Gardening: The trick to planting vegetables in the heat of summer

This summer is proving to be another warm one.

Tomatoes, raspberries, garlic and other vegetables are ripening at least two weeks early because it was warm enough in late April and May for plants to grow fast and the bees to do a stellar job of pollinating.

Now it’s time to start thinking about the fall planting season. We have a short growing season here, but we can still gamble on the weather staying agreeable into early October to ripen late crops of basil, cabbage, kale, lettuce, Swiss chard, spinach, carrots, beets and turnips.

Granted, the vegetables we plant for fall need to produce quickly and be tolerant of cool weather or an early frost. This isn’t the season for warm-weather crops like corn, tomatoes or peppers. You will have to rely on seeds rather than starter plants, but maybe if you look carefully, some nurseries might have small starts available.

The trick to starting vegetables now in the heat of summer is to make sure they stay hydrated and fed. Sprinkle fertilizer on the bed and then soak the area for an hour to get water deep into the soil before planting your seeds. Cover the bed lightly with a thin mulch like grass clippings or mulch pellets used for topping newly planted grass seed. Set a small sprinkler up on a timer to come on for 15 minutes in the morning to keep the surface moist until the plants are a couple of inches tall.

Basil loves the heat and will sprout quickly to produce a late-summer crop just as the tomatoes are reaching their peak. Cabbage, kale, lettuce, spinach and Swiss chard will produce tasty greens for late-summer salads. The cabbages might even produce some small heads if the frost comes late. With the exception of basil, all these crops are tolerant of a light frost and with a little luck might produce into October. That said, once it starts cooling down, keep frost covers handy and follow the forecasts for possible freezing nights.

Root crops like carrots, beets and turnips planted now will probably mature in late October. Carrots can be left in the ground for the winter if they are covered with a thick mulch as the ground freezes. When harvested in March, they will be very sweet. Starting carrots now can be a bit tricky because they are tiny and only planted an eighth of an inch deep in the soil, and are thus prone to drying out easily in the heat. They can be lightly mulched with grass clippings or pelleted mulch and watered a couple of times a day until they emerge. Shading the bed with floating row cover might help keep the soil moist.

Beets and turnips roots might be small in a fall planting, but their leaves make nice fall greens for soups and side dishes. A side benefit to growing greens in the fall is that the leaf-chomping bugs are gone.