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Summer is here! My garden is producing peas, carrots, summer squash and lots of veggies for salads. It’s time to keep after the weeds and to irrigate faithfully. The peas and summer squash and later the cucumbers and beans will need to be picked often to encourage more blooms and, consequently, more fruit. Allowing the fruit to become overmature on these plants will cause them to stop producing.
For some people, spring got away from them and the vegetable garden didn’t get planted. It’s not too late. On the contrary, in many ways July is the perfect time to start a garden. Unlike April, you don’t have to worry that your soil is too wet to work and the beans aren’t going to rot in the ground.
I know many things planted in July grow well, because I do it myself. For me it is a second or successive crop. I have a small garden, so I try to keep what space I have producing all the time. When one crop comes out another goes in. My over-wintering cauliflower were done producing by early June and the tomatoes are now filling their spot. By late June the remaining spinach was bolting, so that was replaced by beans. Half of my early lettuce has been harvested, so it will soon be time to replant that area.
Bush beans, beets, collards, kale, lettuce, mustard, pak choi, radishes, Swiss chard and turnips can be planted anytime in July. If you want to seed broccoli, carrots, endive, kohlrabi, or green onions, do it as soon as possible. The last half of the month is a great time for putting in a fall crop of peas or spinach.
The backs of seed packets tell you when you can first plant that crop. Unfortunately, they don’t say how late in the season you can sow and reasonably expect a successful harvest. I have a chart of last planting dates for common vegetables in the Puget Sound area. For a copy, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Summer-Planted Crops, Snohomish County WSU Extension, 600 128th Street SE, Everett WA 98208.
Bury your summer-planted seeds slightly deeper than usual and be sure to keep them very well watered. Seeds must be kept moist to germinate and July averages less than an inch of rainfall. Check the soil frequently, even when we have had showers. It rarely rains enough in summer to wet the soil deeply.
In addition to the things mentioned above that are grown from seed, a few other crops could be added to the garden from transplants. Check better nurseries in your area for tomatoes in big pots and for well-grown seedlings of Brussels sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower. Choose only young, good-looking transplants of these last three. Old, stressed seedlings will never produce properly and are a waste of time and money.
Whether you are planting your first crop of the season or your second, remember to rotate. Crop rotation means planting crops from the same plant families in different parts of the garden each year. Crop rotations are helpful to break soil-borne disease cycles. If host crops are moved around each year, pest populations can’t build up as easily. Rotations also allow soil nutrients to be used well, because different crops use various soil nutrients at different rates.
Rotate so that no crop is in the same spot more than one year out of three or four. If that is impossible, do the best you can. A gardener with only one bed can switch the crop from the east side to the west side and vice versa. The most critical rotations, in my opinion, are the onion family (onions, scallions, leeks, shallots and garlic) and the cabbage family (cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collards, kale, kohlrabi, mustard, pak choi, radishes and turnips).
Keep planting and enjoy home-grown veggies all the way through the fall.
Hortsense: Managing plant problems with Integrated Pest Management
