June looks like a month when nothing should be happening in the garden, but the experienced gardeners know otherwise. The ground is cold enough to slow growth but not frozen, which is exactly what long-season crops like garlic and bare-root trees want. If you get the timing right this month, you’ll be a full season ahead of gardeners who wait for spring.
What you should plant this month depends enormously on where you are. A gardener in Whangārei has a completely different window from one in Alexandra. Our free interactive tool — the Newswire NZ Gardener’s Planting Calendar — lets you pick your region and see exactly what to sow, plant and harvest this month for your patch. Worth keeping open in a tab while you read the rest.
Garlic — the one plant everyone should be putting in
The traditional rule is shortest day to longest day: plant in late June, harvest in late December. It’s a rule that holds up almost everywhere in New Zealand. Plant individual cloves pointy-end-up, 5cm deep, 15cm apart, in rich well-drained soil that’s had compost worked in. Don’t bother with imported supermarket garlic — it often carries disease. Get seed garlic from a specialist supplier.
Bare-root fruit trees and roses
This is the month. Apples, pears, plums, peaches, nectarines, cherries, apricots, pluots, figs and feijoas are all sold bare-root from now through August. They’re cheaper, establish faster, and you get a much bigger choice of varieties than potted trees. Plant with the graft union 5cm above soil level, stake firmly, and prune to an open vase shape after planting.
Bare-root roses are available from the same suppliers. Plant them in sunny spots with plenty of compost, and prune them back hard.
Winter greens — still in season
- Silverbeet, kale, spinach — keep picking; they’ll regrow.
- Cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli — last chance to get seedlings in for mid-winter heads.
- Broad beans — final sowing window in most regions. Pinch the tops off when flowers set.
- Rocket, mesclun, bok choy — succession sow every three weeks in sheltered spots.
- Hardy herbs — parsley and coriander still go in now; mint and thyme are bulletproof.
Warm north — citrus and avocado
North of Auckland, this is an ideal month to plant lemons, mandarins, limes and grapefruit. The roots establish in the cold months without the stress of summer heat. Avocado trees (‘Bacon’ and ‘Reed’ are hardier than ‘Hass’) also go in well now if you’ve got a frost-free, wind-sheltered spot.
Cold south — pruning season
Dormant pruning is the job for cold-region gardeners this month. Cut stone fruit (peach, nectarine, apricot, plum) while the sap is down. Spray with copper at bud-burst and leaf-fall — the two most important sprays of the year for preventing leaf curl. Prune apples and pears to maintain an open vase or espalier shape.
Ornamentals and bulbs
Tulips should be in the ground by the end of the month. Hellebores are flowering now — plant fresh ones while you can see the colours. Pansies and violas provide the backbone of winter colour; keep them dead-headed for continuous flowering. Roses benefit from a winter mulch of compost over the root zone.
What NOT to plant this month
Nothing outside the cool-season list above. Soil temperature is already below 10°C in most of the country — too cold for almost every summer vegetable or flower to germinate. Any heat-lover you plant now will just sit and rot.
Use the tool
The hardest part of gardening in Aotearoa is that generic planting advice — the kind you’ll find on the back of seed packets imported from the UK or California — is almost always wrong for our conditions. Even advice written for New Zealand is often written for Auckland and quietly fails gardeners south of Christchurch.
That’s why we built the Newswire NZ Gardener’s Planting Calendar. Pick your region once, and it shows you exactly what to sow, transplant, and harvest this month — plus a reverse lookup where you can type in any plant (tomato, feijoa, dahlia, pōhutukawa) and see the ideal window for your patch. It’s free, it works on your phone, and it’ll save you a lot of guesswork.
What are you planting this month? Drop a comment below and tell us what’s going in the ground in your garden — and which region you’re in, so other readers can compare notes.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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