By the end of the summer, we should all be well experienced in surviving 30 degree days!
How has your garden fared in this heat? Did you manage to keep it well watered and daily picked?
That's an important part of successful vegetable gardening keeping ripe vegetables and fruits picked to ensure a continuing harvest.
Another way to ensure a continuing harvest is to remove spent crops like peas, which are finished bearing, and to replant a second crop of spinach, radishes and lettuce for fall salads. If your pea vines are not diseased in any way, throw them on the compost heap when you've pulled them up. Otherwise, just discard them.
If you want to bet on an Indian Summer, plant a second crop of beans and beets too. They'll do very well if August turns out to be a hot month.
When planting a second crop in mid summer, make sure you soak overnight any seeds that have a hard coating on them. Plant your seeds just a bit deeper and farther apart than you did in spring, and keep young seedlings well watered and shaded slightly on intensely hot days. Watering twice a day may not be at all excessive if the weather remains quite hot.
Allowing more room between the seeds planted will minimize root damage when you thin the seedlings out, and will allow for better weed control which can be a worse problem in mid summer than in spring.
Make sure you keep your first crop of beans picked every two or three days. Cucumbers, too.
If you haven't already done so, mow your strawberry patch with a handmower set as high as possible. Then apply a thick mulch of straw. Weed and mulch raspberries now that they're finished bearing.
Asparagus should be weeded, fertilized and mulched.
And, keep the soil hilled up around potato roots so that the sunlight doesn't touch the tubers. New potatoes should be picked as soon as the tops start to flower. Dig carefully around the roots, take the potatoes and hill the roots up with soil again, making sure the soil is firmed well around the roots.
Then head for the lake! Or pool. But, stay cool.
