Water, Weeds, and Bugs

I highly recommend spending time with your garden often. That way you'll appreciate its beauty more, while also seeing what's going on and doing the work in small dose. I find taking care of the garden that way more enjoyable and satisfying than going out for hours at a time once in a while. If your garden is in a place where you can do other things, that's even better. It's nice to just watch the wild bees, for instance.


Watering Time

Since the weather has now become hot and dry (finally!), you will need to start watering regularly. The tiniest plants need to have at least slightly damp soil right near the surface. But once plants start to get beyond the first set of leaves, they are also putting out lots of roots, and you can start to let them collect moisture from deeper down. Try digging a bit to see how deep you have to go to find damp soil.

Greens tend to get stronger tasting if they are in hotter and drier weather, so you can water them more if you want to try to keep them milder. Also, hot weather makes them flower, which is the beginning of end of their life cycle. My mizuna and arugula are flowering now. The flowers are edible and taste like broccoli (which makes sense since broccoli is an overdeveloped flower in the same family). But don't eat them all, as you can collect seed for next year if you let the seed pods mature.

Tomatoes, once established, have deep roots, and can be watered less often, though uneven moisture conditions will stress any of vegetable plants. Digging down somehwhere nearby is always a good way to check.

Also, once your plants are strong, you can "mulch" to conserve moisture in the soil. "Mulch" in gardening means absolutely anything covering the soil, and people do use an extremely wide range of things. I like straw, generally. My local hardware store (Bastone, on Dufferin at Hallam) carries straw bales. But mulch can also give shelter to slugs and snails, and since I have had a lot of slugs, I will not mulch for quite a while, until all my plants are large and thriving.

Weeds and Bugs

Now is also high season for weeds and bugs. Many of your plants are still probably pretty small, and so somewhat defenceless.

On the one hand, it's best not to get too hung up on control. Biodiversity is your friend: a broad mixture of plants (including weeds) and bugs (including pests) is valuable. Pests in modest amounts support their own predators and parasites in modest amounts, which in turn keep those same pests under control for you. Weeds, in modest amounts, contribute well to the biodiversity of your garden, supporting beneficial insects, birds, and soil organisms.

So it's good to let things be somewhat disorderly/diverse. Weed enough to give your own plants a strong upper hand, and remove obviously harmful critters when you find them (e.g. slugs, tomato horn worms).

On the other hand, sometimes you definitely need to take more decisive action, or you will lose what you are trying to grow. Only some problems will solve themselves. (For example, I used to have lots of aphids, but now they seem to be under control - so I guess something came along to control them for me.)

I have not tried to control slugs much for years, however, and they have been increasing. This spring was an especially good slug spring. My plants were getting eaten pretty badly while they were tiny. So I have been coming out often in the evening for a few minutes before it gets too dark, to search for slugs on the plants themselves, and I have also been looking under bricks and things where the big ones hide during the day. Many of them were tiny ones, so it took a while to find the majority of them (usually just barely visible, clinging to stems or leaves at dusk), but since I started, it has made a big difference.

For the first time, I am also going to try to control something tiny that eats plants in the brassica family - I haven't figured out what, yet. My greens (mizuna, mustard, tat soi) don't usually take enough damage to matter, but I am growing broccoli this year, so I need these much larger plants to be healthy and energetic for a long time. (They are all in the same family, and have the same pests.)

Unlike slugs, these insects are too small and elusive to find and remove. The broccoli leaves are getting eaten pretty badly, so I am making up some gourmet natural pesticide/repellent: garlic and hot pepper infused natural soap mixture to spray on just the broccoli plants, and see if I can reduce the damage. I haven't tried this before, so not sure how it will go.

Over time, you will also learn to recognize your own most troublesome weeds, and then you can focus on removing those more thoroughly as you weed, while not worrying so much about minor ones that don't get in the way too much.

One helpful weeding technique when you have a lot of area to cover is to use the edge of a trowl to scrape/cut very small weeds just as they come up. Be careful not to injure your own plants, of course. Seedlings don't have enough resources to recover from this cutting treatment, even if the root is left intact. Small-scale organic farmers use sharpened tools for this, even mounted on wheels to weed whole rows quickly.

Again, the most helpful thing is to check out your patch quite often. Then you will catch problems before they get too large.