Do These 11 June Garden Tasks ASAP

it's June in the garden and if your garden is growing you've got some stuff to do I know I do so in this video jacqu myself and a few other epic gardeners from around the country are going to share what's going on in our garden what we're doing for chores and why for me one of the biggest things as the garden starts to grow in zone 10B in June it's just chopping stuff back down to size so I just finished up pruning my tomatoes and I'll talk to you really quickly about two things I did over here I have a double poly twine and I'm going single liter what that means is I've picked one single stem the main stem that comes out and we've come through and pruned off the sucker shoots which are the things that are coming out between the main stem and a leaf there'll be something in the middle there cut that off and I have a nice straight line here on what's called my eating tomatoes I'm going to be eating these in like a sandwich or a salad over here I've done something just a touch different I'm still pruning these down to one single leader or one main stem but I didn't do as crazy of a trellising structure I just planted them all about 2 ft apart these are my sauce tomatoes my San Marzano tomatoes so it's kind of up to you how you decide to prune but for me I like a clean single stem but that's not the only thing I have to prune in the garden the pruning continues with my squash patch a crop that number one you probably get too much of and you might not be so sad if you lose a squash by the end of the season but number two gets hit with a ton of diseases powdery mildew being one of the most prolific if you start seeing a little bit of this on your squash you need to take it off immediately and you need to get it as far away from your squash as humanly possible this is powdery mildew which is one of the things that can really decimate a squash plant so overall the patch looks great what I'm going to do now is I'm coming through and I'm removing leaves where I see some damage or I see some Browning or some yellowing because squash just really is just trying to die it's just trying to die all the time from powdery mildew so I'm going to take these off and work my way through my squash patch making sure I'm harvesting as I'm going often times you'll find it on these lower leaves especially as your squash patch starts to get uh kind of bushy right you they'll be shaded out there'll be higher humidity that's where the milw wants to thrive so I just want to come through and clean it all up so when you're dealing with disease that you know you just interacted with like powdering mildew might be a little paranoid but to me I like to just wash up and I also will throw just a touch of disinfectant on here in this case it's just a little bit of soap but you can do some hydrogen peroxide side or another disinfectant spray cuz I really don't want that to spread to anything else that's at least susceptible to powdery milw before I keep pruning the garden is now entering June and it is the perfect time to actually take a look around and assess a lot of your plants many of them are now mature and they are starting to produce their actual crop for example right before me here I have a bed of peppers and one thing that I neglected to do at the start of planting this pepper bed was actually trellising them so let me show you how to Trellis Peppers why it matters and what happens if you don't do it one of the beautiful things about growing peppers compared to other summer crops like tomatoes is that they are very simple to prune steak and support they don't really grow very quickly and they don't need very much all I really do is I take a simple steak like this bamboo here and for a single pepper like this one right here all you're really doing is trying to come between some of the branches I like to get close to the main stem and then I will push the Stak in about an inch away from the plant I don't want to go straight down right next to the stock because that is where the major root ball is and I don't want to damage it so I want to put that in at least about 6 in and then I'll go ahead grab some twine I just use cotton butcher twine this is something you get even at a grocery store doesn't have to be anything fancy I like using this cuz it degrades instead of just being plastic that I then have to deal with so what I like to do is I go underneath a current pepper you don't want to go above cuz you don't want to put any pressure on that pepper and all you're simply doing is tying a loop in this string so there we have it a simple piece of string looped around the pepper and the steak and that is really all you need for pepper plants they don't tend to in my experience break from heavy branches but what they do do is if they get too heavy and especially if there's like a bunch of peppers on one side the pepper plant will start to actually lean if it gets too heavy it'll lean so hard that the plant will hit the ground and it'll dig itself out so while you don't need to do much just literally a steak and a single piece of string will protect your plant from tipping over and unbearing itself before you get to enjoy your Harvest fertilizing is an important part of garden maintenance especially when you're growing everything in containers