By Mary Lowther
If you’ve been too busy to get your garden in during our windows of opportunity when the sun shone, never fear! It is not too late. We can sow many crops and expect a harvest before next winter.
Some vegetables, like arugula, lettuce, scallions, pak choi, parsley, spinach, chard and turnips can be sown right through to the end of August. Carrots and beets will produce a crop if sown by the end of July. Overwintering crops can be sown until the first week of August.
Plan on sowing every two or three weeks for a successive harvest. I direct sow all my root vegetables in the ground and everything else in flats because I can keep them cooler and have more control over them. Freshly-sown seeds will need hand-watering every day until they sprout and even twice a day in hot weather. Ninety per cent of the carrots and beets I’ve sown this year have been gobbled up, probably by slugs and sow bugs because we’ve had a lot of rain that fosters their proliferation, so I just keep sowing more every couple of weeks in expectation of drier weather.
Because predatory slugs and sow bugs awaken with the mere whiff of their favourite seedlings I start everything possible in potting soil in flats that I cover with spun cloth cover like Remay. Did you know that slugs and sow bugs can, and DO, fertilize their own eggs? No wonder they’re so prolific.
By the time the seedlings I’ve started in flats are ready to go into the ground, they are usually big enough to survive the oncoming assault. We want to grow them so fast that slugs et al can’t keep up. As always, dig in a quarter to a half cup of fertilizer in the bottom of each hole, fill it with water and plant the seedling into this. Set up the soaker hoses and water twice a week like the rest of the garden. Side dress with fertilizer every three weeks and spray with compost tea every two weeks.
I keep brassicas like cabbage and broccoli covered with Remay the whole time they’re in the ground. Though wasps kill cabbage moth caterpillars I can’t depend on them, particularly since I’ve managed to discourage them from building a nest under the soffit that’s above my head when I hang up the wash. Installing hoops and Remay over the bed and removing the cover to weed, fertilize and foliar spray with one eye scanning for cabbage moths trying to sneak in when the cover is off takes time, but when you harvest a clean, healthy cabbage or broccoli your efforts pay off.
You’ll need wide Remay to cover the hoops and plants as they outgrow the hoops. A few other gardeners and I chipped in and bought a roll of 10 foot wide Remay from Integrity Sales in Central Saanich 20 years ago and I’m still using it. Along with soaker hoses, a timer and compost tea, Remay has become an essential in my garden.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.
