It is easy to be enticed into gardening in the spring when dreams of tomatoes and sunflowers seduce. It is harder to stay motivated as the temperature soars and the weeds multiply. Middle to late summer is a crucial time in the garden, and working smart now will pay off with great benefits later. Here are some of the most important late season gardening activities to focus on, to spare you a mess to sort out, and leave you more time for your shady hammock.
Keep Up with the Harvest
You probably waited and waited for the first zucchini blossom to open and lost your patience willing the peppers to flower, but now that they are plentiful, it can be tiresome to maintain a daily harvesting schedule. Unfortunately, when you fall behind on picking, you endanger the vegetables that lay waiting for you; they become susceptible to insect damage, weather conditions, and some plants even become complacent and reduce their production if not regularly picked. It is vital to continue picking if you would like the tasty produce to persist until the frost. Likewise, many flowers continue to bloom if they are regularly snipped for bouquets. Spend an afternoon doing some catching up. Afterward, each day’s harvest should only take a few minutes for each crop. Your plants will be healthier and you will probably have some very healthy produce that you can preserve by way of freezing or canning for another time.
Work on the Compost
Whether you keep a continual compost pile going throughout the year or are a compost newbie, late summer is a great time to work on in-garden composting. If you have a bed whose crop has already come and gone, or just a spare area you would like to be fertile and productive next year, you could establish some comforter-style compost to enrich your soil, keep out weeds, and make next year’s planting even easier. Choose your area, cover the ground with grass clippings, kitchen scraps and fallen leaves and let Mother Nature work on turning it all into gardening gold for next spring. Most summer and fall made comforter compost should be ready for planting the following spring.
Plant Now, Eat Later
Consider some late season plantings that will be ready to eat in the fall with little work. Mid summer is a great time for planting brassicas, such as cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower, as well as storage crops like carrots. You can also sow fall peas, lettuce, kale, and chard. Check the ‘days to maturity’ on seed packets and count backwards from the first average frost date in your area. Add on a few days to accommodate for shortening sunlight as fall sets in. Beyond the first frost, many greens will stay ready for picking with little work. Using a plastic covering at night will often extend the harvest for several weeks.
Maintain Good Garden Notes
One of the best habits for any gardener is to keep specific notes. Just like weeding, this can seem like a chore after a few months, but these notes can be invaluable when you do your planning for next year. Did those green zebra tomatoes ripen early or late? Were the squash as productive as the packet claimed? Did it really rain as much as I remembered? (If you live in the northeast, the answer is yes for 2009!) Writing down a daily or at least weekly account of weather conditions, soil conditions, and the type and abundance of produce harvested can help you determine how to improve in the following seasons. You have done all the hard work—now be sure to learn something from it!
Just Weed It
You don’t even want to think about pulling another weed, but remember this: a weed that is allowed to go to flower is much more troublesome than a pulled weed. Do your best to eliminate weeds before they set seed and sprinkle their villainous babies all over your garden to wreak havoc next spring. Most weed seeds will be killed in a properly hot compost pile, but to be safe, you may want to keep especially tenacious weeds in a separate pile you do not put back in the garden.
Relax & Enjoy
Now that you know the most important late summer gardening activities, stay abreast of them, spend some time swinging in that hammock, and don’t forget to make some wonderful organic meals with all your fresh produce—you’ve earned it!