because containers typically need to be watered much more often than if I was growing my plants in the ground and by watering more often nutrients are leeching out of this potting soil much faster than it would for plants in the ground so I need to replenish them with more nutrients at planting time I will add a granular slow release fertilizer to my pots and my beds slow release fertilizers are great because they're going to provide food in your containers for a longer period of time but the plant doesn't take up the nutrients quite as quickly as if it was a water soluble fertilizer but at planting time I'll typically use biotone by asoma they also have plant tone and then I will maybe add this again to my raised beds and pots two or three times throughout the season but if I notice that my plants need nutrients right away that's when I'll use a liquid fertilizer now fertilizing was one of the most confusing parts of gardening to me when I started and a brand that I came across that I really liked because it seemed to make it much more simplified was fox farm so I actually use two different liquid fertilizers depending on the stage of growth of my plants so I use the grow big fertilizer before my plants have flowered so this one is higher in nitrogen which is going to help the green leafy growth of your plants once they bloom then I switch over to the tiger bloom Which is higher in phosphorus and that's going to help support the growth of the blooms and the flowers on your plants so for me that was just really simple to understand so that's why I've kind of stuck with that brand but honestly just a general all-purpose fertilizer in your garden can be perfect for your plant's needs most of my containers are luckily set up on irrigation so that runs automatically every morning but whenever I am fertilizing I do do that by hand so I'll just fill up my watering can based on the instructions on the fertilizers and then I'll go around and I will handw water all my plants so I try to do that once every 2 weeks again unless I see some sort of nutrient deficiency in a plant that I need to treat right away but that has been a pretty good schedule for me so make sure you are feeding your plants throughout the growing season again especially if you are growing in containers the summer rain and heat has already arrived so I'm going to get my set it and forget it cover crop of cow peas in ASAP and I think you should too June is the perfect month for me to put in a cover crop now I need something that can withstand Supreme Heat over the summer and that will help build my soil back a bit so I've chosen cow peas cow peas are legumes so they fix nitrogen and they're incredibly Lush down here in Florida in the summer which means they're going to make a glorious Green carpet that's going to smother out weed pressure because over the summer with all the generous rain and sunshine it's just an incredible environment for getting lots of weeds in your rais beds so I'm going to smother my weeds and build my soil with cow peas so for me summer is is where my herbs really start to get a little crazy this is a pineapple sage I've gone through a couple pruning rounds on this it's not looking amazing so I want to reset it and the way to do that is just to get a little bit harsh with it so I'm going to come down I'm going to cut off a lot of these flower tips that have already flowered and I'm really looking to shape this plant so that it looks good and sets itself up for future growth now you can let your herbs flow this is summer Savory that's flowering this is some thyme of course that's flowering I can use a lot of this still in the kitchen so I don't need to remove that then I've got a basil that it's kind of up to me do I want to let it flow or am I comfortable removing a lot of this and trying to kind of get it back to a more productive State personally I'm fine but what I'm not fine with is actually right over here is my sage I've been using Sage a lot lately in some summer preparations in the kitchen and you can see I've got some flower stocks here I'm actually just going to come through and trim these all back down personally I haven't found a big deal if Sage starts to flow and then you decide to continue to eat it it seems fun but of course if I really wanted to I could just rip it and replant it with a sage that I actually propagate from a cutting from this very plant June is one of the busiest months of the garden by far there's so many different things to do and keep on track of but there also a great time to start some seeds in particular right now I'm going to be putting in a couple jack-o-lantern seeds because if you want to grow your very own pumpkin to carve for Halloween June is really the time you want to do it they take three to four months really closer to four months to reach maturity so now's the perfect time to get some seeds sew them in the garden so you could grow your own Jacko Lantern but there's so much more to do in June so let me show you some of the tasks that I pay attention to most crucially at this time of here June is really the ideal time to be keeping an eye on your aliens things like garlic or onions if they are starting to dry down even 10 to 20% of the leaves are turning brown then you want to turn off your irrigation or at least