This week marks the peak performance of your garden. From this day forward, through the fading days of autumn, your garden will be in decline.
While there are some fabulous early spring flowering plants that you have enjoyed and other plants that bloom best in October that are ahead of you, many vegetable and fruit crops are yet to reach the crescendo of their ripeness. The best of their season lies before us. We are standing on the Continental Divide of the gardening season: on your right is the past 4 months where planting is history. On your left is the next 4 months. Your job is to manage the flow of the season in your favour.
Where sowing seeds, planting, and weed control dominated your thoughts and actions previously, things are now about to change dramatically. Fact is, the real productivity in your garden lies ahead of you.
What gardeners busied themselves with from April through July is now done. If you didn’t plant, sow, or weed before this, there is not much point in getting at it now, unless you are starting a new landscape altogether. We are talking about the established garden that should be flowering to beat the band and the vegetable garden that is on the threshold of producing the best crop of food ever. While our rhubarb, asparagus, strawberry, raspberry, and cherry days are behind us for this year, we still have my tomatoes and apples to look forward to. Not to mention peppers, potatoes, Swiss Chard and all of the cucurbits like squash and cucumbers, and list goes on.
The shortening days of August and September slow the growth of weeds in the garden.
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