Garden Tips for July/ August

What To Do in Your Garden This Month
by Suzanne Millard, Mendocino Master Gardener

For new and experienced gardeners alike, mid-summer means harvesting your summer vegetables. Here is a link from the UC Cooperative Extension about planting and storing your harvest. Vegetable gardening at a glance: How to plant and store

Also, during the harvest, food safety is vitally important. Bacteria, viruses and parasites can contaminate your home grown food. Water, tools and animals can spread harmful organisms in your garden. Follow this link for safe and easy tips on how to maintain the integrity of the food from your garden: Food Safety in the Home Vegetable Garden

What to plant?

In August you can directly sow chard, kale, peas (late), cilantro, mustard greens. You can also start lettuce, brassicas, chard, kale, fennel nettles, sweet onions (Italian, Walla Walla, etc.) for planting. Plants ready for transplant are lettuce, leeks, brassicas and chard.

Other activities for August are cleaning-up and composting fallen fruit, sow fall/winter cover crop (barley, vetch, bell beans, diakon, etc.), preserve the harvest and as always, weed!

For more Gardener's Tips, please click Greater Hopland Planting Guide (Peter Huff and Kate Frey's Monthly Planting Calendar for Inland Mendocino, also found at the "How to - Grow Food" page on The Garden's Project Website).

What to look out for…

Be sure to harvest your vegetables and resist the temptation to leave them past their prime. For example, pick the wonderful bounty of those prolific zucchini plants, look for great recipes and share the harvest with friends and coworkers. Leaving fruit and vegetables on the plants attracts pests that you don’t want onto your plants. Any vegetables picked past their prime can be sent to your compost pile for natural decomposition in the right environment.

Don’t forget, now is the time to start thinking about broccoli, garlic, onions and other cool season crops. Come September you’ll want to clean up your spent summer plants and ready your garden for the next round of plants.

Just a friendly reminder that there is a tremendous body of knowledge about gardening in California, provided by University of California Cooperative Extension. This site, geared toward the home gardener can be found at http://cagardenweb.ucdavis.edu/.

Happy Mendo Gardening!