What to do in The Garden This Month
Tips for Keeping Your Garden Looking Great
Plant:
Plant your favorite heat-loving veggies this month. They include eggplant, hot and sweet peppers, tomatoes, melons, squash, beans, corn, and cucumbers.
Get tomatoes off to a solid start by backfilling extra-deep planting holes with nutrient sources. To the bottom of the hole, add a fish head from a local seafood market — this is an organic way to provide nitrogen and calcium. Next add three to four crushed eggshells — they add calcium, which helps prevent blossom-end rot from being a problem later in the summer.
Mulch around newly planted trees and shrubs. This practice reduces weeds, controls fluctuation in soil temperature, retains moisture, prevents damage from lawn mowers and looks attractive.
Maintain:
Keep after weeds while they’re small- they’re easier to pull and if you get them before they go to seed, you won’t have as many weeds to pull next year.
To get ride of pesky weeds in cracks and between stones, use boiling water, for an environmentally friendly alternative to pesticides.
Plant Pick
For this month’s Plant Picks we are taking a look at combination planting for contrast in the garden. Read on for tips on how to make your garden pop!
A simple ground-cover tapestry of the lovely glowing gold Deadnettle (Lamium maculatum ‘Aureum’) interplanted with the dark-leaf, purple-spiked Bugleweed (Ajuga reptans ‘Catlin’s Giant’) provides a long season of color and complementary textures come spring through early summer.
In a shady garden area, hostas are often a favorite plant partner, perhaps because their leaves unfurl just in time to cover up unsightly bulb foliage while complimenting early spring perennials. The small Hosta ‘Hydon Sunset’ (Hosta gracillima) has smooth, rounded yellow leaves that offer a perfect contrast to other shade-tolerant plants like dark-leafed heucheras, we like Black Beauty Coral Bells (Heuchera ‘Black Beauty’).
In dry areas, you could try the darkly bladed New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) among a myriad of bright scarlet verbenas, such as Homestead Red Verbena (Verbena canadensis ‘Homestead Red’).
Farmers Market Finds
This time of the year is especially fun at the farmers market because there are so many delicious things to try and buy! Some of our favorites are strawberries, cherries, raspberries, apriums (plum-apricot hybrid- YUM), sugar snap peas, fresh herbs, and dozen of greens and lettuces! To find a local farmers market, look here.