stop watering once it reaches that stage it's actually maturing it's starting to dry down and you don't want to get too wet cuz that's going to cause it to rot speaking of garlic once you see at least 50% the leaves are indeed dead you want to go ahead and harvest that and you'll see a nice big bulb and you'll see that the wrappers have started to develop if you wait too long to harvest what happen is you won't get any wrappers and this garlic won't be able to store for a long time so be sure to harvest on time and be sure to cut off the water before they are fully dry and ready to be harvested this task is going to be for warm climates only I'm sorry colder climates please forgive me but as somebody that lives in a warmer climate we are very blessed with a long long growing season and where I live in North Carolina Zone 8A we usually don't get our first Frost until November or December if we're lucky so fortunately this gives us plenty of time to succession sew and squeeze in another round of determinate tomatoes determinate tomatoes have a much shorter lifespan than their indeterminate counterparts they grow way more compact much shorter than your indeterminates and they have a determined amount of fruit that they're going to set over their lifetime and usually it's kind of all at once over like a month or so whereas the indeterminant they're just continuously setting out fruit so the determinats they're going to put out their flush of fruit and then they're done that's it so that's what makes determinants perfect for a succession sewing I like to start my second round in June right now um my first round is already in the ground they're putting out their flush of fruit it'll probably be done in about a month month and a half or so I'll Harvest those I'll pull them out and then I'll plant my round two I'll be aiming for like the end of July early August to plant and then that'll set me up for a harvest in September October so I'm just going to be starting a six C sea tray of these Italian Roman Tomatoes these are one of my absolute favorite Tomatoes ever they are paste tomatoes they're determinant and most paste tomatoes are determinant because when you're making things like sauces and Salsas you often need a lot of tomatoes all at once especially if you're preserving them so for the preserver determinate varieties are our friends these are also very meaty Tomatoes meaning they don't have as much water content as other types so that's also what makes them perfect for sauces and Salsas so I'm just going to be starting these in a six cell and I'll be up potting them every few weeks until they're finally ready to go out into the garden and be my round two since our last frost date here in Chicago is miday that means that basically all of my attention in May is just to getting the plants out into my container garden but June is where my focus shifts to some maintenance task in order to hopefully keep all of these plants alive one of my most important maintenance tasks that I will do throughout the rest of the season is checking my plants for pests now I have a small garden it's about 18 by1 19 Square ft on this deck and there are some pros and cons so I don't have a lot of space for plants which means a lot of the time I may be growing one of a certain type of plant and if it's taken out by a pet I don't have a backup I would have to start it again from seed so I want to be on top of any potential pest damage in my garden a benefit of a small garden is that I can take 5 to 10 minutes walking around my garden and check every single plant for pests usually I will lift up the leaves look for any signs of distress and see if I find anything now I've been gardening here on this deck for about 5 years so I know which pests I'm going to expect to see in the garden I know I'm going to see aphids typically on my zenas but they can pop up on a lot of different plants I will usually have budworms that find my patunas at some point and I know I'm going to have some Japanese beetles on my dollas but I also always get a surprise pest every year I don't use any pesticides in my garden to treat pests typically I'm using one of two things either my hand or my hose I will use my hose to knock the aphids off of the leaves of my plants when I find them I just do that once a day until I no longer see the aphids on my plant it's pretty easy at least in my experience for me to treat aphids in my garden if I see any budworms Japanese beetles anything else crawling around and mching on my plants I will use my hands now I will typically use a gloved hand because I'm not at that gardening level yet of being able to grab the pest with my bare hands but that's how I'll remove them from my garden because I don't want to unintentionally harm any other beneficial insects and actually often I will see ladybugs or wasps actually helping me with Pest Management in my garden ladybugs feed on aphids and the Wasps actually help me with the budworms for me June July even August it's the time of spending 5 to 10 minutes a day in your garden and doing like a walk through just walk through and do some stuff to make your garden better so take this bed for example what do I have here I've got some leaks and what am I noticing I'm actually noticing these leaks are trying to throw up a flower