If you are growing bush beans, chances are you have seen the first small white or pink flowers, and maybe small beans are already forming. If you are growing tomatoes, the plants likely have small green fruit, or perhaps even ripening ones if you planted quite large seedlings.
Basil plants are probably large now if you bought seedlings, or maybe even if you grew your own from seed. You can start to pick occasionally from your basil plant once it's a foot high or so, and more as it gets larger. A few fresh leaves are amazing chopped raw into a salad or in a sandwich. Rather than pick the lower leaves, it's actually good to pick an end cluster of basil leaves at the top of a stem (especially when flowers start to form there). Pick off the top part of a stem, just above a pair of healthy leaves below. When you do that, new stems will start to grow from the where that lower pair of large leaves join the stem. The replacement stems will be more numerous than what you picked first, and your plant will become nice and bushy, rather than tall and spindly as it would be if you picked the lower leaves first.
Watering Needed
In this weather, you should be watering things deeply at least once a week, possibly more. Obviously if plants are wilting, they need more! On the other hand, watering too much causes problems. (Okay, I don't know what those problems are: too much care has never been one of my gardening problems.)
For plants growing in the ground, once your plants are large so that they are fully shading their own ground, evaporation will be less, and they should have a well-developed root system. The ones on the short list will be fine with a deep watering once a week or so. As I mentioned before, a deep watering means enough water to soak deeply into the soil. You might find a different way, but I use a bucket, and a small container to pour water from the bucket around each plant. I make a small pool, and each time the small pool soaks in completely I pour some more, until I've percolated water down 2 or 3 times for each large plant. I do just use my intuition for how much - if you need more guidance, I'm not a good source!
For plants in containers, with the high heat and unusually dry weather (for Toronto) we've been having, you may need to water more often, perhaps every few days. Poking into the soil can give you some sense of how much moisture is retained. This is when pots within pots can provide a little protection from the worst heat.
Collecting Mustard Family Seeds
If you let them grow out, then your mustard family plants: arugula, mizuna, and mustard, by now will probably have ripened seed pods. Some may not yet: usually mizuna is first, arugula is second, and mustard is last.
If you want to keep seed for next year, you can collect seed when the pods have dried out enough to pop open almost at a touch. I rarely buy seeds for these three, since they are very easy to collect and the seeds keep very well. The seeds I collect always sprout well for me the next spring.
Hold a round container (like a large plastic yoghurt container, for example) right beneath the pods hanging from their stems. Roll the pods between your fingers. As the pods open, some will drop their seeds; other pods will open but fall into the container themselves. When you have a container full of tiny black or brown seeds and dry pods, roll the pods in the container with your fingers some more to get all the seeds out of them.
The seeds now should be settled mainly on the bottom of the container, and the pods on top of them. You can pick out the pods, but that is a bit tedious. What's more fun is to blow (very gently at first!) slightly downwards along the inside of one side of the container. Your breath will circle around in the container and swirl the dry pods right up and out of container surprisingly quickly, while the small seeds will stay in the bottom as long as you don't blow too hard. (Okay, I always get some pods in my face. It always happens faster than I think.)
After you separate the seeds, you should leave them out in an open bowl or container on a shelf for several weeks to make sure they have time to dry fully. After that you can put them in a paper envelope and store them in a basically dry place. Make sure to label each envelope with the type of plant and the year. It's probably impossible to tell from looking whether it's mustard, mizuna, or arugula seed, and you also want to make sure that each year you are planting the previous year's seed. (If you collect from several of these, and they are sitting in bowls drying at the same time, you may also need to label the bowls.)
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