Late Summer Gardening.

Hey, hey, gardener friends! Summer is wrapping up (can you believe it?!) and we’re soooo excited for harvest season. But! There are still some great planting opportunities, grab a notepad and join us for some pre-Fall planning.

Plant this:

Grow seedlings of herbs such as chervil and dill in a location that receives 4-6 hours of sunshine. For fall color, plant:

• asters

• dahlias

• mums

• pansies

Sow seeds for cool-season root crops in an area with full sun, such as

• beets

• radishes

• turnips

Late-Season tomato Pruning: 

Pruning tomato plants late in the season should be more aggressive than early-season pruning: your aim is to improve air flow and let more sunlight in.

All branches that have no tomatoes or flowers on them, or just a few, are fair game. If it’s late in the season, you can also remove any branches with flowers that are unlikely to develop into mature fruit by the time the first fall frost hits in your area. When pruning late in the season, sanitizing your pruning tool is crucial because the likelihood of diseases is much higher. To prevent the spread of diseases, it is also very important to remove any of the pruned plant parts out of your garden for disposal in your green can, not in your garden compost.

Speaking of tomatoes, soon those juicy heirloom tomatoes will ripen (ours usually reach prime time late August), then it’s time to get all the burrata and basil and eat them freshly sliced (make sure you slice them a bit ahead of time and sprinkle some kosher salt and pepper, it makes the acidic tang of tomatoes pop, intensifying their flavor). Last summer we found ourselves with lots of tomatoes and had lots of chilled gazpacho, but also tried out this delicious tomato galette recipe from one of our favorite food bloggers. 

{Image from Love and Lemons.}

How’s your garden doing? What are you harvesting? What are you planting? We’d LOVE to hear!

xx, flavia