Tend to Your August Garden and Extend Your Harvest
by Anza Muenchow
The bountiful summer harvest is truly here. All the cool spring crops are finishing and the heat-loving crops are flourishing in the gardens. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash and beans are all starting to produce. To maximize fruit production from each plant, be sure to pick these crops regularly. Don’t let these fruits of your labor hang on the vines or stalks too long. For example, summer squash and beans should be picked several times a week so that the plant will continue to produce. Remember that the goal of these plants is to make seeds, and they will keep fruiting, hoping to make lots of seeds. Allowing the fruiting parts to stay on the plants too long signals to the plant that it has completed its job of seed formation, and that it doesn’t need to set any more fruit this season.
Major examples of the need to control maturing seeds by harvesting are cucumber and zucchini. If you allow them to sit on the vine and get huge, the plant won’t produce any more flowers or fruits. So always pick off any old summer squashes, cucumbers and beans, even if they’re too big to eat or were chewed by slugs or other pests.
Tomato vines and winter squash plants will generally keep producing even with some fruit left on their vines. As autumn approaches, the weather becomes cooler, and the day length shorter, the summer row crops are anxious to produce their fruit and seeds. With careful monitoring, they can offer us a bounteous harvest till frost.
While harvesting, take time to notice the health of the plants. Picking through the peas or beans, I will clip any diseased plants. For peas it is usually a virus that causes distorted growth. For beans it is usually a bacterium, like a brown moldy spot. Controlling these diseases will extend the harvesting period because the plant will keep producing. Tomato vines don’t isolate blight very well, so cut out the whole vine if you see a soft, brown infection on it, otherwise the blight could spread to other tomato plants nearby. Keep an eye out for powdery mildew on the squash family. Generally, just cutting off infected leaves will help extend the life of those plants. Tomato blight and squash powdery mildew will eventually take down these crops when the cool rains begin in September and October.
Even for the warm season crops, our hot, dry weather with no precipitation will stress our gardens. How do you know if you are watering your crops enough? Check your soil. Some dry soils will shed water if they have a significant clay content. On Whidbey, we mostly have sandy soil which can drain quickly. Dig down a couple inches and see if the soil is damp. If not, then water slowly and consistently every few days. Soaker hoses or drip lines work well to re-hydrate the soil. I admit that sometimes I enjoy hand watering with a long-handled sprayer. I reach the sprayer under the leaves and water just the soil. It’s a relaxing time in my garden, when I get to notice the development of the flowers and fruit, check for aphids and other pests, trim off diseased materials and just assess the health of all the crops.
Put on a layer of weed-free mulch around the plants to keep the soil covered and slightly cooler. Decomposed leaves from last fall are my favorite. Any good compost will work. I like adding several inches of compost in all my beds and the summer mulch is a perfect time to do that.
As you finish the harvest of the spring crops, some space becomes available in your garden to plant fall or wintering-over cool season crops. Pay special attention to watering when starting new seeds in the August drought time. Use floating row cover over your newly seeded beds to help control moisture and protect new sprouts from birds and larvae pests. Try a fall planting of gai lan, snap peas, spinach or bok choy this month, and you’ll have some delicious harvests in October. Kale and purple sprouting broccoli are good crops to plant now and overwinter here on Whidbey. You’ll have no insect pests, and you’ll get delicious early harvests next spring.
Join our monthly Zoom class, The Farmer’s Shadow, to discuss everything we learn in our gardens. We usually meet on the first Tuesday in the evening. Request the Zoom link at education@southwhidbeytilth.org.