Your flowers may be out but Oxford In Bloom judge Harry Robinson says you still have a lot of work to catch the eye in this year’s competition. Here are tips and advice for getting the best from window boxes and hanging baskets: I have always said that people can have a garden no matter where they live.

Even if it is only a pot or a window box, people can plant it up and have their own little garden. The secret to a hanging basket is to water it every day.

I know it is a simple thing, but in dry weather they dry out very quickly indeed.

I always used to water mine twice a day and once a week feed them with a dilute tomato feed.

Anyone can do a basket up, but it takes a good gardener to nurture it.

What gardeners should be doing at the moment is deadheading flowers.

When flowers lack freshness or go over, the plant stops flowering because it knows its job is done. If you deadhead it, the plants think they have to carry on so they will keep blooming.

One of the things we will be checking for when we judge the gardens is that plants have been deadheaded and there are no nasty dead or dying flowers.

Another thing to keep an eye on is keeping the weeds down. You need to get to weeds as early as possible to make sure that the plants have room to grow and make sure they have no competition.

Thanks to that hard frost earlier in the year, which I think killed off the bugs, gardens in Oxford are looking really good this year and I have noticed a lot of baskets up already.

Entries to this year’s Oxford in Bloom competition are open until Saturday, July 2, for schools, and Sunday, July 10 for other entrants.