July in the Garden
In July, all your earlier soil preparation, planning and design, planting and weeding will be showing their results and bearing their fruits in your garden in this month. While there is still always plenty to be do, take time to enjoy your garden on long summer evenings after work and on weekends with family and friends.
By July most planting should be done, which is why I didn’t get to writing a June in the Garden blog post last month, sorry folks! We’ve had a cool spring this year, which meant I could keep planting through the whole month, when usually I try to finish by mid-month. Alas, the heat dome is upon us and now we have to dutifully water and weed all those plants we kept planting in May and June. July is a month of care and enjoying the harvest and beauty of the garden. Some folks are ready to head out on a vacation now, but remember to arrange a sitter for you garden to water, harvest and tend your plants while you’re gone!
When looking for a garden sitter, it’s better to find someone a little better qualified, like a fellow gardener like myself, or someone in a garden group, master garden program, or horticulture program, all who may be willing to help your for a fee.
Make sure also to leave good (and written!) instructions for your garden sitter–how much to water and how often, directions for harvesting and storing or using the produce from the garden. Both you and your plant sitter I’m sure don’t want produce to go to waste!
Design
July is a great time to get inspiration, and start making plans and designs for fall planting or next year. Visit botanical gardens, go on community garden tours, take a walk through the neighborhood. Bring a journal or sketchpad, record planting schemes and combinations with photos, words or drawings. Another way to think about possible plant combinations is by making cut flower bouquets with your perennial garden and your friends’, if the plants look good together in the arrangement and require the same growing conditions, they will likely look good growing together in the garden.
Now is a great time to evaluate your sun and shade maps and make sure that they are correct with your full summer patterns, are plants receiving the amount of light and shade they need? Make notes about what is working and what needs to be redesigned for next year. It’s a good time of the year to make sure your shade trees are giving you the shade that you want, check their locations and impact on the enviorment, consider where you could add trees to the east and west side of the home to reduce cooling costs, or a windbreak to reduce energy from winter winds. If you don’t have room for trees, consider a vine-covered trellis, which can provide shade or screening.
Look for gaps in your plantings, where can you add a few more annuals or perennials? Add annuals, biannuals or short lived perennials where there are gaps between young perennials that still need quite some time to grow and fill in the space you’ve given them. Many garden centers still carry plants for midsummer and fall plantings (and fall planting is the best IMO for perennials, less watering!).
July is a good time to think about and put in orders for spring-flowering bulbs for fall planting and fall planted bare root stock. Consider as well for your vegetable garden, what would you want to grow for mid-summer plantings and late summer plantings? Make sure to select vegetables that will mature and produce in the remaining frost-free days of the season, and/or how you could extend your season in the fall.
In the Garden
Planting and dividing
There is still time to plant and garden centers still provide plants, but I personally wouldn’t recommend it, they will need twice your spring planted plants watering needs to properly get established. They will need extra attention during very hot and dry weather, consider giving them mulch to conserve moisture and keep soil temperatures cool. If you have hot and dry spots empty in your garden, I would recommend zinnia, moss rose, gazania, lantana, dusty miller, sunflower and cleome for those hotspots.
You can start digging an dividing irises in mid to late july, about 6-8 weeks after they bloom. Cut the leaves in a fan shape back to 6 inches, this makes them easier to handle and reduces water loss. When you dig up the rhizomes, check for borers and discard any that are old and damaged. Replant healthy ones (or give to other folks!) and make sure to position the rhizomes just below the soil surface with the leaves and buds facing upwards.
As you harvest in your vegetable garden, use those empty spaces to plant mid-summer crops. These will need extra attention during early growth and hot and dry periods.
Mulching and Watering
Mulch with wood chips, shredded leaves, evergreen needles, chemical-free grass clippings, chopped weeds or seed-free straw around your plants to help keep roots cool and moist, while reducing weeds and improving the soil, I recommend straw over wood chips for annual vegetable crops though for their nutrient needs, shredded leaves specifically for native wildflowers, and evergreen needles for your acid loving plants like most berries. Make sure to keep the mulch away from the crown of the plant, burying plants can lead to crown rot and other disease problems. Try to spread a 1-3″ later of organic mulch over the soil for best results, but the finer the material, the thinner the layer of mulch.
