Your plants are in the ground. Your cool-weather plants are showing signs of heat stress and maybe they’re slowing down. Heat-loving plants like tomatoes and squash are actually starting to grow but they haven’t produced any food for you yet. Here’s a list of activities you can do in the garden to get the most out of your season as it gets hot outside!

• Mulching
• Watering
• Weeding
• Monitoring for pests and diseases
• Pruning, staking and tying tomatoes, peppers, tall floppy flowers
• Feeding plants with organic fertilizers
• Harvesting
• Succession planting

Mulch

If you haven’t yet, it’s not too late. Mulch is amazing. It keeps the soil cooler and more moist during heat waves and dry spells. It prevents weeds from growing. It protects lower leaves from getting splashed with soil during rainstorms (this keeps your veggies cleaner and prevents the spread of diseases and fungal infections). The right mulch for the right crop and climate can protect your plants from slugs and can add beneficial soil life to your garden soil. It’s worth experimenting with different mulches to find one that works best for you. 2 general rules for mulching vegetables: depth should be about 2″, make sure each plant has about an 1″ breathing room between its stem and any mulch

• composted woodchip mulch: best for trees, shrubs, perennials, and flowers.
• straw (NOT hay): this year I bought a bag of chopped up straw meant for seeding lawns and mulched all my beds with the one bag. It seems to be working quite well and I think it’s preventing some slug issues. Benefits: great at suppressing weeds and many pests, creates a “bacterial-dominant soil biology” which is especially great for brassicas and squashes, it also looks pretty great. Pitfalls: you’ll have to buy it and straw isn’t super cheap. That being said I bought one bag for $20 and it covered a pretty large garden.
• mulched leaves: I like to cover my beds with a thick layer when I put the garden to bed in the fall. Rake or blow your leaves into a straight line and run over it with your mower a couple times. Benefits: this stuff is absolute gold for your soil and is totally free. Pitfalls: it might attract more slugs and snails, it’s more available in the Fall than the Summer
• grass clippings: if you mow the lawn and there are big clumps of grass you can rake up or you have a collector on your mower, this makes wonderful mulch. HOWEVER, you MUST let the grass dry until it’s brown in the sun before putting it around your plants. Green grass clippings will burn your plants with excess nitrogen. Benefits: totally free. Pitfalls: you have to solarize it first, there might be weed seeds in it.
• unsifted compost: if you have a good finished compost that has lots of big bits you can side-dress your plants with this. Benefits: it really gives each plant a huge boost in nutrients. Pitfalls: it doesn’t really suppress weeds very well.
• plastic: mostly used at the beginning of the season to warm the soil quickly for melons, squashes or other heat-loving crops. Benefits: warms the soil early and keeps it warmer into the Fall, best for weed suppression, looks very tidy. Pitfalls: it will probably warm the soil too much for most crops at this time of year, it’s not water permeable so it’s best for gardens that have driplines under the plastic, lots of landfill waste because you generally can’t reuse it the next year.

Watering

Seems straightforward, but it isn’t always. Brenda wrote a whole post with tips about watering your garden. Read it here.

Weeding

If you can spend 5-10 minutes weeding in the garden each day and a little more over your weekend, it won’t ever feel overwhelming. The absolute most important weeds to pull are the ones that are growing very close to your crops and the ones that are going to seed. If you can prevent weeds from throwing their seeds in your beds, you’ll be much happier later. Weedwack or mow the border of your garden so seeds don’t spread and try to avoid putting any seedy weeds into your compost pile.

Monitor for pests and diseases

Each year is different and brings different challenges. If you can spend a few minutes a few times a week examining all of your plants closely, you can often catch issues quick enough to control a larger problem. Here are a few issues I’ve noticed this year. Please email us with your questions and pictures!!!

Slugs and snails

The best prevention you can do is make sure no leaves are laying on the soil surface. Pick off the lowest floppy, yellow, or brownish leaves from your leafy greens and toss them in the compost. Lettuce, chard, kale, cabbage, broccoli, beets, squash, cukes all need regular cleanup maintenance to reduce the food supply of slugs. When I see one, I pick it off and step on it or throw it in the pond for the frogs and ducks. I also have had good results from diatomaceous earth, which is an organic-friendly powder that is safe and food-grade. You’ll have to reapply it after it rains each time. You can sprinkle it around your plants or right on the leaves.

Cabbage worms

These @*$holes got into one of my cabbages and a few of my broccoli early enough that they ruined the whole plant. They are extremely camouflaged and lay along the veins on brassica leaves and eat them until you pick them off. If you see your leaves looking very chewed up, check well, underneath the leaves as well for the worms and any eggs. I think between these criminals and the early heat waves, my broccoli didn’t have a very good Spring. Often there are less insect pests in the late summer succession.

