Workhorse Crops for June

I’ve chosen 14 Workhorse Crops (including two pairs) to focus on at the beginning of every month, until April 2022: These are crops that we can rely on under a wide range of conditions. Some Workhorse Crops are easy to grow, some pump out lots of food, some are “insurance crops”, some are especially profitable (for those growing for market), and watermelons are the circus pony among the workhorses, I admit, but we all need fun!

I intend for this series to help growers who want to become more efficient, productive and profitable (if selling) as we emerge from sheltering at home and expand our lives again. Don’t give up growing your own food, just choose some less time-consuming ways to do it.

Workhorse Crops to Plant in June

June is another busy planting month here in central Virginia. Next month the heat strikes hard, and the daylight starts to get shorter, but this month we are still climbing the hill of the year. Ten of our 14 Workhorse Crops can be planted in June.

Beans: We sow bush beans every few weeks to keep up supplies of tender beautiful beans. See the Special Topic section for info about Succession Planting, to help you determine when and how often to sow beans and other short-lived warm weather crops. Also see the Special Topic section to read how we control Mexican Bean Beetles that used to destroy our bean plantings. Click this link to read about soaking bean seed, using inoculant, sowing through biodegradable plastic mulch using a jig, sowing sunflowers in our bean rows as place-markers when harvesting.

Carrots: I wrote a lot about carrots in the past year, when the monthly series was on root crops. See this post on preparing beds for sowing carrots, and weeding and thinning. Check out this post on flame-weeding, if you plan lots of carrot-growing!

We sow carrots in late February, then twice in March, once a month in April and May and after that we’d like to not sow more until the beginning of August. Carrots grown in hot weather don’t taste that good: there’s little sweetness and too many terpenes (the compound that in small quantities gives carrots their distinctive carrotiness, but can be overpowering if too strong.) But home-grown hot weather carrots are still better than jet-lagged travel-weary carrots from afar. You could use shadecloth over the beds. If we have not grown enough carrots by the end of May to see us through to October, we sow in June, and even July if we must.

Chard: The perfect insurance crop! We use chard for fresh greens in summer, when spring kale, collards, broccoli and cabbage have long bolted and been turned under so we can plant something else. We transplant our chard into a hay mulch in late April. Organic mulches help keep the soil cool during hot weather, so are very helpful for leafy greens. This crop will be in the ground until mid-winter, and mulch will keep back most of the weeds.

Chard provides leafy greens all summer whenever you need them, and you can ignore it when you have plenty of other vegetables! As a biennial, chard will not bolt the first year (unless stressed by lack of water).  I’ve noticed the red chards bolt more easily than the green ones. I suppose red crops are a bit stressed already, as they are short of chlorophyll, compared to the green ones, making photosynthesis harder work.

Potatoes: I wrote a special series on potatoes last year. Click the link to access the whole series, starting with planting in April. Here we plant in March and June. For our June-planted potatoes, we pre-sprout the seed potatoes for just two weeks (shoots grow quicker in warm weather than in early spring). To protect the planted potatoes from the summer heat, we hill immediately after planting, even though we can’t see the rows! Then we unroll big round hay bales down the field to cover all the soil. Potato shoots grow strongly, and can make it up through the extra height of the hills/ridges and through the 3” (7.5 cm) of hay. After about 16 days, we walk through the field, investigating spots where there is no sprout. We call this task “Liberating the Trapped Shoots”. Often the problem is just an overthick clump of mulch, and the shoot will be quite literally trapped (and completely white). We simply let he shoot see the light, and redistribute the over-thick mulch.

Sweet corn: we make 6 sowings of sweet corn, to harvest from July 4 to mid-October. We are well into corn-planting time, which continues until mid-July, when there are not enough warm days left in the season to mature another sowing. Remember: don’t plant a mixture of different corn genotypes, and don’t plant Indian corn, popcorn or any kind of flint or dent corn within 600′ (180 m) of your sweet corn.  This leads to very disappointing starchy corn. We grow only sweet corn in our garden, to avoid this problem.

Sweet potatoes: I wrote a lot about planting sweet potatoes in 2020. Wait for the soil to warm before planting out your sweet potato slips, they don’t grow well if too cold. We plant ours a couple of weeks after the last frost, around the time we transplant peppers and okra. In early June, we replace any casualties, if needed, to fill out the rows again. This year we have a beautiful looking patch, with rows of healthy plants on ridges, with biodegradable plastic mulch. We have a solar-powered electric fence to deter the deer. My latest worry is groundhogs, who can slip right under the electric fence. They haven’t yet, but I expect they will, if we don’t catch them first.

Tomatoes: In mid-June we plant a bed of late tomatoes, to boost the yields when the maincrop beds start to pass their peak. We planted our main crop tomato beds at the very beginning of May, and they’re looking quite good.

Here’s a post about planting tomatoes in our hoophouse. We use the same techniques in the hoophouse and outdoors. We transplant one row of tomatoes down the centerline of a 4ft (1.2 m) bed, 2ft (60 cm) apart. Once the weather has settled so that we’re confident we won’t need rowcover any more, we stake and stringweave. We install a steel T-post every two plants (4ft /1.2 m) apart and start stringweaving when the plants are about 12ins (30 cm) tall. I’ll say more about stringweaving next month.

Watermelons: As I explained in May, I gave watermelon a “Circus Pony” place among the workhorses! They’re not easy, therefore not reliable, but they provide so much pleasure when they do grow well. We transplant our watermelons, to get ripe ones as early as possible.

Watermelons grow very well on black plastic mulch, which warms the soil as well as keeping weeds at bay. The first year we switched from using hay mulch to biodegradable plastic mulch, we were astounded to get ripe melons a full month earlier!

