Late June: When You're Thirsty, Do You Take a Shower?
This week: more watering tips, tools for weeding, and look out for those squash vine borers!
Last week we discussed tips for watering a veggie garden. But we still want to drive one point home since we see it so often forgotten: whenever you can, water the soil, not the leaves.
If you're thirsty, do you take a shower? Obviously, no. So, remember, plants drink through their roots, so put the water at the base of your plants.
This approach carries several benefits:
It's a more efficient use of water.
Dry leaves discourage disease.
The stomata, or leaf pores, stay closed when leaves are dry, retaining moisture.
For a veggie garden, we strongly suggest using drip-tape or soaker-hose irrigation that keeps the water at the base of the plants, or watering your plants at the ground level by hand.
Now let's talk shop.
Weeding: Tools and Timing
First, be proactive about weeds. Don’t leave your soil naked!
As we mentioned in earlier weeks, mulching is really important for annual veggie gardening. Weed prevention is one of the big reasons why. Mulching around big plants and between rows of smaller crops will cut back on weeds and conserve moisture. We see the positive results of mulching showing up now. Watch the “Stop Weeding Your Garden” video by OYR Frugal & Sustainable Gardening for details on mulching and its benefits.
Timing
The best time to remove weeds is when you can barely see them. The most efficient way is to run a hoe through the exposed soil to lift out tiny weeds just after they've sprouted. Weed seeds will sprout quickly, so stay ahead of them. Make this a weekly practice, and your plants won’t compete with weeds for nutrients and water.
Tools
What tools do we use? Our most used tools are collinear and trapezoid hoes. Both are small with very sharp edges to cut through weeds, but you can manuever them to delicately move around your plants.
Eliot Coleman demonstrates how to use a collinear hoe on the JohnnysSeeds YouTube channel. Also, this farmer dude from No-Till Growers really likes his collinear hoe.
The collinear hoe is meant for a soft veggie bed, not hard-path soil. For paths, you will need a flat-edged, sharp shovel or a traditional hoe. Keeping your hoes sharp is important to performance. You can sharpen with a file, and some hoes have a replaceable blade that you can swap in when your original blade gets too thin.
Squash Vine Borer
Next up on our tour of common garden pests is the squash vine borer. The squash vine borer is the larval stage of a moth who lays its eggs at the base of squash plants. When the larvae hatch, they bore into the stem of the plant and eat their fill. The borers restrict the flow of water up the xylem of the plant, often causing the whole plant to wilt and eventually die.
If you start to see whole sections of your plants wilting away, you may be too late. However, if you keep a watchful eye, you can avoid this point of no return. Here are some tips:
If you’ve had issues with the borer before, don’t plant again in the same place. The borer larvae pupate and live in the ground all winter before emerging as adult moths ready to lay more eggs. So move your squash patch across the yard and give yourself a fighting chance.
Look for the parent moths, which actually look more like black-and-orange wasps. They are attracted to yellow and can be trapped by placing a bright yellow pail filled with water in the garden. If you do find adult moths in your trap, you can try a few methods of keeping the larvae away. You can use row cover to keep the moths from laying their eggs, but remember to take the cover off when the squash plant starts flowering to allow the bees to pollinate. Additionally, you can inspect your crop for eggs, which are usually laid at the base of the plant and are small, flat, and reddish-brown.
If larvae successfully hatch and bore into your squash stems, remove the infested plants or the stems they are living in to make sure they don't return next year. You’ll see a moist sawdust-like residue at the plant base where the larvae have burrowed in. Sometimes, if they haven't bored too far up your plant, you can slice open the stem, dig them out, and cover the wounded stem with a few inches of soil. If the damage isn’t too extensive, the wound will heal.
For some great detailed information, check out the University of Minnesota Extension’s web page on the squash vine borer. This page has more great pictures to help you identify the bug in its various stages, so you can be on the lookout.
If you’ve had problems with these bugs in the past, you may what to plant varieties that are resistant to squash vine borer. Waltham butternut squash, Hubbard squash, Cucuzzi, and Green-Striped Cushaw are resistant to these pests, so you may want to give them a try.
Best of luck! In the meantime, remember to enjoy eating your lovely squash blossoms (just the male flowers, not the females that turn into squash)! Raw as a snack, in salads, or best of all, stuffed and fried.
Plucking Suckers
We want to remind you to pluck off the suckers from your tomato plants and cucumbers! Pruning your plants in this way redirects their focus to flowering and fruiting instead of developing more foliage.
The “Pruning Tomato Suckers” video from California Gardening might be helpful when looking at your tomato plants, and “How to Prune Your Cucumber Plant” from Wisdom Gardening is another helpful clip. Just a few minutes of pruning a week can make all the difference in the yield and manageability of your crop.
Looking Ahead...
Wishing you'd planted more peas or leafy greens this year? You still can! Come July and August, you can start seedlings for the second planting of crops that like cooler weather for harvesting in the fall. Remember this chart? So we are gearing up for seeding some stuff in July.
Just a friendly reminder to keep thinking a month ahead so you can keep your garden producing late into the summer and fall.
