Vegetable Gardening Workshop #11

Hello,

Some important garden maintenance to take care of this week. Each vegetable needs its own space in the garden. This means that you may have to do some extra harvesting of kale, chard or roquette, or may mean that you need to cut off some non-edible leaves to make space. Please make sure your cucumber plants are growing up the trellis, and not into the garden.

If your squash leaves are starting to grow over your other vegetables, cut them off to make more light in the garden. Same goes for your tomato plants. It is important to cut off any branches that you can’t fit on the trellis. If not they will shade out the other vegetables in the garden and make it hard for them to grow well.

Zucchini flowers are delicious to cook with. The ones with the small zucchini at the base is a female flower, the ones without the zucchini are male flowers..they both need to be open to pollinate and produce fruit. If not pollinated..that small zucchini will shrivel up. If you have a LOT of male flowers, you can go ahead and pick some of those but keep in mind that the flowers only last one day.Usually you use the male flowers to cook with, but if you remove them all, you risk not getting any zucchini off of your plant.

zuchinni flower

Your onions may be about ready to harvest. Once the leaves start to fall over or yellow it means they are almost ready. Leave them in the ground another 10 days to fully mature. You can either leave them in the ground and harvest them as you need them, or you can harvest them all at once. In this case you need to ‘cure’ them. Rinse off the soil and leave them lying in a sunny spot (for example a patio table) at least until the roots and leaves dry out completely. You can then store them in a cool, dark, dry place.

onion

The bottom leaves of your pea plants may already be starting to yellow. This indicates that the pea production is starting to slow down.You should remove them from the trellis to make room for the tomato. I suggest you cut the pea vine near the soil level and cut the vine in to pieces to make removing it from the trellis more easily. The pea greens are delicious cooked, in salads, on pasta etc.

Your cabbage may be ready to pick as well. You can pick it when it is big enough to your liking. Make sure to harvest the large outer leaves if they are shading out neighbouring vegetables.

cabbage

Best,
Tereska Gesing

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