July in your Texas Kitchen Garden
This eggplant flower is happy. When many of your warm-season crops struggle in the heat, eggplant remains at it’s best!
June is a hot month in Texas and July is even hotter. I like to call July the official beginning to our “hot” season, which lasts until the end of August, sometimes into mid-September. And after the typical rainy springs we have, our home gardens are taxed. If you're wondering how our gardens hold up between torrential rains and droughts, the answer is, "not so well." It's stressful! For more info on how to protect your warm-season garden during these rain-to-drought extremes, check out my blog on the topic here.
July is the hottest month of the year in Texas. August may have higher highs, but if you count each day of the month, every one in July is rough, unless there's an oddity. Not only that, but the night time temps are very high, normally well above 80. This is the part that stresses your plants out. But wait - there's more! The day lengths in July are longer than in August, which is something our plants respond to. It's all just too much at times. Their immune systems are taxed. Pests and disease come right after one another. It’s a rough time of year.
If you feel like the July blaze is dragging you down, and you rather not spend a lot of time outside, it's totally ok not to garden for these 4-6 weeks of intense heat. If you choose to take a break, or modify it a bit, or just not take the uphill battle head on, here are some ideas:
1) Keep pruning unhealthy foliage off all the plants in your garden. Water the rest. Just do this minimum and that's it.
2) If a plant seems like it's more struggling than producing, remove it by cutting it at the base. If it's not diseased, the roots should stay in the soil.
3) Cover all exposed soil with mulch of some type, even if it's just cut up pieces of newspaper, because you do not want your soil drying out. (Of course the best type of mulch is pine needles or garden straw, but honestly, this is desperate times, so almost anything will do.) Four to six inches of mulch will keep the soil healthy and alive until you're ready to plant again, be it in the fall (right around the corner!) or next spring.
4) Chop everything in your garden at the soil line, cut all stems and leaves into small pieces and drop them onto the surface of your soil. This is called "chop and drop" and it's a way to make mulch out of the foliage of plants that aren't working for you anymore.
For those of you who want to keep growing all through the summer, good for you! Here's your garden to-do's for the month of July:
July Garden To-Dos:
PLANT pumpkin seeds on the 4th of July for a Halloween harvest. Pumpkin is a "winter squash," which means it can store for a longer period of time versus the "summer squash." So you can also have them through the fall for all your pumpkin yumminess! Transplants that can be added to your garden now include okra, eggplant, herbs of course (always!) and summer flowers. Any seeds or transplants added will need to be babied - and I mean BABIED. You may be watering 2-3 times a day until seed germination or for the first 1-2 weeks, then once a day for another week or two. Herbs are the toughest.
WATER consistently and deeply, at least every-other day, in the mornings is best.
PROTECT your blazing sun grow spaces with a little shade cover. If your garden gets more than 9 hours per day and is looking sad, you may want to help it out. More on garden sun protection here.
OBSERVE for how the heat effects your garden: Large leafed plants such as cucumber will have wilting leaves in the afternoons. This may not mean they need to be watered, so make sure you do your "finger test" in the soil before watering. Flowering plants like tomatoes and peppers may stop flowering in extreme heat. This is just due to stress. You can trim the tops back to encourage ripening of the existing fruits, or you can leave them. They will start flowering again in late August once the heat "breaks" and you will enjoy a fall crop!
And when the heat drags you down, just remember, Fall garden planning is right around the corner! :-)