July Garden Planner

The summer garden is in full swing. This is the time of year for harvesting the heat lovers like tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, fava beans, green beans, all types of peppers, garlic, basil, along with other Mediterranean herbs.  Yum!

The spring greens have bolted, but there are summer greens that are robust during the hot days of summer. My favorites are amaranth, Swiss chard, collards, Malabar spinach, mustard greens, New Zealand spinach, orach, sorrel, sprouting broccoli and cultivated dandelions.

The spring lettuce has gone to seed. When you see the white fuzzies, they are ready to save. I just pull the seed heads, break apart, put in a ziplock freezer bag, label with type and date, and store in the refrigerator. I also re-seeded our self watering pots with some of the seeds. I had a few small volunteer lettuce plants elsewhere in the garden that I transplanted to the pots as well. The lettuce seeds I planted last month have sprouted, but aren’t quit ready to transplant.

There are even a select few varieties of lettuce that can stand up to summer heat:

Leaf lettuce -”New Red Fire”, “Simpson Elite”
Butterhead -”Optima”, “Winter Density”
Romaine -”Jericho”, ”Green Towers”
Batavian -”Magenta”, “Nevada”

The fava beans are putting on their second flush of beans. They could be picked now and eaten as green beans, left on the vine to harvest as lima beans, or cut down to keep nitrogen in the soil to feed the veggies planted next to them for the rest of the summer. The other legume, my snow peas, are still producing sweet pods that I love to eat right off the vine. Not many of these beauties make it to the kitchen!