July is the time to start overwintering brassicas like purple sprouting broccoli. Start seeds now, transplant in late August, and let the plants build over winter so they explode with early spring shoots when everything else is still mud. Patience pays off big.
Tomato cracking usually comes down to one thing: inconsistent watering. Here’s why it happens in July, how to prevent it with mulch and deep watering, which varieties hold up best, and what to do with the split fruit before it’s gone.
Pulled your garlic? Skip the fancy braids. The shed-rafter method is free, works great, and takes about five minutes to set up. Here’s how to cure, store, and pick next year’s seed cloves from your own crop.
You don’t need a root cellar to store apples and pears through winter. A cardboard box, some newspaper, and a cold garage will get you fresh fruit into January for almost nothing.
July is the exact right time to sow fall carrots and beets, not too early, not too late. Here’s how to get seeds to germinate in the heat, which varieties hold well in the ground, and why a light frost actually makes them taste better.
July in the PNW means your raspberries and blueberries need attention right now. Deep mulch, the right bird netting, post-harvest pruning, and a homemade spotted wing drosophila trap. Here’s what actually matters and what you can skip.
Cross-pollination ruins a lot of saved squash seeds, but it doesn’t have to. Here’s how to figure out which squash will cross, how to prevent it, and how to scoop, ferment, dry, and store seeds so you get the same variety next year.
If your zucchini or squash keeps dropping fruit before it develops, you might have a pollination problem, not a disease. Hand pollinating squash takes about two minutes each morning and completely fixes it. Here’s how to tell male from female flowers and transfer pollen the cheap and easy way.
It’s July and the zucchini are taking over. Here are three real strategies for dealing with the inevitable summer squash glut: freezing for winter, quick preservation, and the unspoken art of the porch drop. Also, please stop planting three plants.
Bok choy, tatsoi, mizuna, and komatsuna are some of the fastest vegetables you can grow, and fall is actually the best time to sow them. Direct seeding in late summer means they mature in cool conditions instead of bolting, and succession sowing every two weeks stretches the harvest deep into fall.
Sunscald on tomatoes and peppers shows up as white papery patches and it’s almost always caused by fruit that suddenly has no shade. Learn how to prevent it with cheap materials you already own, why over-pruning makes it worse, and how to salvage fruit that’s already been hit.
Walking out to find your tomatoes covered in cracks, weird scarring, or brown patches mid-July is a special kind of gardening dread. Most of it traces back to one thing. Here’s how to diagnose what you’re actually seeing and fix it cheap.