June 2021
Well…here we are 10 days into June and I am just getting this out to you guys! I hope you have all been well, busy in your gardens and enjoy the fruits of your labors!
June is a lovely month in the garden. The racing energy of spring seems to climax, as we move to Midsummer Solstice, June 21. The sun is the highest and longest in the sky and all of this month we are bathed in light. In this moment of endless daylight, take some time to savor your garden, there will always be weeds to pull and this ,that, and the other thing to get on with, but take some time to be still in the garden. I find this particularly hard, morning coffee on the front patio quickly turns into weeding, watering potted plants and staking up the massive peony blooms, I have to remind myself to take a moment to just take it all in. I particularly love the late evening in the garden. The evening sounds of birds and insects moving about the garden, the glow of the setting sun, casting a soft glow over the garden, the last light illuminating the very tops of the trees, then the light fades, a deepening dusk rolls in and the bats can be seen swooping about the garden.
In June, we feel we are in summer, but every thing still feels green and new, fresh, still springy. The blooms as they come are treasured, the growth in the vegetable garden full of anticipation. June to me feels like just the beginning of all summer has to offer.
We have planted out the garden, and have mulched a good deal of it, but there is still a bit more to tackle in the annual gardens. The rush of getting things planted has past and now we are shifting our energy to garden maintenance - pruning, tying up plants, mulch touch up, fertilization, weeding, watering and best of all, harvesting.
Our alpine, woodland and other strawberries are all very happy and productive. Just last night the girls pick a quart container full of tiny woodland strawberries that we use around the property as a ground cover. The alpine strawberries that line the front walk are picked over every day and little handfuls are eaten as we come and go.
As the daffodils and tulips die back I am starting to cut the browning leaves down to clean up the garden.
Our front garden has been a wash of purples, dotted with hits of yellow: lupines, iris, catmint, sedums, thyme, and alliums . And now the peonies are gracing the garden in their ranges of soft pinks, adding more color to the front garden. The climbing roses in the back have been blooming for weeks, a soft creamy white with a touch of pink and very fragrant. I dead head mine daily, this keeps the plant putting energy into flowering and you will get a longer bloom season. It really isn’t a bad job, standing by the rose bush, drinking up the sweet smells, I’ll take it.
Jobs for the Garden
The Vegetable Garden
As we move further into June we are getting more and more of a harvest from our vegetable gardens and things are growing quickly. I am regularly pinching out the side shoots on my tomatoes plants and tying them to the stakes as they grow. I don’t begrudge this little garden chore, it is a meditative task, and I love the scent of the tomato plant that coats my hands. The squashes, cucumbers and potatoes are getting routine searches for squash and potato beetles, which are out in full force right now. There are probably better strategies out there, but my method is to spray the plants with water then go around and smash the beetles in my fingers. The water seems to make it harder for them to fly off and evade me. I do sometime use neem oil if it is really bad. Keep sowing a regular succession of greens, beets, basil, cilantro, dill, etc.. This will allow you to have plants ready to take the place of the plants you harvest and then you can have these all throughout the season. Some lettuces can tolerate the heat better than others, so I grow those varieties in the summer months. I am also going to be sowing some more biennials to grow on for the season in pots and then plant out in the garden in the fall. I will be starting more foxgloves, hollyhocks and whatever else I get in my head to do in these next few weeks.
Along with all the amazing growth we see in the annuals and perennials, the weeds are also growing like mad in June. For larger pathways a sharp hoe is essential and can make quick work of weeding. For tighter spacing we like using a Korean hand scythe or hori hori. The best time for weeding is a dry hot day, done in the morning and then the weeds will wilt throughout the heat of the day and won’t be able to re root.
One thing we are trying to focus on more this year, is fertilization, adding beneficial organism to the soil and continuing to create habitat for beneficial insects. At the beginning of the month we added nematodes in the annual gardens and released green lace wing eggs around the homestead. We will do both again later this month, hopefully. We fertilize using Neptunes Harvest products, but we also make our own compost tea, and this year we will be experimenting with making a comfrey tea as a fertilizer that is high in potash. In the past we have used comfrey as a green much, around the garden, cutting the plant all the way back after flowering. Comfrey will completely regrow and this process can be repeated several times throughout the season. The leaves break down quickly and provide plants with a variety of nutrients. The leaves can also be chopped and added to a compost pile, I have been told they speed up the breakdown of compost, so we will be trying that out as well. All and all, comfrey is an amazing plant and has many usages in the garden and we are excited to try a few more.
Fruit Trees
The fruit has set and is swelling on the trees. Now is the time to thin the fruit, this is one of those tasks that is always a little bit of a mental hurtle for me, it feels like you are reducing your harvest, but really you are not. You are thinning to allow fruit to be larger and ripen better. If you don’t do this, the tree will likely do it for you by dropping fruit, however it is better to do the selection yourself, so you can choose the best fruit to stay. When you look at your fruit tree, you will see the spurs that fruit develops from. I have been told to reduce the amount of fruit on each spur to two and select two that aren’t touching, so that is what I do. It is also a good time to fertilize your fruit trees to help them have the nutrients they need to sustain fruiting. We do a variety of feeds…Neptune’s Harvest fish and seed weed, compost tea, azomite powder (trace minerals), comfrey leaves at their base, this is not an exhaustive list but what we typically do throughout the season as time and energy allow.
deadheading rose
I do this task several times a week, mostly because I really enjoy tending them, but I think you would be fine doing it weekly. This will prolong the flowering season for your rose, because as you dead head, you are pruning, and pruning stimulates new growth, and that growth will produce more blooms. Don’t just pull off the head, cut back to a leaf. But you may choose to not prune your roses and enjoy them while they are there if you are looking for the display of hips in the late summer and autumn. The hips are edible, and can provide a late season interest in the garden as well as food for wildlife, there are costs and benefits to everything, prune or don’t, it is up to you.
Boxwoods
We are new to growing boxwoods, just this spring we planted a boxwood hedge in part of the upper annual garden. So I can really only pass along what I have researched about boxwoods, not what I have done in my garden for years, with that in mind take my advice with a good grain of salt. June is a good month to prune / shape your boxwoods if you growth them as a hedge and are pruning them, and is best done when you have a few dry days, the wetness can encourage fungal growth on the fresh cuts. We will trim our boxwoods this month, and see how they do.
