It is late August, It's hot, it's humid, and everything in the garden is either booming or busting.

Sound familiar?

Yeah.

Mistakes made earlier this season often show up now.

So today we're going to tackle the host of issues that can pop up in the late summer garden with very little warning.

And a lot of the time, it's all our own fault.

So today on Just Grow Something, we're talking over watering, overcrowding, poor plant pairings and yes, the oh so handy garden garden journal that might just save your sanity next season.

So grab your garden journal and a cup of coffee, or your iced tea or cocktail, whatever you want, and let's talk about what to fix, what to tweak, and what to stop doing entirely in your garden right now.

Let's dig in, hey?

I'm Karen and what started as a small backyard garden 20 years ago turned into a lifelong passion for growing food.

Now as a market farmer and horticulturist, I want to help you do the same.

On this podcast, I am your friend in the garden teaching evidence based techniques to help you grow your favorites and build confidence in your own garden space.

So grab your garden journal and a cup of coffee and get ready to just grow something.

I know that this time of the year might very well be the time of the season where a lot of us are just over it, like we're done.

We don't want to mess with it anymore.

We've we've been dealing with the heat, we've been dealing with the humidity and the bugs and the weeds and the plant diseases and all of the things.

And if you haven't been dealing with these things, well, congratulations because that makes for a very lovely gardening season.

But most of us aren't that lucky.

Most of us have dealt with something or another during the season and we may just be ready to just give it up and walk away.

Let's not do that.

Let's, you know, work our way through some of these issues that we might be having right now because I promise you, once we get through it, we're going to be better off in terms of the fall garden.

And if you're not growing a fall garden, that's fine too.

Your current summer plants can actually continue a lot further into the fall than you think.

So let's start with watering.

OK, here's the thing.

Especially in the summer heat, a lot of us think, you know, more heat means our plants need more water.

And while our plants are definitely thirsty, too much love in the form of water can actually backfire.

Over watering is one of the biggest mistakes home gardeners make at this time of the year, especially when maybe we hit that sort of daily watering schedule and we forget to check and see if the soil actually needs it.

Now, I don't know about where you've been, but you know, we had one of the rainiest Julys that we have ever seen.

We actually had a little bit of flooding out here on the farm.

And I generally am not a proponent of being on a fixed watering schedule in terms of like set it and forget it because you don't actually get the opportunity to figure out whether or not your plants actually need that soil or need that water.

The other thing is that, you know, if you are watering daily, you likely are not leaving that water running long enough for it to really get down in there and soak down into the soil.

So we don't know if the soil actually needs it.

We don't know if the plants actually have any airspace down in there because when we over water, the roots actually get soggy and we're filling all of that soil airspace with water, which means that oxygen can't get in and the plants need, the roots need oxygen.

So the plants get stressed and then you just get really sad tomatoes, OK?

Plus you also get diseases that start like root rot and fungal diseases.

They absolutely love swampy soil.

So if you had a ton of rain and then all of a sudden the rain stopped and you felt like, oh gosh, now I needed to go ahead and start watering.

The first thing that you always want to do is do a finger test, right?

Stick your finger down a couple of inches into the soil.

If your soil is moist, skip the watering, right?

Your water, your, your root zone is generally, you know, between two and four inches.

So if you can get your finger down that deep into the soil, if it is damp at all, skip the watering.

And if it's dry, then we want to water very deeply.

I would love to see people watering to where it gets moist all the way down to like the six inch depth #1 the roots are going to go down to look for that water.

So this is training them to go away from the surface of the soil, which is the hottest area, right?

So we want them to get down in there and #2 it means that you know the plant is going to get a nice long drink, not just a little shallow, shallow sip and then have to wait for more water again.

OK, If you're doing this in a raised bed, yes, the raised beds tend to dry out a little bit faster, but the same rule actually applies.

Deep watering, not just a daily little sprinkle.

OK, for both of these instances, mulch.

Mulch is your best friend right now.

OK, so I even if you have not had mulch on your garden at all all season and you have completely ignored me when I have said mulch, now is still a good time to add mulch.

It is never too late to cover that soil.

OK, so go ahead and do that.

If you're growing in containers, smaller containers, they absolutely dry out fast and so they do need regular attention.

But don't just assume that they are thirsty, OK, water those pots until the water drains out the bottom.

Let it sit for a hot minute and then water again until the water drains out the bottom.

Then we know that that soil has been saturated, that pot should feel heavy, and you just kind of want to make sure that the drainage holes are doing their job.

Always make sure that they aren't blocked.

Then you don't have to water again until once again you check that soil, check down in there at about that 4 inch, 2-3 to 4 inch, you know, depth to see whether or not that container needs to be watered or if the container starts to feel light again, then it's time to water.

