June 4 – 17, 2018
Mount Washington — Consistent warm weather has encouraged gardeners to plant hot season annuals. For vegetable growers, these are many of the mainstays of summer cuisine and crops for winter storage. Hard-rind squash and pumpkins, aka winter squashes, require a growing season of 100 to 120 days from seed to maturity. Sown right now, they will sprout, leaf out, flower, form fruit, ripen and cure before a hard freeze. Edamame beans, different from most bush and pole beans, take a full 100 days to mature: Plant them soon. Tomatoes and peppers must be grown from transplants. Cucumbers, green beans that ripen to soup beans, bulbing fennel and tender herbs like basil will provide abundantly if seeded soon.
At our latitude, we, including our plants, experience the longest days of the year during the month before the Summer Solstice (June 21 this year) and the month after. The heat continues while days shorten as the Sun moves toward the Autumn Equinox. Before planting, count days-to-maturity of the crops you wish to grow. By allowing adequate field time while the Sun is high, we avoid the anxiety of watching the calendar as we gauge our plants’ readiness for harvest during the waning days of summer.
Perennial edibles offer fresh harvests before early spring-sown vegetables provide food. Flourishing now, perennial green onions, French sorrel, rhubarb, woody herbs, onion and garlic chives add savory vitality to springtime dishes. Easy to grow, plant them in vegetable and flower gardens anytime in the growing season. Once established, they keep giving, although they are in their prime as edibles in spring.
Search under rhubarb leaves for flowering parts and remove before they elongate. If flower stalks appear, cut them for display as a novelty or in flower arrangements. Perennial onions form reproductive stalks that bear bulblets in late spring, limiting their production of tender scallion-like stems to early spring and fall, when other plants are not productive. The bulblets are known to be prepared like shallots. Pink and lavender flowering, round-leafed onion chives are in bud or flowering as June begins; white-blooming, flat-leafed garlic chives bud and bloom later. All parts are edible.
At the moment, I am most drawn to showy stands of blue to violet spring wildflowers I have cultivated: In addition to attracting me, they are luring pollinators to my landscape, making my place a community center. Ruby-throated hummingbirds, yellow eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies and voracious bumblebees hum and buzz in the starry blossoms of Camassia leichtlinii and Amsonia.
Opportunities to participate
June 10 deadline for “Birds, Careers, and Conservation Workshop,” August 7 – 8 at Cornell. Full scholarships available for 15- to 21-year-old urban youth living in underserved communities – https://mailchi.mp/cornell/scholarships-available-for-youth-workshop-in-august?e=12cb6fc395
June 27 discounted registration deadline for August 10 – 12 Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) Conference – https://www.nofamass.org/articles/2018/04/honoring-our-roots-tending-our-future-nofa-summer-conference-2018
