Gardeners Checklist: Here Is What to Do on the Week of July 17

By Ron Kujawski

• Keep picking beans, cucumbers and summer squash, even if you have more than you can use now. If you don’t pick them, the plants will stop producing. Give the surplus to neighbors and friends, or to the local food pantry. Surplus produce can also be preserved by freezing, canning, pickling, or dehydrating.

• Harvest garlic when one third to one half of the leaves have turned yellow or brown. If you wait too long the skin which is normally tightly wrapped around the bulb will break and the cloves will separate. The separated and skinless cloves easily blemish and do not store well. When harvesting, pull up the entire plants. Tie the plants in bunches and hang them from the rafters in a well ventilated garage or garden shed for about a month to cure. The plants may also be spread out on the floor in a dark, airy location.

• Pull up spent pea, broccoli and other plants that are no longer producing. However, don’t leave the space empty. Either plant more vegetables or sow a green manure crop. Buckwheat, annual sweetclover, sorghum, and millet are good green manure crops. These are called green manure crops because they add organic matter to soil when turned under. Legumes such as the sweet clover also contribute nitrogen to the soil.

• Continue to remove side shoots (suckers) from staked tomatoes. I also remove some of the side shoots from my caged tomatoes since too many stems will slow the development and maturation of the fruit; and the fruit will be smaller.  

• Be aware that soil in a black or dark green plastic pot will heat up on hot, sunny days. The soil can get so hot that roots of a potted plant can be damaged. To prevent root damage, water the plant frequently, or move the potted plant to a shady location, or wrap a reflective material such as aluminum foil around the pot.

I like green beans, shell beans, fava beans, and edamame beans, but I am not a fan of lima beans. “Picky, picky,” you say. Well, apparently, I am not alone in being finicky about beans I’ll eat. One of Peter Rabbit’s descendants found his way into our garden and devoured the two rows of edamame beans I had planted. Oddly, these two rows are in the middle of a six-row planting of beans. The other rows include green beans and yellow wax beans; and they were untouched by the ravenous rabbit. If that isn’t strange enough, I have six rows of shell beans side by side in another part of the garden. Two rows are "Great Northern," a white bean; two are "Red Kidney"; and two are "Black Turtle" beans. My little bunny friend ate only the ‘Great Northern’ plants. To add to my misery, Japanese beetles are ravaging the leaves of the "Great Northern" but have shown less interest in the other beans. Nature can sure be strange at times.

Ron Kujawski began gardening at an early age on his family's onion farm in upstate New York. Although now retired, he spent most of his career teaching at the UMass Extension Service. He serves on Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Horticulture Advisory Committee. His book, Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook, is available here.