Keep your garden healthy by keeping it orderly
Peas peas peas! Now is the best time to be harvesting your snow peas. The peas are tender and delicious, and the more you pick the more harvest you will get. It is hot hot HOT out there, so the vines will soon be stressed and dying and we will be removing them to make room on the trellis for the tomatoes.
It is important to take a close look at your tomato plants and remove any extra branches and suckers. Take a look at my video for instruction. If your peppers and eggplants are not doing well, it is probably because they are being shaded and crowded by your overgrown tomato plants or leafy greens. You can start attaching tomato plants to the trellis with string, or looping them around the trellis netting if you have room between the snow peas. I will ask you to remove the snow peas soon to make more room for the tomatoes.
It has come to my attention that some of you still have flowering spinach in your gardens. It is time to pull out spinach, and heads of lettuce to make space for the other summer vegetables in your garden. You can still have lots of leafy greens, just start harvesting larger outer leaves from your beets. Keep harvesting from your kale and Swiss chard plants.
Take a close look at your cucumber plants. Keep an eye out for signs of cucumber beetle eggs or larvae (see photos below). It is important to kill ANY cucumber beetles in your garden as they will reproduce very quickly and the disease they carry (bacterial wilt) will kill your cucumber, zucchini or squash plants.