If you want to use organic mulches for warm weather crops, don’t do it immediately. Wait till the soil warms through. This year we made that mistake, then we had late cold weather and the transplants all died. We’re going to experiment with station-sowing seeds directly in the gaps. Station-sowing is a technique of putting several seeds in the ground at each spot (station) where you want one plant to grow. Rather than making a furrow and sowing a row that needs thinning later. It’s a good technique for remedial work (ahem!), or if growing very expensive seeds, or for crops you are not familiar with, such as parsnips. You see several seedlings all the same and can be pretty sure it’s the thing you planted.

Watermelons can be planted from seeds when the ground has warmed to at least 70°F (21°C). On average, it takes about 85 days for Crimson Sweet seedlings to mature and produce ripe fruit. This is late for us to sow watermelons, and we certainly won’t get early ones this year, but we could get them in September. Better than none.

I described transplanting watermelons last month, if you need that info.

Winter squash are a true workhorse, and can still be sown here early in June, provided we don’t sow the slow-maturing ones like the gigantic Tahitian Butternut. Aim for harvesting in September and October and count back to see how many days you have until you want to harvest. Then choose the varieties that will have enough time. You can also transplant winter squash if you need to. We did this once when our fields flooded. It worked out fine.

We mostly grow Butternuts, Moschata types that store best. This is the type to focus on if you want squash with no damage from borers or cucumber beetles. The tougher stems are better able to repel invaders. They need warm growing temperatures above 60°F (16°C).

See last month’s post for more about sowing winter squash, and for other kinds of winter squash, such as some Maxima squashes that store quite well and have relatively high resistance to squash bugs compared to others in this group, and Pepo squashes, suitable for storing a few weeks only

Zucchini (courgettes) and summer squash: another crop type that we succession sow, to get a continuous supply. More about succession planting below in the Special Topic section. We make five or six plantings, each one half yellow squash (Zephyr, Gentry) and half zucchini (TenderGrey, Noche, Golden Glory). We grow our earliest squash in the hoophouse, setting out transplants at the beginning of April. Our first outdoor crop is also from transplants. After that, the soil is warm (60°F/15.5°C) and we direct sow. The time from sowing to harvest is only around 42-54 days.

After transplanting or sowing, we hoop and cover the row with insect netting (rowcover works if it has no big holes). We have many bugs that like these plants, especially the striped cucumber beetles, so we keep the rows covered until female flowers appear. At that point we need the service of the pollinators, unless the squash is parthenocarpic (sets fruit without pollination). We pack away the covers, hoe and thin the squash to 24” (60 cm). It would be better to thin sooner, but we rarely find the time.

Workhorse Crops to Harvest in June

We have mnemonics for harvesting: Monday, Wednesday and Friday might be the crops beginning with the plosive Ps and Bs: peas, beans, beets, broccoli, blueberries etc. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays would be the crops beginning with the hard K and G sounds: kale, corn, carrots, collards, cabbage, garlic scapes etc.

Other crops like asparagus, lettuce, cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini we harvest 6 days a week. Some, like cabbage, we harvest twice a week.

Asparagus can be harvested here until early in June. Every day for the 8-week harvest period, snap off at ground level all the spears above a certain length. We chose 7” (18 cm). This task is best done first thing in the morning, when the spears are crisp. Daily harvest will also remove asparagus beetle eggs, controlling the pest level.

Cabbage is ready here from late May until mid-July. We store enough to feed us until we start harvesting fall cabbage.  An early sowing of fast-maturing varieties (like Farao or Early Jersey Wakefield which can be ready in only 60 days) can be followed by harvests of slower varieties. When a cabbage is ready for harvest, the head is firm and the outer leaf on the head (not the more horizontal wrapper leaves) will be curling back. For cabbage to store to eat over the summer, cut with a strong knife and set it upside down on the nest of leaves to dry a little. Come back along the row with a net or plastic bag and gather up the storage quality cabbages to refrigerate. Gather any lower quality cabbages to eat soon. If you would like to get another harvest from the same plants, cut criss-cross into the stump. Small “cabbagettes” will grow and can be used raw or cooked. They won’t store.

Carrots can be ready about three months after sowing in spring, although you can get thinnings for salads sooner. Read here about harvesting carrots.

Chard is ready for harvest as soon as you decide the leaves are big enough. Simply snap or cut off some outer leaves and stand them in a bucket with a little water until you cook them. For a sustainable rate of harvesting with chard, always leave at least 6 of the inner leaves to grow.

Garlic harvest time will be soon if not already. I wrote about garlic last week.

Kale and collards can be harvested until they are bolting, as long as the flavor is acceptable. Our spring-planted ones are not bolting yet, but the fall-planted ones were tilled in a couple of weeks ago.

New potatoes could be dug here during June, if you don’t mind reducing the final yield. The flavor of new potatoes, with their delicate skins, is very special. As a child, I ate them boiled with mint, and topped with some butter.

Tomatoes start to ripen this month. Our hoophouse tomatoes have started to yield a small amount of Glacier, Stupice, Sungold and Amy’s Apricot.

Zucchini and summer squash are ready from the hoophouse early sowing since about May 20.  We are now (June 2) harvesting our first planting of outdoors. We harvest every day to the fall frost (or beyond if we remember to cover that last planting with rowcover on chilly nights.).

From storage: carrots, potatoes,

 Workhorse Crops Special Topic:

Succession planting, and Mexican bean beetles

Succession planting is a topic I have often presented at workshops, so rather than give you more words, I’m giving you the slideshow from 2019. Towards the end it includes information about dealing with Mexican bean beetles.