Lots of home gardeners, from late June to early August (when plants are really growing!) get into a rhythm of just getting by with watering, weeding, and picking what’s ready, but they don’t do a lot of important things that will make a big difference to how much and how good your vegetables are in the autumn. Experts in gardening from the University say these weeks in midsummer are in fact the most important time of the whole year for planning and putting new things in the ground. Despite that, most of us think of them as a relaxed time between the busy spring planting and getting everything cleared up in the fall. If you do the things people usually forget about at this midsummer time, you’ll find your garden is much more fruitful overall.
1. Succession Planting Fast-Maturing Crops
By the middle of summer, the lettuce, radishes, bush beans and anything similar that grows to maturity quickly will have been picked or are just about done providing a crop. A lot of gardeners then just leave those spots in the garden bare for the rest of the season. But if you quickly plant fresh seeds of the same things in those beds, or switch to things that do well in fall, you’ll have something growing all the time. You can get a harvest of lettuce, radishes, cilantro, bush beans from seeds planted in July, and they’ll be ready to eat comfortably before the first frost arrives.
2. Sowing Fall and Winter Crops
Most people think of planting things in spring, so a lot of gardeners don’t realize July and the beginning of August is when you should plant broccoli, cabbage, kale, carrots, beets, turnips, and other vegetables you’ll get from the garden in the fall. If you begin seeds for these in the middle of summer, either directly in the garden bed or in containers to put out in August, the warm ground will help them sprout quickly and they’ll be ready to be harvested when it gets nice and cool – which is what they like. If you don’t plant during this July/August period, you won’t be able to catch up later and you’ll not have anything to harvest in the fall.
3. Refreshing Mulch That Has Decomposed
By the middle of summer, that mulch you put down in spring usually breaks down, gets washed away by watering, or blows around with the wind, and so it becomes much thinner. If your mulch is less than two inches thick, it won’t do a good enough job of stopping weeds and holding water in the hottest, driest part of the year. That’s when you really need it to do those things! Putting down another two or three inches of straw, broken-up leaves, or any other natural mulch during the summer will rebuild that protective layer and help your garden finish growing strongly.
4. Side-Dressing Heavy Feeders With Fertilizer
By the middle of summer, plants that grow for a long time, like tomatoes, peppers, squash and corn, use up all the goodness in the soil around their roots. Because of this they really need extra food at this stage, and this extra feed is termed a ‘side-dressing’. You give them a boost by spreading compost, well broken down manure or a natural granular fertilizer in a circle around each plant, but don’t let it actually touch the stem. This will keep them growing strongly and making lots of fruit for the rest of the season. If you don’t do this, many of these plants that are hungry for food will by late August show you they are running out of nutrients. You’ll see this in leaves that are a paler colour, slower growth and smaller fruit.
5. Pruning Indeterminate Tomatoes
Tomato plants that don’t have a set size just keep growing and by the middle of summer they can be huge, leafy things. They can even shade the tomatoes themselves, stop air flowing around them, and start using loads of energy for leaves and stems rather than actually making fruit. If you get rid of ‘suckers’ – those little shoots growing in the place where the main stem and a branch meet – and only do this on the ones below the first flowers, the plant will focus on a smaller number of tomatoes which will be bigger and better. Also, taking off lower leaves that are on the soil will lessen the chance of soil diseases like early blight being flung up onto the plants with water splashes. You should do this pruning all through the growing season, but it’s particularly important when the plants are really speeding into growth in midsummer.
6. Monitoring for Late-Season Pest Buildup
By the middle of summer, pest numbers will frequently surge, because warmer weather speeds up how quickly bugs breed. Aphids, spider mites, hornworms, squash bugs, all fairly limited in June, can be causing serious trouble by August unless you’re looking for them and dealing with them. Looking at your plants every week, and specifically the underparts of leaves, plus where stems meet the plant, helps you find small problems while they’re still easy to fix without chemicals: you can pick them off, spray them with water, or use insecticidal soap on just the pests. If you wait until you can see the damage from a distance, the problem has generally gotten too big for a quick fix to handle.
Key Takeaway
Midsummer isn’t a time to relax in the garden. It’s actually when you really need to get things done; this is the best time for planting things for the fall, putting in autumn seeds, replacing mulch that’s broken down, giving lots of food to plants which are giving you a big harvest, trimming tomato plants which keep growing and growing, and dealing with bugs before they do a lot of harm. Gardeners who work at July and August as hard as they do in April and May almost always get a bigger harvest, have fewer issues later in the year, and have a strong, productive garden going into autumn instead of one that is worn out.
Leave a Reply