14 WAYS TO EXTEND YOUR GARDENING SEASON

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

5. Trellis.

Trellising veggies whenever possible makes it easier to weed and mulch around the base of plants, as well as giving you more room to plant additional crops. Some vegetables you can successfully trellis are peas and beans (climbing, not bush, varieties), indeterminate tomato varieties, and vining types of cucumber, melon, winter squash, and zucchini. If large melons or squash get heavy and start pulling on the vine, fashion slings from stretchy material, such as worn-out nylon stockings.

6. lnterplant.

Interplanting, or combining compatible vegetables in the same row, has several advantages. It lets you extend the harvest by planting fast-growing veggies among slow growers. By the time the slow growers need more room, the fast growers are done and gone.

Another way interplanting extends the harvest is by letting you grow cool-season veggies into the warmer months. Shade created by big-leafed crops like cabbages, tall crops like corn, or trellised crops like beans can improve summer growing conditions for cool weather crops like radishes and lettuce.

Interplanting, like successive planting, maximizes yields by keeping your garden soil occupied so weeds can't find a foothold. It also discourages plant pests by varying the environment. As a bonus, in seasons when one crop doesn't do particularly well, the interplanted crop should still give you something to harvest.

7. Rotate.

Crop rotation means nothing more than not planting vegetables from the same family in the same place twice in a row. Since all plants within the same family experience the same problems, rotated crops suffer less from pests, diseases, and soil deficiencies. They therefore tend to produce over a longer period than plants grown in the same tired soil time after time.

Here, again, raised beds offer an advantage. You can set up a crop-rotation plan and use it year after year, simply by shifting your planting scheme from one bed to the next. Because legumes fix nitrogen in the soil, whenever possible alternate a legume veggie in one of the other families.

8. Water only when necessary.

Water your garden only as necessary to makeup the difference between rainfall and the amount of water your plants need. If your garden soil is rich in organic matter, as it should be, it will trap and hold most of the water that falls on it without need for much intervention. Mulching heavily around plants ensures that water won't evaporate too quickly, but will remain available to the root systems. Your plants will continue to grow, even during spells of moderately dry weather.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print