July Garden Advice
...all the relaxed connotations of the word abundance.
You asked for it, and here it is: the first in what I hope will be a regular series of monthly garden advice, published during the first week of the month so you can get the most use out of it. Thanks again to those of you who responded to last week’s poll.
Last night my wife and I watched a full yellow grapefruit moon rise over the rooftops from her parents’ patio just outside Detroit. The heavy haze in the sky and the powdery depth of its blue when the sun rises are hallmarks of the season: it’s the zenith of light. Yet Summer Solstice is now behind us. Though still long, each day is now briefer by a minute or two. Kenneth Grahame described the grand arc of seasonal light as a pageant whose guest of honor is the summer wheat, and there’s something symbolic, if not exactly palpable, about the beginning of that arc’s decline. Walking out into the garden, you get the sense that every plant has gathered a whole year’s momentum and is flinging itself with all that energy into the fading light.
But it’s also the beginning of the real harvest season for vegetable growers in the Northern Hemisphere, when our first tomatoes redden in the heat, the herbs shoot up in sprays, and the tender squash swell almost visibly beneath their elephantine leaves. July is the month I associate with the easiest and best sort of eating: cold white wine, improvised tacos, shrimp ceviche sprinkled with too many chives, or lettuce eaten in handfuls while you’re still standing in the garden. July’s in-season fruits and its sun-blanched, easygoing atmosphere carry all the relaxed connotations of the word abundance.
Yet, for all that delicious ease, there are still productive things to be done in the garden. Here are a few tasks you might want to take care of between now and August.
1/ Pinch Suckers Off Tomatoes
Tomatoes, which are perennial vines or quasi-bushes in warmer climates, are treated like annuals this far north. They grow rapidly throughout the hotter months, always in a three-branching pattern, with the new branches shooting out from the place where two of the older branches fork. This growth is all well and good during the earlier parts of the season but, now that the plant has set fruit, you want it to direct all of its energy towards ripening what’s there instead of adding new branches which will not last long enough to produce tomatoes of their own. To ensure that you get as much fruit as possible, go out once a week in July and punch off any new, small branches or “suckers” with your thumb and fingernail from between the forked branches of the plant. While you’re there, it wouldn’t hurt to give them a dose of organic liquid feed.
2/ Dead-Head Roses
Most roses will now have ended their first frothy wave of blooms. The blossoms of some species, especially those with red flowers, actually look quite nice as they crisp from crimson into a dry, brownish burgundy. But avoid the temptation to leave them hanging there and, instead, dead-head the spent blossoms early this month. Dead-heading simply means cutting off the old flowers to make room for potential new ones. The trick is always to cut back to something, meaning that you shouldn’t just pinch off the flower but should use snips to cut the stem just above the next sign of visible growth, be that a leaf or a bud. This process will prevent the rose from sending energy to sections of stems that can bear no more flowers. Keep up a pattern of dead-heading all this month to give yourself be best chance of new flowers, leaving a few alone if you like the cheerful red of rose hips decorating your bushes in fall.
3/ Plant Lettuce
I adore lettuce, which is easy to grow, a big money-saver compared with the prices at the grocery store, and far more flavorful when it’s plucked straight from the garden. I now dedicate about half of our small plot at home to various varieties, some of which have now started to “bolt” or flower. The heat of July and August guarantees that most lettuce will bolt, its leaves turning tough and bitter as the life cycle of the plant reaches its last stages. Thus, now is the point in the year when you should plant a second wave, pulling up some of your gnarlier lettuces, adding some bloodmeal to the soil, and planting new rows that will come into their own late next month. You can sow the seeds directly into the warm earth, but should do so bit by bit, planting about one row per week all this month and next. This tactic will give you a clear succession of good lettuces right through the frost—or even later if you plant some hardier varieties.
4/ Safeguard Winter Squash
Winter squash are still far away from harvest at this time of year, but I look forward to eating them eagerly all summer: delicatas roasted with butter and a grating of nutmeg, butternuts blended with apples into a perfect soup, or spaghettis cooked on the grill and pulled in golden coils out of their steaming shells to serve with a slow-simmered bolognese. My passion for winter squash is therefore rivaled only by my hatred for the squash vine borer, Melittia cucurbitae, a moth custom-made in Hell by Satan himself. These moths lay their eggs on the stalks of squash vines and, when the larvae hatch, they go to work immediately, eating the center of the vines in a matter of hours. It’s a pretty dreadful feeling to see the leaves of a winter squash plant already laden with plumping fruit suddenly go limp, only to push back the bottom leaves and see the webby, extruded hole where these demons of the garden have fatally severed the central stalk. At that point, the whole plant is a loss, so taking preventative measures in July is the only sensible approach. The best solution I’ve found is to sprinkle diatomaceous earth around the base of the plant during July when the risk of the moths is high, repeating the process whenever it rains. During wet summers, the task can be a little arduous, but it’s a lot less cumbersome, and a lot less sad, than ripping out a whole plant and throwing it into the compost.
Whatever else you do this month, make sure you take the time to relish the rewards of your hard work. Cook with your herbs and vegetables as much as you can. Snack on them. Give them away. Don’t let anything go to waste! My wife and I went on vacation one week a few summers ago and found that our zucchini plant had put all its energy into one enormous fruit that had swelled to roughly the size of a young German Shepherd. Squash tastes terrible when it gets that big, but still, the thing could not be wasted. In the end, we walked across town and left it on the roof of a friend’s car. It appeared on top of our mailbox the following morning. We passed it back and forth with our friends in various clandestine raids right up until it was about to rot, then gave it a soldier’s burial in the compost heap. We didn’t get any food out of that squash, but we got another kind of abundance: a legendary goof we all still laugh about. All that is to say, there are lots of different uses for the fruits of your labor—just don’t forget to enjoy them.
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