Obviously the bigger the container, the more soil content you have, which means the more water you can hold.

So that's the less frequently that you have to water.

OK, so that's our first problem is the over watering.

The second problem would be overcrowding.

And I know, I know I talk a lot about interplanting, but there is a delicate balance there.

We do want to make sure that we are leaving gaps between the roots of our plants and a little bit between the leaves depending on what it is.

So I mean, yeah, raise your hand if you planted too much in a small space.

OK, I do it.

I do it all the time because I'm trying to take advantage of the space that I have in my garden and I'm trying to give those plant companions the opportunity to help each other.

But sometimes it's easy to get a little over ambitious in the spring when the plants are itty bitty.

And then by the late summer we're seeing the consequences because we have a jungle in there and some of the plants might be stunted, there might be some poor airflow, we might see some more pests and diseases than what we normally would.

And, you know, so nobody's comfortable, right?

It's time to maybe thin out some of those plants.

So check your spacing.

If you've got a tangle of tomatoes and Peppers, it might be time to prune some of that stuff back, or even pull a plant out to save the rest of them.

If you have to do this, there's nothing that says you can't take that plant out and transplant it into a pot and keep that pot, you know, near the rest of the plants, or near a raised bed or near your patio or whatever.

Don't be afraid to make changes in the garden if you think that things are just not doing well and that airflow ends up being a problem.

This also may not necessarily mean that you did plant them too closely together.

It also could mean that the weather conditions this season have been different for you.

So if you normally, you know, tuck your plants in really tightly together and it's not a problem, but then this year it suddenly is again, it could be excessive humidity that you're not used to or excessive amounts of rainfall or a lack of a breeze.

You know, sometimes you're just not getting the breezes that you normally do in your garden and that is causing problems.

So don't think that it's necessarily something that you did.

It might be just the weather has changed a little bit and so you can take steps to remedy that.

If you're doing this in raised garden beds are really good way to kind of mitigate this is by using square foot gardening guidelines.

It's, you know, a good reference for how many plants you can fit in that sort of 12 inch by 12 inch space and still be able to have a good amount of air flow, right?

We want the proper amount of air flow and we want the proper amount of sunlight too.

If you're growing in containers, one tomato plant per 5 gallon bucket and then maybe you can put some, you know, lettuces or something around the bottom of it as you prune that up, OK?

We're not going to try to cram like 3 tomato plants into one bucket, OK?

If you've got them positioned next to each other on your deck or on your patio or wherever it is that you're keeping them, if you're starting to see that maybe they're looking a little overcrowded, it's OK to kind of pull those pots apart a little bit and give them a little bit more airflow.

Don't be afraid to thin or to, you know, harvest aggressively some of these plants to give the remaining plants room to breathe and to sort of dry out a little bit and maybe stretch their little plant leaves so that they can continue to produce for you and grow in a manner that is productive for the rest of the summer.

If you have thought at all about adding roses to your garden, now is the time.

As you heard Robin from Heirloom Roses say last week, fall is the perfect time to be planting roses.

It's when I planted mine last year, and I can attest to just how well it performed right out of the gate this past spring.

Head to heirloomroses.com and use my code Just GROW to save 20% on your order, and you can get your Rose in thyme to get it planted six weeks before your first fall frost.

That means it will have time to stretch its little roots out into the soil and get itself established so it can take off full force in the spring.

And even if you prefer to plant in the spring, you can order now and delay shipping until the ideal time for you up to 8 full months from now.

So if you're one of my gardeners in zone 3, and yes, they have roses for zone 3, where maybe your first fall frost is about as predictable as the lottery results, you can order now, still save the 20%, and have your rose plants delivered.

When it's the perfect time for you to plant, just head to heirloomroses.com.

Use code Just grow to save 20%.

The link is in the show notes.

So one of the things that you might be seeing right now is maybe the additional consequences of companion planting.

So we talk about inter planting in terms of what we're pairing together and what we're planting in the same space in terms of saving space or in terms of, you know, that high, low, fast, slow kind of pairing to get the most bang for our buck in in out of our garden.

But when we're we're creating these companions, sometimes we cover that things just aren't working out the way that we had hoped.

So when it works, it works really well.

It's almost magical.

But when it doesn't, sometimes it ends up being kind of chaotic.

You know, some plants love each other, others not so much.

You know, basil and tomatoes generally go together really, really well.

Beans and onions, no, not so much.

You know, this is all about resource competition and what kind of pests they attract, what kind of alelopathy one has, you know, when 1 plant chemically inhibits another one, you know, and I have some resources for that I will go ahead and put into the show notes.

But sometimes it's just about you've, you've tried something new in the spring and or maybe in the early summer and now we're getting to the late summer and you're realizing that maybe that combination wasn't the best.

