July Tips

July Tips

The frantic work of spring is over and now it's time to focus on enjoying your garden's bounty.

Harvesting Vegetables -- Keep up with the harvest from your vegetable garden. Be sure to pick small and often. Tiny filet green beans, for example, need picking daily.

Keep new plantings well-watered, but this time of year, pay attention to other parts of the landscape, too. Container plantings can need watering as often as twice a day in hot, windy weather. Lawns need about an inch of water a week.

Watering -- Water deeply and well rather than shallow and often. Educate yourself by taking a trowel after a watering or two and digging down a bit to see how deeply the water has penetrated. Also, when running the sprinkler, set out a pan so you can gauge just how much you're applying.

Whack Your Weeds -- Time weeding for after a good rain. Weeds come out easier and with more of the root.

Planting Trees and Shrubs -- You can continue to plant container-grown trees, shrubs, perennial herbs, and perennial flowers. But do so with caution. As the weather gets hotter, they're more likely to suffer heat stress and therefore perhaps die out. Improve your chances by planting on an overcast or drizzly day.

Deadheading 101 -- Keep deadheading! For the most flowers and tidiest garden, deadhead daily. Some gardeners take a few minutes each morning, making it part of their daily routine.

Feeding Roses -- Continue to fertilize roses.

Continue to pinch the suckers off tomatoes. Suckers are miniature stems that grow out at a 45-degree angle right at the crotch of where a larger stem meets a main stalk. If not removed, the sucker will grow to the size of a whole new plant, creating a tangle of stems that can be a mess to harvest.