Bare-rooted season is in full swing. Trees and shrubs are sold lifted straight from the field while dormant, which means cheaper prices and a much wider selection of varieties than you’d find in pots.

They establish just as well as potted stock, often better, because they spend the whole winter quietly putting roots into your soil before the spring growth push hits. By the time a containerised tree planted in August is still adjusting to its new spot, your bare-rooted tree planted in June is already running.

Look for fruit and nut trees (apples, pears, apricots, peaches, almonds), ornamentals (Japanese maples, claret ash, silver birch, flowering cherry), climbing and bush roses, and hedging plants. June and July are peak months, so get there early because the range narrows quickly as the season progresses and won’t come back until next year.

Before planting, soak the root ball in a bucket of water mixed with Seasol® (40mL per 9 litres) while you prepare the hole. Dig wider than deep, build a small mound of soil in the base, and drape the roots over it so they spread outward and downward rather than bending up. Backfill, firm down well, water in with whatever’s left in the Seasol® bucket, then mulch around the base. This trick helps to protect the roots through the planting process and makes a noticeable difference to how quickly the tree settles in.

Grapefruit, oranges and lemons are at peak ripeness through June and will hold on the tree for weeks without dropping quality, so harvest as you need them rather than all at once.

Watch for fruit dropping before it’s fully ripe. That’s nearly always a sign of stress: inconsistent watering, a nutrient shortfall, or both. For in-ground trees, apply Seasol® Power Feed Plant® Food Granules Fruit & Citrus around the dripline now and water in thoroughly. It’s formulated specifically for citrus and fruit trees, supporting fruit quality and keeping the tree resilient through the cold months. For potted trees, Seasol® plus Nutrients Fruit & Citrus applied as a liquid every two weeks will keep containerised trees in good shape.

If you’ve got a black, powdery coating on the leaves, that’s sooty mould. Scale insects are almost certainly behind it. It looks worse than it is and it’s very fixable. The pest section below explains exactly what’s happening and how to deal with it at the source.

June is a good month for colour. Camellias are at their best right now, particularly the japonica varieties that put out weeks of flowers in white, pink and deep red. They ask very little: a reasonably sheltered position, some protection from hot afternoon sun, and they flower reliably every winter. If you’ve been meaning to plant one, camellias are available now and worth snapping up.

Daphne is one of those plants that you smell before you see. A single established plant in flower will scent an entire front yard on a still morning, and the fragrance carries a long way. Position it near a path, gate, or door where you’ll walk past it regularly and actually notice it.

Cyclamen do well in pots in a sheltered spot: under a verandah, beneath a deciduous tree, tucked against a wall. Hellebores are worth mentioning for anyone with a shady corner that nothing else wants to grow in: they’re nearly indestructible, they flower through winter, and once planted they look after themselves so completely that you’ll forget you even put them in. Then one day in June you’ll notice them quietly flowering and feel like a genius.

Among Australian natives, June is spectacular. Wattles are coming into flower, grevilleas and correas are working overtime feeding honeyeaters and wattlebirds, and hardenbergia is sprawling purple across every fence it can find. Keep natives and camellias flowering through the season with Seasol® Power Feed® All Purpose including Natives, which is formulated for the lower phosphorus requirements of Australian native plants, safe to use across the whole garden, on natives and non-natives alike.

June is rose pruning time across most of Australia, and if you’ve been walking past them trying not to make eye contact, now’s the moment. The only exception is cold inland regions where frosts are still coming regularly, and those gardens are better off waiting another month.

The goal is to remove a third to half of the plant, always cutting just above an outward-facing bud to keep the centre of the plant open to light and air. Take out any dead wood, crossing branches and anything that looks diseased. Sharp secateurs make a cleaner cut and are kinder to the plant. A crushed stem is an open invitation for disease, so it’s worth running a sharpening stone over the blades before you start.

Once you’ve pruned, spray with lime sulphur before any new growth appears. It controls black spot spores, scale insects and a range of overwintering fungal problems while the plant is dormant and can’t be damaged by the spray. Apply it to the canes and to the soil beneath the plant. Done properly every year, this single step makes more difference to rose health than almost anything else you can do.

If you’re planting bare-rooted roses this month, use the Seasol® bucket soak trick (above) before they go in the ground, then water every two weeks with Seasol® through winter. Root development keeps going even when nothing above ground looks like it’s happening.

Sooty mould is almost always a scale problem. Scale insects excrete a sticky residue called honeydew, and the sooty mould fungus grows on that, so the black coating on the leaves is a secondary symptom, not a direct infection of the plant. Fix the scale and the mould clears up on its own within a few weeks.

For scale on plants that are still in active growth, white oil or horticultural oil sprayed thoroughly over all stems and leaf surfaces will smother them. For dormant plants (fruit trees and roses), lime sulphur is a better option. It takes out scale, black spot and a range of other overwintering fungal diseases in a single application, and winter dormancy is the best time to apply it.

After spraying, take a few minutes to weed around the base of the tree and apply Seasol® Plant + Soil Booster. Winter is hard on soil biology, and improving moisture retention and microbial activity now pays dividends when the garden starts moving again in spring.

The most common way to kill a houseplant in winter is to keep watering it as if it were summer. In cold weather, plant metabolism slows significantly. Growth almost stops, which means water uptake drops too. A pot that needed watering twice a week in January might only need it once a fortnight in June. Before you water anything, push your finger several centimetres into the potting mix. Still damp? Leave it. Come back in a few days. Root rot kills more houseplants in winter than anything else, and it is almost always caused by too much water rather than too little.

Central heating compounds the problem by stripping moisture from the air, which stresses plants adapted to more humid conditions. Grouping plants together helps, as they create a slightly more humid microclimate among themselves. Sitting pots on a shallow tray of pebbles with a little water in the bottom raises humidity around the foliage nicely, with the pot base sitting just above the waterline rather than in it. Anything frost-tender that’s been outside through autumn needs to come in or move under shelter before cold nights properly set in.

Plants are growing slowly, not stopped entirely, and a light feed every couple of weeks with PowerFeed® Indoor & Potted Plants keeps foliage healthy and flowering plants going through the cold months. The goal is to support the plant gently rather than push new growth that low light conditions can’t sustain.