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Happy Gardening in the vegetable garden

vegetables
vegetables

(Chelsea Update would like to thank Jennifer Fairfield, owner of The Garden Mill, for the information in this column.)

I am placing an emphasis on what needs to be done in the vegetable garden this month, since that is my passion, but also because July is a big time for veggies.

July should be harvest time for many crops. Spring crops, such as lettuce, spinach, and peas are generally finished producing for now (unless they are getting some good shade), while summer crops, such as zucchini, cucumbers, and early tomatoes will just be getting started by the end of the month.

But July is also a time for planting and starting new seedlings for fall harvest.

If you want to have broccoli and cabbage for fall, start your own inside by no later than July 10, transplanting the seedlings into your garden when they are 4-to-6 weeks old. They should be ready for harvest by early October.

These can be good “succession crops” to be put into the garden in place of things like onions, once those have been harvested.

Bushell-basket-veggiesYou can plant late season successions of lettuce, spinach, peas, beets, carrots, and Swiss chard at the end of the month to be ready for picking before it gets too cold. But wait to plant radishes until early or mid-August, as it will generally still be too hot at this point for these cool-weather lovers (they mature very quickly, and will bolt in the heat of August before they can get big enough for eating).

Side dressing

July is also the time to “side dress” your summer crops. Side dressing is just the simple act of giving your plants a mid-season boost of fertilizer. It provides the plants with a little extra food when they need it most – as they are doing the most growing and as they are producing flowers and fruit. By the time they are ready to start putting out flowers, the plants have used up most of the available nutrition in your garden.

Providing a little more fertilizer at this point will make a big difference in whether your garden produces in abundance, which is the point of all this work, isn’t it?

The term side-dressing really just means to apply fertilizer around the plant, in the root zone. Don’t just sprinkle it on top, though – carefully work it into the top inch or so of soil. Fertilizer left on top of the soil often will just wash away before it can break down and be useful to the plant. Don’t get any closer than about four inches from the stem of the plant, as you want the food to be available to the new root growth as the plant is growing and putting out more roots.

Happy gardening.

(Part 2 will run tomorrow.)

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