Mid June: Is Your Broccoli Wholy? Is Your Lettuce Bolting? Does your Garlic Have a Curlicue?
This week we look at watering schedules and tips, dealing with pests that affect plants in the cabbage family, harvesting garlic scapes, and some treats to make with the food you’re harvesting from the garden now.
Succession Planting
A reminder that you will need to plant crops like lettuce, cilantro, and arugula every few weeks if you want to always have some you can pick all summer and fall. Their life cycle is fast and, especially when the weather gets hot, they can go to seed more quickly than other crops.
Planting these crops every 3 weeks can keep you in greens all season long!
Watering
Now that your garden is planted and growing, here are some water tips:
Feel your soil! Don’t blindly water. Stick your finger down 5-6 inches to determine soil moisture.
Water thoroughly once or twice a week to deliver 1-2 inches to the soil (not the leaves), rather than in small amounts often. Your goal is to drive the water down deep so the roots will follow and stay moist, rather than them staying near the soil surface, where they will dry out quickly.
Water early in the day so the foliage dries off by evening. When the plants are watered at night, the foliage stays wet for a long period of time and disease is more prevalent.
If you have had a light rain, water right after to drive it down to 5 or 6 inches and avoid that rainfall evaporating. This will build up a reserve of water in the soil.
Some plants wilt on very hot days, which is a natural adaptation to the plant’s environment. Check soil moisture before watering and, if moist, wait until a cooler time to determine whether a plant needs water.
Measure the water being put down with sprinklers and drip irrigation by placing straight-sided containers around the garden while the water is being applied. Time it, and when 1 inch collects in the containers, that indicates that 1 inch of water was applied to the garden. Use this amount of time or double it to deliver a week’s worth of water to your garden.
Use drip irrigation whenever possible to minimize evaporation and keep your plant’s leaves dry and disease free.
Pests of the Cabbage Family
Hopefully, by now you are watching your brassicas grow taller and stronger. Perhaps having deterred some pesky slugs, you’re thinking you’ve passed the worst of it…when you start to see yellow and white butterflies around your garden. Don’t be fooled. The Cabbage White, or the imported cabbage worm, can do some serious damage to brassicas. The butterflies lay their eggs on kale and cabbage, and the caterpillar larvae can quickly eat through the leaves.
Cabbage loopers, another common caterpillar pest, and moths do similar damage. We have a few techniques for keeping ahead of these pests:
Use row cover to keep butterflies/moths from landing and laying eggs.
Hand-pick the caterpillars off your plants and feed them to your neighborhood chickens.
One old-time remedy suggests sprinkling rye flour or cornmeal over the brassicas to dehydrate the caterpillars.
Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) insecticide is an organic remedy that uses a bacteria deadly to cabbage worms to protect plants. If you have a well-established population that you cannot control by the other methods, this may be your best bet.
For more information on the cabbage worm’s identification, life cycle, and management options, the Old Farmer’s Almanac website has a quick reference, and the Harvest to Table site has an informative short article. For the entomologists among us, UMass has a wealth of brassica pest management info, including studies on intercropping with native pollinator plants to attract beneficial insects and reduce pest problems in farms and gardens all around.
Harvesting Garlic Scapes
Garlic scapes are actually garlic flowers. They form in mid-June as a curling, round shoot from the center of the stalk. Clip them when they have made a curlicue, as shown in the picture above. By cutting them off, you’ll send the plant’s energy toward growing a big bulb rather than to creating seeds.
To learn more about when and how to harvest garlic scapes, check out the tips from Cedar Circle Farm and Education Center.
Enough About Growing Things, Let’s Eat!
A few crops are ready to pick, and much of them fall under the “Oh, you could put that in a salad” category, like cold hardy greens and herbs. But these first weeks are marked by a few other harvests as well:
Asparagus If you’ve never had fresh asparagus, its taste is a world of difference from store bought. Our 4’×4’ patch gives us several meals each spring. Once planted, it needs 2-3 years to establish before you can harvest but will produce for decades. You can learn more in our Plant Info Sheets on our website. Fresh asparagus is so sweet and crisp that you can eat it raw. We find it best with minimal preparation: salt, oil, and maybe some lemon, and then sauteed or roasted until tender but not wilted.
Radishes These grow fast! A first crop might be ready now, and once it’s harvested, another can be planted in its place. You can eat the tuber and the tops. Peppery radish greens make a great addition to salads. Crisp, zingy tubers are good raw but delicious when quick-pickled, and the pickling process couldn’t be easier. Check it out!
Garlic scapes These are good in salads, but our favorite use for them is in making pesto! It freezes well in an ice-cube tray, and then you can pop them out of the trays and into a bag for pasta and pizza all year. Check out the Food52 pesto recipe, and get more ideas from the Smithsonian Magazine website.
Garden Extras:
Here is a group we just can’t keep to ourselves! We want to introduce you to Rodale Institute, a leader in advancing the organic movement and regenerative agriculture. Watch this 3-minute video to see their story.