stock I'm going to remove that because I do not want that for this season I actually just want the leak down below so onions are a banial crop meaning that year one they're going to do their bulbing year two they're going to throw up their flower stock sometimes when you're growing them they get confused they think that year 2 is actually happening in year one so you want to remove these and this is one of those things that be very easy to miss unless you just spent a little bit of time in the garden every single day so I'll remove these another thing I'm noticing in this bed is my lettuce it's June this lettuce and here's a really good indicator you see this guy he's just getting a little little weirdly shaped a little kind of funky and tall he is trying to bolt or she you know we can't be assuming this lettuce is gender out here but take a look this is just about at the point that I would want to harvest and still eat it if it got a little bit taller than this and flowed up these leaves start to go bitter so I'm going to take note of that think of the time of season I'm in and say this lettuce is not going to want to last in the garden too much longer so I'm going to take this guy right here and I am going to take this bigger guy right here and the way I'm going to harvest it is I'm going to do a whole head Harvest now remember you could in Spring maybe in Fall you could come through and do what's called cut and come again and just cut these larger leaves and let it continue to grow but keeping in mind the season knowing that hotter days are to come and lettuce doesn't like a hot day I'm going to remove and actually just use the whole head okay so like many Deep South gardeners I have a severe root not nematode infestation in one of my raised beds so for the month of June my chore is going to be soil solarization now this is not a compulsory chore for every Gardener in the month of June this is actually just a last ditch effort for me to cleanse my soil of root knot nematode if you have root knot nematode verticillium Wilt fusarium Wilt or very severe weed seed bank built up in your soil solarization can be a good Choice it's never My First Choice my first choice is to add really high quality compost and see if I can out compete with beneficial bacteria and good quality soil however if I have a super infestation of root Nota like I have this year I'm going to solarize and the month of June is perfect to solarize in Florida you're going to need 6 to 8 weeks where you're not going to need to touch that garden bed that sounds crazy if you're growing up North but down here in the Deep South 6 to 8 weeks from the month of June July that's a really hot time of year I don't want to be on the garden anyway so how do I prepare to solarize my soil I'm going to pull all my weeds I'm going to clear out any root residue and I'm just going to get that soil nice and fluffy next I'm going to deeply irrigate that Garden I'm talking I might run the water all night I want 8 to 12 Ines of soaked soil really wet then I'm going to cover my raised bed very tightly now you don't just cover it with just any plastic what you need is 2 mil thick clear plastic that is ideally UV rated so that it will not break down and fall apart over the season I'm going to very tightly set that plastic over my raised bed and I'm actually going to Hill some soil around the edges to make sure that I can't get any wind catching the piece of plastic to take it away or to tear it up and I'm going going to let it sit for 6 to 8 weeks minimum in that time it should get over 110° in that soil which will kill off root KN nematode fusarium Wilt verticillium Wilt and most weed seeds but definitely not all of them it's not a magic cure all but it does do the trick after the 6 to8 week Mark I'm going to pull off my plastic and I'm going to start sewing for fall perfect timing I'm inside my trellis over here to show you guys something that is very crucial that you stay on top of and that is actually to harvest all of your produce if I were to leave this cucumber here to grow too big and actually start to become yellow what that does is it steals a lot of nutrients from the plants it tells the plant to focus on producing seed instead of more fruit and then you will get a huge gap in your Harvest window so Now's the Time of Year where you really want to go out there Harvest and enjoy your Harvest because if you don't Harvest often enough you will actually get less produce overall June really marks the entrance of Summer and summer comes in it starts to get warmer and the plants start to get more stressed also think about how small your plant was when you first put it out versus what it looks like now has way more leaf on it which means it's going to be losing way more water to evaporation especially as temperatures increase your soil is going to start drying out very quickly so one thing I want to call out is to make sure that you're increasing your water to not just keep your plants alive but ensure that they are thriving you want to increase your water as the warmer months approach and even In The Heat Of Summer where you're actually the warmest you might even have have to water twice a day it might feel wasteful but keeping your plants alive to not get a harvest is really just wasting water when