July Veggie Gardening Tips Sacramento

 In Gardening, Landscape Design, Landscape Design El Dorado Hills, Landscape Design Folsom, Landscape Tips, Landscaping Sacramento

July Veggie Gardening Tips Sacramento

July Veggie Gardening Tips Sacramento

(Zone 9b Sacramento, CA – Harvest cherry tomatoes, Sow your Drought Tolerant Gardens: Tepary beans, Cowpeas. Start Harvesting Corn)

In July, your garden should be covered in bright red cherry tomatoes and fat ears of corn. Time to harvest and start canning! It’s also time to plant your drought-tolerant garden plants. If you are looking for a custom landscape design or landscape renovation, reach out to FiveSTAR Landscape and we can get some plans going.

Harvest your cherry tomatoes

Harvesting Cherry Tomatoes

Start harvesting your cherry tomatoes as soon as they are red

If you need to harvest them before they are perfectly ripe (for example, if you have birds that are pecking at them), you can pick them when they’re green and let them ripen on a sunny windowsill.

While your tomatoes are ripening, make sure to water them every day. If they go through dry periods the tomatoes will stop growing, and then when you water them they will get really fat really fast and split the skins. For perfectly shaped tomatoes and even skin, water them every day with a soaker hose.

As your tomatoes start to ripen and the harvest starts coming in, you will quickly find yourself inundated with more tomatoes than you know what to do with. You can can them into pasta sauce, or just slice them and throw them in a dehydrator.

Harvest your corn

Protect your corn from worms by spraying the tassels with mineral oil when the ears start to form. Harvest corn when the tassels are brown. When you puncture a kernel with your fingernail, the liquid that comes out should be milky. To store corn on the cob, blanch it in boiling water for a minute or two, and then it can be frozen without turning mushy.

Sow drought tolerant plants

Gardening in July can get frustrating because of the sheer amount of water you need to be able to keep things alive and producing. Cut down on your water bill by sowing drought-tolerant beans this month. These are varieties that thrive in arid climates and that grow best with limited water.

  • Tepary beans: these plants will produce lots of leaves but few beans if you give them too much water. Who knew that you could increase your harvest by watering less?
  • Cowpeas: these are lookalikes to the more well known black eyed peas, but unlike black eyed peas they actually won’t grow if you water them too much.
  • Bolita beans: Bolita beans are native to Spain, but were brought to New Mexico as a high protein, nutritious crop that they could grow in dry and arid climates. They taste like pinto beans but are easier to digest.
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