This time of the year, almost every garden looks pretty. Take some time to walk around and look, enjoy the fragrance, absorb the beautiful colors into your pores. When you're done enjoying the June garden, a little mid-season maintenance is in order. Here's a list to help get you started.

Eliminate as many weeds as you can. They steal moisture, nutrients and sunlight from your plants. Shallow cultivation of the soil around plants loosens weeds so they're easier to pull. Regular cultivation will also aerate the soil, allowing oxygen to reach plant roots where it's needed.

Apply mulch to keep weeds down. Use compost, bark dust, decomposed sawdust or landscape cloth or thick newspapers.

Groom flower beds by removing the dead blossoms from spring-flowering bulbs. Bulb leaves should be left alone until they have completely died back; they're manufacturing energy to carry them through next winter.

Remove spent blossoms of annual flowers. "Deadheading" promotes heavier blooming of many ornamentals and prolongs flowering for a longer time.

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Pinch back the growing tips of annuals to make them branch.

Pinch off flowers of annual herbs. Once flowering, they stop growing and lose fragrance. Eventually you'll get tired of trying to keep up with the pinching, and the flowers will win out. Just before they do is an excellent time to harvest.

If you find bugs making a mess out of your flowers and vegetables, the first thing to do is to identify what type of insect it is. An insect book with color pictures helps to make the ID, and it might become as indispensable to you as your favorite pruners. If you aren't able to discover damaging bugs during the daytime, go out with a flashlight at 10:30 or 11 p.m. to look for night feeders such as earwigs, slugs and snails. In general, water when the soil is dry an inch or two under the surface.

If you use drip irrigation, check the system to see if it's working correctly. Clean or replace clogged emitters to make sure water is evenly distributed. Reset automatic timers to suit your needs.

Throughout the growing season, find time to go out into the garden and just delight in it. Then while the memories are still fresh, take notes on what's planted where, what seems to be working and what does not. I'll bet the information will come in handy some day.

Coming up

• Join the Master Gardeners at the first Master Gardener open house from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center Extension gardens, 569 Hanley Road, Central Point. View improvements to the display gardens, including roses, lavender, xeriscape, orchard and more. Bring a picnic lunch to enjoy in the shade grotto. Learn about classes. There will be tractor rides for the kids and lemonade and cookies for all. For more information, call 776-7371.
• Learn the basics of pressure canning from family food education volunteers from 7 to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, June 13, at the Extension Center auditorium. The class is taught by certified instructors so you'll be able to safely and deliciously preserve the bounty from your garden. There is a $5 materials fee. Call Sheila at 776-7371 to register.

Sams Valley gardener Joyce Schillen is author of "The Growing Season," a book on organic gardening. Her e-mail address is joyceschillen@msn.com.