It’s never too late to mind a garden
Happy Summer Solstice! This is a great time of year: the days are long, the weather is warm, the garden is growing, and the R.I. legislative session is nearly over so we can start organizing for candidates… sorry, I just had to put that in here for the chuckles. But that’s not what today’s column is about. It’s primetime on the urban farm, so today I want to talk about a few important tasks that we should all be taking care of in the next few weeks. If you haven’t already, plant your garden. I’ll admit to being very late to plant my garden this year, so maybe we are in good company. But it isn’t too late. We had an odd start to the warm season this year, with a lot of cool days in June and very little rain. Hopefully it will level off for the rest of the summer, so now is probably a good time to plant in anticipation of that. All threat of frost has passed, so all of your warm-season crops – tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beans, summer and winter squash, and cold-sensitive herbs are fair game. If you haven’t already, prune bramble fruits (raspberries and blackberries). As I wrote about a few years ago, raspberry and blackberry bushes are some of my favorite plants. They require basically no maintenance, and each year they produce a bumper crop of incredibly healthy fruits. They are the epitome of a “Paleolithic crop” (if such a thing even existed). The thing is, they also try to take over your yard. They spread via a network of underground roots, with dozens of “new” canes (stems) popping up five or 10 feet from the rest of the patch. Thankfully, you can prune existing canes and pull these new ones pretty much at any time during the growing season, without much of a negative impact on the health of the patch. Remove any canes that haven’t started growing leaves at this point (they are dead), and either pull or mow over newly-sprouted canes that are spread too far beyond the boundary of the patch. Keep your garden mulched and weeded! This is the time of year that you can get ahead of the mulch. The weeds are only just coming out in full force, so if you make sure to keep a nice, thick layer of straw, or grass clippings, or shredded leaves, or whatever you can get your hands on, on top of your garden soil, you can prevent the problem of excessive weeding later on. I mulched with straw this year, which worked great… other than the fact that one of the two bales I put down still had viable seeds in it! So while half of my garden beds are pretty much weed-free, the other half are full of some sort of grain plant. Make sure to water. Rain is sparse and kind of irregular during the New England summer, especially as of late with the effects of climate change. This whole weekend is supposed to be stormy, which made me happy to hear (other than that fact that it limited what activities I’ll be able to do outside). If you keep your garden mulched, it will prevent a lot
of the evaporation that necessitates watering many times each week. But I still recommend that you water maybe twice a week, especially if it’s been dry. Use your judgment, and base watering frequency on how well the soil has retained moisture, and what the weather looks like it will be in the next few days. Also, consider drip irrigation. I have yet to fully install mine, but a drip irrigation system saves you lots of time by watering your garden for you…all while using a lot less water, and spreading it over a longer period so that plants can absorb more of it before it percolates too far downward into the soil. Clean out the chicken coop. If you have chickens, now is a great time to do a very thorough cleaning of the coop. You should be cleaning it out once every few weeks, but completely replacing all of the bedding/mulching on the ground of the coop is best to do before it gets too hot. They will thank you, and hopefully repay you with a bumper crop of eggs! Clean out the accumulated junk. I’m sure that you, like I, still have seed trays and old plant ties and a whole slew of other materials from last year’s season, still lying around in your garden. It’s so easy to fall into that trap: you plant in May and June, and your garden – and life – get so hectic, and remain that way well into the fall, that you don’t get around to cleaning up the equipment and odds and ends…and then it all freezes over in the winter. And the next spring (or early summer), you’re preparing to plant again, and last year’s trays are still there! It’s okay, we all do it. I made a concerted effort, a few weeks ago, to clean up a bunch of that stuff (and isolated it in one corner, to eventually bring inside). It is definitely cathartic to do this; it makes you feel more organized in your gardening, and also makes it less likely that that stuff will get in your way while you’re planting and taking care of your garden.