you can increase that a little bit more to allow them to thrive and still get a Bountiful Harvest like this some people find this task kind of a hassle some people find it really therapeutic personally I find it quite therapeutic and that is removing the spent or fading Blooms from a plant to try to encourage it to keep flowering and this is called deadheading and it is exactly how it sounds off with their heads the ENT enire purpose of life for most plants especially our flowering plants is to flower get pollinated start making seeds and start spreading and once a plant has been pollinated and it's started making those seeds it really doesn't have a reason to flower anymore so it'll slow down or it'll stop altogether and one thing we can do to kind of trick our plants and encourage them to keep blooming is we can just chop off those flowers so that they don't get a chance to make those seeds and stop blooming and our plants are probably like hey what are you doing rude I'm just trying to to fulfill my life's purpose here but we want them to keep flowering so they're going to keep flowering and keep trying to create seeds until they are successful you also want to keep in mind that not every flower is the same and not every flower blooms all season long some only bloom in Spring some only Bloom in summer some spring summer some summer fall some spring summer fall winter it just depends on the flower and it really depends on where you live as well so deadheading is really only going to be beneficial and promote blooming if it's the current season for that very specific flower so it's always best to just do a little bit of research on the flowers that you're growing first to dead head your flowers it's extremely simple you're just simply removing those spent blooms however you want to do so if you want to be a little more meticulous with it and just kind of chop one flower by one flow you can do that and that's kind of how you would dead head larger blooms like dollia zenas branching sunflowers things like that but for the perennials that kind of create more of like a bush or something like that it's okay to be a little more half-hazard with it I just kind of go in like a little Meg Scissor Hands just start chopping everywhere I kind of pretend like I have like a hedge trimmer or something and I'm just doing one B swoop just getting rid of all of the blooms at once I've actually seen people use hedge trimmers for that and that's actually a really good idea I probably need to get me one of those deadheading can also be a great technique to keep things from flowering that you don't want to flower things that can be really invasive like anything the mint family for instance I have an oregano and a lemon balm that are trying to start flowering on me so I really need to take care of that because if one of those were to flower and set seed I would be finding it everywhere throughout my garden so I definitely do not want that and usually in those instances especially with herbs I'll usually just cut back about 2/3 of the entire plant and that'll keep it from trying to flower for a long while and it'll also encourage more leafy growth this might be more of a pruning technique than than deadheading but I mean pruning deadheading they kind of go hand in hand for your edible and medicinal flowers like your kin Doula and your Cho Miley okay I'm going to say it a normal way now with the correct pronunciation cuz I don't know if that's too obnoxious to keep calling it that people are flipping their Lids in the comments so here's a normal way for your edible and medicinal flowers like your kalindula and your chamomile you just want to make sure that you're staying on top of harvesting those because harvesting is deadheading and that way you'll just continue to get more Harvest and more blooms you just saw what Dead Heading was a little bit ago from Meg I'm going to do something I'm calling life heading I just made it up so take a look I've got these zenas I've got these Peppers pretty good combo looks beautiful but I like these colors so much I actually want to bring them inside but I want the plant to have a benefit from me doing so so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take a healthy amount of this stem off and if I want to I can even clip this right cuz this is going to go into a vase inside so I can remove that and cut that to 45 now I've got a nice little Cut Flower I could remove this too if I wanted to but see where I cut it I cut it at a point where it's going to now Bush out cuz to me this is just a little bit awkwardly too high but I don't want to sacrifice the flower so I'm going to use the flower as a cut flow just like this and that's also going to force that plant to bush cuz now it's going to go in this direction and this direction it's actually the same over here but now I've got a kind of a nice little scape here and I can manage this and grow it in the way that I want over time so some chores for June if you want to know what to plant in June check this video out right here you can of course shop our seeds at Botanical interest.com subsscribe good luck in the garden and keep on growing

Channel: Epic Gardening

Views: 88,160

Keywords: epic gardening

Id: dFjySSM7mN4

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 15 2024