We still have more than 60 days of growing season remaining, and the soil is at its warmest this month. From seed, you can plant beans, corn, lettuce, spinach, and beets, and have an excellent harvest from mid-August to (absent an early frost) October. If you can find tomato and pepper plants that are not ‘leggy’ (tall and spindly), you can also enjoy those vegetables this summer.
They do! Your plants will be competing with weeds for water, sunlight and nutrients in July, and the weeds are, too often, better at grabbing available resources. Your flowers and vegetables win the fight only when the weeds lie, gasping for breath, in the aisles or in a bucket.
Growing plants consume the nutrients in the soil, so replace them naturally by using good compost as a mulch. You’ll get two jobs done (mulching and fertilizing) in one. And, unlike chemical fertilizers, mulch will improve the soil health at the same time.
A mild winter and early spring have given black swallowwort an ominous head start. It looks like a vine as it grows, then a pretty purple flower appears (in June this year) and finally a pod full of seeds (July and August). While the pods look somewhat like those on milkweed, they will kill monarch butterfly larva that hatch from eggs laid on these plants. Pull the entire plant (it will come out easily) by hand before the flowers ripen into pods. Keep an eye on the area because swallowwort may re-appear. Do not compost or throw any swallowwort into other areas. It will aggressively cover everything in your garden. Bag and add to your trash any swallowwort you find on your own property, then encourage your neighbors to do the same.
