Mid-June in the vegetable garden
What's going on the vegetable garden at the moment? In addition to enjoying the first cucumbers and anticipating the first summer squash and tomatoes, I'm keeping my eye on the bush beans and am freezing more broccoli.
I'm also weeding as fast as I can, and planting the second-to-last set
of beans, sweet corn, summer squash, and cucumbers. Oh, and
serving us masses of sugar-snap peas, Swiss chard, black raspberries,
strawberries, and gooseberries.
Bug patrol has become a weekly task, which at the moment just involves cabbage worm removal,
but which will soon expand out in other directions. I don't pick
cucumber beetles (pictured above), choosing the lower-work option I
explains in The Naturally Bug-Free Garden
--- I simply select resistant varieties and succession plant to beat
the bacterial wilt carried by the beetles. (That's not to say that
when a mating pair perches right in front of me that I don't squish
them after taking a picture.)
The
perennial plantings need my attention, but woody plants generally have
to wait their turn at this time of year. Instead of summer pruning
fruit trees, I spend a minute snipping the top off the young basil
plants so they'll bush out and produce many more leaves without rushing
into bloom. Of course, those basil tops make their way onto the
menu too.
What's on your garden to-do list this week?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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