Month-by-Month Guide to Vegetable Gardening

June

The bottom line: Full speed ahead! Through the next few months, your focus will be on maintenance and harvest.

Planting

Early in the month, finish getting any warm-season vegetables into the ground. Direct sow the warm-season crops you plan to grow in place. Continue to thin seedlings of direct-sown crops that were planted earlier.

Maintenance

As your plants shoot up, be prepared with staking materials; you’ll need plenty of bamboo stakes in different heights to keep your crops from succumbing to gravity.

About one month after planting, side dress crops with organic compost. If you didn’t use mulch, get out there with a scuffle hoe and attack the weeds.

Harvest

Harvest during the cooler times of day—early morning or evening—when plants are least stressed. Continue to pick greens, peas, beans, and herbs. Stop harvesting asparagus and rhubarb, which need to rebuild their food reserves in order to produce a good crop again next year.