Allium leaf miner

This was a new one to me. Turns out there are introduced, invasive buggies that get into the bulb of your onion when it is young and eat out the core. The leaves above ground look crimped and curled. The only thing to do about this is pull them out (make sure you get the whole bulb, root and all, and burn them at your next bonfire or throw them in your trash. Luckily, I think I got on top of it quick enough that they didn’t spread to every plant.

Flea beetles

This is always an issue with brassicas (especially kale) planted in the Spring and left uncovered. My kale went from GORGEOUS and perfect at about mid-June to swiss cheese at the beginning of July. The best way to prevent these pests is to cover your plants with row cover or insect mesh as soon as you plant and only remove it to harvest. This article has a couple of suggestions for organic, easy to make sprays with soapy water or garlic/pepper spray. The good news is, they generally are less vigorous and destructive in the Fall succession.

Japanese beetles

I’m finding these most attracted to my flowers (especially dahlias and roses), but I’ve also found them on my squash, peppers, beans and broccoli. They seem like they’re not terribly picky. I’ve been picking them off and plopping them in a jar of soapy water. There are many suggested controls floating around the internet. It seems like neem oil spray might be the best option because the neem is passed along to the larvae and and will kill them before they hatch next year.

Pruning, staking, and tying up

Especially in all this heavy rain, a plant can go from holding its own to falling over and breaking a stem in one storm or windy day. This is a good time to stake your taller flowers–sunflowers, amaranth, dahlias, even zinnias sometimes.

It’s also a good time to give your tomato plants a good prune and make sure they are tied to their trellis so that the swelling fruits and the top-heavy plants don’t tumble down and break. Make sure you tie the tomato plants loosely so that they don’t choke as they grow! I really like this roll of vegetable velcro because you can move it around or loosen it as the plant grows. You can find it at any garden center.

With sharp, clean (clean with rubbing alcohol or soap) pruners or scissors, cut off the lower leaves that are touching the ground or are directly covering any bunches of ripening tomatoes. You can also keep your tomatoes productive and tidy by pruning off any suckers that grow from the nodes of each leaf.

Feed your plants

All though it’s not strictly necessary with in-ground plants in rich, fertile soil, it will give them a boost in growth and productivity to give your plants a feed a few times each season. Most container plants should be fed once every week or two because at this point they probably have exhausted the nutrients in their pot.

For all around feeding, I really like Neptune’s Harvest fish and seaweed emulsion. Follow the instructions on the bottle and don’t overdo it. If you’re feeding lettuce or anything that you’ll be eating the leaves, make a weak solution and water at the root (it’s smelly!). For flowers or anything like a squash or pepper that’s looking a little yellow or stunted, you can also mix a weak solution and spray it right on the leaves. For leafy plants like cabbages, lettuce, swiss chard or any plants that haven’t started flowering yet, a feed higher in nitrogen is super helpful. For a boost in flower or fruit production get a good “Tomato/Flower” feed and water it in.

Some vegetables, flowers and herbs actually do better in less fertile soil. Bush beans are actually known to start to vine in high nitrogen soil. Salvia flowers and many Mediterranean herbs actually do better in poor soil. Medicinal compounds are generally in higher concentration when the plant is somewhat stressed.

Harvesting

The best part! I hope you’ve already gotten a great harvest from the early vegetables and are starting to cut and enjoy bouquets of your flowers! My zinnias are really starting to bloom and my salvia flowers are spreading and creating the most charming blue-violet ground cover! If you’re enjoying your flowers in your beds and borders, be sure to dead-head (cut off the spent blooms) to encourage more flowering.

My MVP this year so far has been my swiss chard! I have to admit, I never really loved it in the past. This year, though, I have come to love how hardy they are in the intense heat, drought and monsoon storms we’ve had. I’ve been throwing it into every meal and cooking it like spinach–a light 5 minute sauté or steam with some garlic, salt and pepper is all it needs. A couple of my plants sent up a flower stalk and I just cut that stalk at the base and the plants have gone on as if it never happened!

Sometimes I get all excited and harvest a bunch and then don’t have time to cook, process and preserve it all. Almost all vegetables can be preserved for later. There are endless resources in books and all over the internet. Do some research and try a few recipes that look appealing to you! I did have a bumper crop of lettuce, which doesn’t have any preservation quality, and I found myself giving bags to my friends and neighbors!

If you have any recipes or favorite techniques send them to us and we’ll post them for our community!

Succession planting

As you harvest your Spring crops, you’ll have space for more! See our blog post all about succession planting and crop rotation.

Let us know if you’re interested in a Fall collection from us!