By Jennifer Fairfield
(Publisher’s note: This is the first of a two-part column. The second part will run tomorrow.)
The Garden Mill will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of my purchasing the store on June 29. I have no idea where the last 10 years have gone, but it has been a pretty fun ride (let’s just forget 2020, shall we?).
I want to thank all of our customers for your support throughout. It has been great getting to know so many of you and talking gardening with everyone. If you happen to be in town on June 29, please stop by – there will be cake.
If you’re still trying to catch up on everything that needs to be done in your yard and gardens, here are some tips for what to do this month:
Vegetable Garden:
If you weren’t as fortunate as I was this weekend to be able to plant your tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, squash, melons – get to that task as soon as you can. Waiting too much longer will mean you may not be harvesting anything until the season is almost done.
Pole beans should also be planted ASAP. Bush beans can be planted through about the third week of June, and I highly recommend planting some each week up until then. This way, you will be harvesting over a longer period, rather than all at once.
You can also plant successions of beets, carrots, dill, parsley, and cilantro through the end of July to ensure a prolonged harvesting season.
If you’d like to have a fall harvest of cabbage and broccoli, plant seeds directly into the garden around the end of June or early July, or start them indoors at that time and transplant the seedlings into your garden by late August. They’ll be ready to eat by late September or early October.
To protect these cool-weather loving plants from the heat of late summer, try planting them in a shady part of your garden or in the shade of other plants.
If you are planting tomatoes, be sure to give indeterminate varieties some sort of support – and consider doing so for determinate ones as well. Put your stakes or cages in at the time of planting, so that you don’t risk damaging the plants’ roots later. Not sure whether yours are determinate or indeterminate (or maybe even what the heck I’m talking about?) First – let’s get the terminology out of the way.
Determinate tomatoes are those that generally grow to about 3 or 4 feet tall and produce all of their fruits at once (or within a short period). These are great if you are canning and want to have a lot of tomatoes to can all at once.
Indeterminate tomatoes can grow to 6 feet or taller and produce throughout the season – all the way up until we get a hard frost. Supporting both types of tomatoes is helpful, because it makes picking the fruit easier, and because it helps to reduce the likelihood of disease.
Giving indeterminate tomatoes support is an absolute must, if you want to get the best results for all your hard work – you get more fruit, and the fruit generally gets larger than it would if the plant is left on the ground. As a general rule, most cherry-type and heirloom tomatoes are indeterminate.
How do you know what type you have? If you have grown your own from seed, the seed pack should tell you. If you’ve bought plants, and can’t ask the grower, look up the seed variety online. Any seed company selling that seed variety should have that information on their site. If you get your tomato plants from The Garden Mill, all of the varieties we sell are indeterminate.
Once you have gotten your tomatoes, squash, cucumber and bean seedlings in the ground (or as soon as the start to grow, if you planted any as seeds in the garden), it’s important to begin a program of spraying your plants with fungicide.
All of these plants are susceptible to many types of diseases, and the only way to deal with these issues is through prevention. Once the diseases set in, you can slow them down a little (sometimes), but you can’t cure them. So, start spraying early, and keep doing it. Follow directions on the fungicide’s packaging to determine how much and how often, but count on doing it generally once per week, unless we get a heavy rain – then re-treat.
Diseases are one of the biggest reasons people don’t get as much from their gardens as they hope. Treating with fungicide early and often throughout the season will make a big difference in how much you get to harvest.
Keep an eye out for pests in your garden. Pests are another reason for lower yields. If you have broccoli, cabbage, kale, or brussels sprouts, those lovely little white “butterflies” you see hanging around your garden are eyeing your plants to lay their eggs on. Those eggs will hatch into little green caterpillars that can totally consume your crop, if you’re not careful.
There are two ways to treat those caterpillars effectively – pick them off and squish them or spray them with B.t., an organic product specifically meant to kill caterpillars. Other pests that can be particularly destructive to your plants, that you should be on the lookout for, include cucumber beetles, squash vine borers, Mexican bean beetles, flea beetles, tomato hornworms, squash bugs, and slugs. There are others, but these tend to be the ones I hear most customers saying they are dealing with (and the ones I am often fighting in my own garden).
Know what pest you are dealing with before you decide on a product to use. Some products work on certain pest and not others. If you’re not sure what the culprit is, there are lots of apps available for smart phones that allow you to upload a picture for identification.
Purdue University’s Extension Service also offers a pretty extensive list of garden pests, complete with pictures and details on the type of damage done. Once you know what you have, you can decide what to use to rid your garden of them. Come in and talk to us, or visit our website for suggestions. Many of the products we carry are ones I use or have used in my own gardens, so I can give you tips on what has worked for me.
