drama into the garden, from the uncanny hues of ‘Katharine Hodgson', which flowered in the garden in January, to Carol's new planting of bearded iris on her shed roof. Other members of the same family get a look in, including advice on how to plant and cultivate gladioli corms, and digging out an overcrowded row of hesperantha — all of them gorgeous additions to a summer garden. In the vegetable garden, this is a big week for salad, from planting out little gem lettuce to how to sow more summer salad to keep the succession going, including micro mizuna and rocket.