Category: Sustainable vegetable production

Twin Oaks July Garden Calendar

(LOTS TO HARVEST)

Here’s this month’s task list, which you can adapt for your own vegetable plot. We’re in central Virginia. It’s 100F just so you know! October 14 is our average first frost date.

During the month:

Mow clovers, and sorghum sudan cover crop areas.

Lettuce Factory: Sow heat-resistant lettuces, every 5 days, (sowing #20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25), using shade-cloth & burlap to cool the soil after and before sowing. Soil temp must be below 80°F – use Jericho if very hot, with ice on seed rows, or sow in plastic flat in fridge. Transplant #16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 this month under shadecloth – 120 heads (1/3 bed) /planting. Store seed in fridge.

String weave tomatoes once a week with binder twine.

Seed selection: Romas: Select for high early yield and healthy foliage. Mark with ribbons on T-posts (bows on good side). Select 100 from 260 plants. Remove off-types, don’t select from plants within 150’ of other tomatoes.

Perennials: Water blueberries, take up & store roof netting.  Mow, weed & water all perennials.

Cover crops: can sow buckwheat, soy and sorghum sudan during July. Also white clover if damp enough.

Early July:

Mow spring potato tops if they have not died by 7/1. Spread compost for fall brassicas following potatoes.  Disk in compost ASAP, or if disking impossible, till.

Sow brassicas for fall, resow earlier brassicas if needed. Use rowcovers, water and your best powers of memory.

Sow carrots #8 (if needed), corn #5. Last date for limas is 7/6.

Asparagus: First week of July (or sooner) is a good time for weeding, composting and tucking mulch.

Transplant lettuce #16, 17.

Hill up peanuts at 12” tall, and mulch them.

Clear any remaining spring carrots, for best flavor.  Stop harvesting broccoli when it gets bitter.

Potato Onions – July 10-15 Second sorting: check through curing bulbs, starting with the largest. Eat any > 2”, or refrigerate and plan to plant them in September. Use Worksheet and Log Book.

Strawberries – July 6-8: If propagating from our plants, pot up 600-900 for each planting, pencil-sized crowns, 2 or 3 leaves, 4” petioles. Use current favorite method. Remember irrigation. 580 for 1 bed in East Garden, 900 for 2 beds in  Central Garden, 800 for 2 beds in West Garden. Finish renovating strawberries by mid-July, restore 20″ paths.

Plan, inventory and order winter cover crops.  Make cover crop maps.

Summer Disking: Get spring broccoli & cabbage area bush-hogged, disked, sown in summer covers – same time as second disking for corn #6.  Disk some of the Green Fallow area for new strawberries, sow buckwheat & soy.


Mid-July:

Harvest spring potatoes 2 weeks after tops have died; air the root cellar and warm to 70°F. Store potatoes in the early morning. Ventilate the cellar every night or two, especially if it’s wet in there.

Sow brassicas for fall; cukes #4 (slicers & picklers), zucchini and summer squash #4 7/15, corn #6 7/16, beans #5 7/19, edamame #5, storage melons. (Could sow snap peas 7/15, swiss chard, leaf beet, kale; rutabaga 7/15-8/15.)

Cut down all the celery to encourage a second harvest.

Transplant lettuce #18, 19; 2 week-old Blues cabbage,Tokyo bekana, maruba santoh;

Transplant senposai, yukina savoy, komatsuna, other fall brassicas – cover all with rowcover. Keep watered.

Water soil for transplants if dry: Set out drip tape for fall broccoli and cabbage. Transplant broccoli, cabbage, [cauliflower] at 4 leaves (3-4 weeks old?) in 34-36″ rows,

If eggplants are suffering from fleabeetle, start foliar feeding.

Seed Selection: watermelons: mark 30 early large watermelons from healthy plants for seed (use grease pencil).

Late July:

Sow fall brassicas, corn #7, scallions #4, fall carrots and bulb fennel in the last week of July, if not too hot and dry.

Flameweed carrots before emergence. (Get propane tank filled in good time.)

Transplant more brassicas, incl kohlrabi, collards, preferably not older than 5 weeks. Transplant lettuce #20 & 21.

 

July Harvests: Asian melons, asparagus beans, beans, beets, blueberries, broccoli (early July), cabbage, cantaloupes, carrots, celery, chard, corn, cow peas, crabapples, cukes, edamame, eggplant, lettuce, okra, onions, peppers, hot peppers, potatoes, raspberries, Roma paste tomatoes, scallions, squash, tomatoes, zucchini and summer squash.

Leek Planting

Leek seedlings earlier in spring

The past few days we’ve been planting out leeks. We love these so much for winter harvests that we plan to plant about 3600 (5 beds at 90′ long, with 4 rows in each, and plants 6″ apart).

We sow March 21 and April 20 or so. Some people start leeks earlier, in the greenhouse, but we don’t want leeks in August (why compete with tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn and all the other summer delights?). By starting in late March, we can sow the seeds outdoors in a nursery bed, and just transplant the bare-root leeks when the time comes.

This year April was hot and dry here, and I failed to get good germination with the March sowing (it’s now a copse of galinsoga), so we’re relying on the April sowing to give us all we need. Luckily the weather cooled down, and the second sowing came up well. Leeks do grow slowly, and don’t compete well with weeds, so we did have to “rediscover” them a few weeks ago.

Now they are big enough to plant (between a pencil-lead and a pencil in thickness). We make a map of our nursery bed, because we are growing 5 varieties and don’t want them mixed up. We have fast-growing Lincoln and King Richard for eating in October and November, King Sieg for December, and the hardy Tadorna for December to February. We can eat 720 per month in winter, between a hundred people. They make a nice change from leafy greens and root vegetables, and they are a good source of onion flavor after our bulb onions have all been eaten.

To plant them, we make deep furrows down the bed, then dibble holes every 6″ in the bottom of the furrows. We dig up some seedlings and put them in small buckets of water. having the roots covered in water helps the plants separate from each other, and stay in good shape in hot weather. Leeks are the only thing we’d even consider transplanting in the mornings here, as the afternoon temperatures can be brutal. Because leeks don’t have wide spreading leaves, they don’t lose water fast.

We shake out a plant separate from its neighbors, then twirl it down into a hole. Sometimes bobbing it up and down helps settle it with the roots at the bottom of the hole and not folded back on themselves. Having wet roots makes this task easier. After planting a section, we bring cans of water and fill up the holes. The goal is to fill the hole with water but not with soil, leaving the small plants protected from sunshine, deep in the hole. They have room to grow a bit before the soil fills in the hole. This gives long white shanks without the need to h

On Monday, after planting the first bed, we had a heavy rain, which filled in the holes anyway, totally covering the smaller leeks. We’ll need to do some remedial gap-filling later. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we planted more beds. Today I decided discretion was the better part of valor, and in view of the forecast for temperatures over 100F for the next 3 days, we’d hold off on more planting till Monday. We have plenty of other jobs we can do!