Mike Dunton’s Maritime Northwest Edition Victory Gardener’s Almanack for the month of June
The gardening season starts in full swing in June. Everything is growing now, including the weeds. Develop a good, daily routine to hoe and cultivate and they won’t get away from you. As your lawn takes off, save your clippings and use them to mulch around the plants in your vegetable garden.
In the Vegetable Garden
- If setting out plants that have been started indoors, be sure to harden them off or provide a bit of shade the first few days, or until they are established.
- By mid-month, after any danger of frost, transplant peppers and eggplants.
- Sow directly into the garden from seed, cucumbers, squash (including zucchini and pumpkins), beans, beets, carrot, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower.
- Sweet corn should be planted in successive plantings at the beginning of as well as at mid-month.
- To keep lettuce growing throughout the heat of the summer, try shading and keeping well-watered.
- Rutabagas, or Swedes, need to be sown twelve weeks before your first frost date. Plant in fine, loose soils and keep it moist. This allows the globes to form properly and prevent forking.
- Mulching helps to conserve moisture, keeps down weeds, and maintains plant health.
- Train tomatoes for earlier harvests. Dwarf and determinate varieties do nicely in containers. Indeterminate varieties can be trained up poles.
- Start planning your Fall garden now!
- Plant endive and kale now for Fall greens.
- For late crops of beans, beets, carrots, kohlrabi, turnips, plant near the end of the month.
- Ten weeks before your first expected frost date, sow broccoli and Brussels sprouts in flats.
Mike Dunton is the founder of the Victory Seed Company and one of the early signers of the Safe Seed Pledge. The Victory Seed Company works to preserve rare, threatened, heirloom seeds and to make them available to home gardeners.