We should be watering less frequently but more deeply to encourage deep roots that are more drought tolerant, and watering established plants 1″ of water a week, new plantings will need water more often to keep their small er shallower roots happy, and container/pots and raised beds will need watering more often than plants in in-ground beds.
July is a great time to think about how you can make your life (or your garden sitter’s life) easier in the garden. Group containers together so they take less time to water, or purchase a self-watering device. A wonderful, passive and low tech self-watering option are terracotta olas, or homemade DIY versions. Another easy DIY method is to take a 5 gallon bucket with water and run cloth strips from the bucket to the soil of the container, as the soil dried the cloth wicks the water from the bucket to the container. Another thing I’ve done is fill glass bottles like wine or beer bottles with water and inverted them and stuck them in at a 45 degree angle nearby larger plants like tomatoes, summer squash, and fruit trees. The water passively moves into the soil as it dries, I refill them once a week. Setting your pots inside plant trays without drainage holes also helps reduce watering needs. Other options to consider include installing soaker hoses or drip irrigation. Whatever you do, make sure to test whatever you do before you leave town!
Feeding and Weeding
Keep an eye on your plants growth, if you top dressed ornamental and edible perennial plants in the spring, most should be just fine, but keep an eye out for signs of nutrient deficiency. High nutrient-requiring annual vegetables like corn and brassiceae (cauliflower, broccoli) plants may benefit from a mid summer application of compost tea when they are half their mature size, and solanaceae (tomatoes, eggplant, peppers) when they start producing fruit.
Weed to your preferred level—your garden doesn’t need to be immaculate. What matters most is that the plants that you want are getting what they need to grow and not too much competition for light, soil, nutrients, and water. Many “weeds” are useful plants for humans and wildlife, many are edible, medicinal, and attract beneficial insects to the garden to pollinate or protect our plants from pest insects.
Keep an eye out for really hard to deal with weeds and get those dealt with as soon as you see them, like bindweed, poison ivy (careful!) and crabgrass. Try not to injure the roots of your plants when you pull weeds, put one hand around your plant stem and the soil around it and with the other carefully pull any weeds that are close to it, firm the soil afterwards and give the plant a drink. Try not to disturb the soil as much as possible, each time you do you bring new weed seeds to the surface to get light and water and germinate better. If you can, mulch right after weeding, or cut weeds back instead of pulling.
Pests and Pestilence
Keep an eye out for insect and critter damage in the garden, this year we have had particularly difficult time with groundhog browsing here and across mid-Michigan, and living in an urban area, with squirrels and skunks digging in beds. I’ve had the best luck with deterrents, particularly spreading garlic powder and crushed red pepper on my soil after ever rain or watering, which is tedious but has been pretty effective for me. For insect damage, I find a solution of water infused with garlic, onion, crushed red pepper and a little biodegradable soap to help it stay on the leaves sprayed on plant leaves keeps most insects and critters from munching on my plants (see this recipe), but also looking for them them and collecting them in the mornings also helps immensely. Here are some other homemade bug repellent recipes.
Stake tall plants that tend to flop and note which ones they are. Native plants tend to flop more in soil to rich for them, and many perennial plants also benefit from having low-growing grasses, sedges and legumes to help anchor them in the soil better. Use twine and bamboo to loosely tie plant stems.
Deadhead flowers for continual blooms, pinch back leggy plants to encourage branching and more flowers. You can stagger pinching and deadheading within each flowerbed to display flowers all the time. Add your annual trimmings to the compost, or use them for mulch! Make sure not to pinch or cut back or deadhead plants prior to a heatwave through, they don’t need the open wounds and extra stress. Deadhead during wet weather to reduce the risk of disease.
Keep an eye out for abnormal coloring, holes or damage, spots or growth on your plant and then try to identify what you find. If you are having trouble identifying a pest or disease, contact your local Extension service, a botanical garden, a gardener for hire like me, or a garden center for help with your diagnosis.