So maybe you mixed some plants together that were, you know, really, really thirsty with some that like the conditions to be more dry, you know, or, you know, you combine something because you thought, OK, this is a tall plant and this is a short plant and they're going to go to better really, really well.

But the tall plant began to shade out the other things and it just isn't working.

So at this instance, it might be time to sort of suss out which one you want to keep and which one you want to get rid of.

Make a note in your garden journal that this pairing did not work.

And that way you don't repeat it again.

I'll give you a really good example of this.

I tried some new combinations in my planter box direct planters out in the kitchen garden this year and some of them did fabulously, fabulously well and some of them did not so great and some of them were OK, right?

I don't think there were any complete and total disasters, although they might have been close.

So the first thing that I did was I planted my kale and in between my beets.

So I had the beets come up first and then I planted the kale.

I transplanted the kale and the idea was, OK, the kale is going to get tall, but by the time it gets tall enough to shade out the beets, then the beets will have already been harvested and the kale will get to stay in place in the bed.

And I harvest kale from the bottom and they end up looking like these, you know, cute little palm trees eventually.

And that pairing worked really, really well.

It did exactly what I thought it was going to it it, you know, the, the beets were done and out of the bed by the time the kale really needed to take over the entire thing.

And then I just threw in some straw mulch and called it good.

I did the same pairing of the same type of pairing with the kohlrabi.

So I planted the beets.

I let them come up.

I planted the kohlrabi in between with the idea that by the time the kohlrabi would get too big and shade out the beets that they would be ready to harvest.

I would pull them out and then they the beets could continue to go.

This one didn't work as well as it could have.

It wasn't a complete disaster, but I did find that the kohlrabi's stayed in the bed a little bit longer than what I anticipated.

And they got bigger.

Like the leaf cover got huge really, really quickly and it very quickly shaded that bed.

And so the beets that were in there were way behind the beets that were in the other beds where the kale was.

But once I harvested all that kohlrabi and those beets all got the full sun, they had the opportunity to go ahead and and catch up.

So even though they weren't harvested or ready to harvest the same time as the other beds that were combined with the kale, they were ready to harvest about 3 weeks later, which worked as an accidental succession planting.

I didn't do that intentionally and I probably would not pair those two together again, but it wasn't a total disaster.

Now what did not work very well was some other pairings and some of my other beds.

I started the collard greens along the South side of the beds and then as those were growing up, I was planting cucumbers in the north side with the idea that the cucumbers would grow up the trellises.

And then in the next set of beds I did the same thing, but I had all of my lettuces in there on the South side of the bed and I planted the cucumbers on the north side.

The problem that it worked great with the lettuces.

The lettuces were done and out, and that's the same beds where I have my living mulch of the mint.

So the mint sort of started to take over, and the cucumbers have grown up this side of the trellis, and that has all worked beautifully.

Well.

I will do a separate episode about that because there are some things that I learned that might help you.

But in those beds where the collard greens were, the collards just were too big.

They were huge and there was no way #1 for the cucumbers to be able to get the amount of light that they needed.

And they also, I think we're not getting enough nutrients.

I think the collards really were sucking up all that nitrogen in the early stages, and that prevented those cucumbers from getting the nitrogen that they needed to really get going and be able to start climbing.

So at some point I had to make the decision which one of those plants that I want to keep.

Did I want to keep the collards and have the collards keep going?

Or did I want to pull the collards and allow the cucumbers the opportunity to be able to continue to grow?

And so ultimately, I chose the cucumbers.

The collards were already starting to.

I had been harvesting collards for weeks and weeks and weeks #1 #2 they were starting to attract the insect pests.

So the cabbage moths and the cabbage butterflies were coming in and laying their eggs.

And of course, then we would end up with the cabbage worms.

And the collards were so big that they couldn't even be covered completely by the insect netting anymore.

And so I just made the decision that you know what, it was time to sacrifice the collards and allow the cucumbers to take over.

So if you experience these types of things in your garden when you're trying new companions or you're trying new inter plantings and it seems like it sort of pencils out on paper, it makes sense.

But in reality, when you look at it, it's not working out for you.

It is okay to change that.

It is okay to, you know, modify the planting, modify what's in the bed to suit your needs right now.

You just have to, unfortunately, sometimes make some sacrifices to figure out which one of those plants you actually want to keep.

And of course, all of these problems that we might be seeing in the late summer garden need to be written down.

I know sometimes writing things down feels like homework, but trust me, future you in the garden is going to thank you.

Your garden journal is how you remember what worked, what didn't, what cucumber variety you loved or or didn't like, which basil did really, really well and which one did not.

It's your record of your planting dates, your watering schedules, how your harvests have done, what pest problems you have.

It's like your garden's diary, right?

And it doesn't matter how you do this.

It could be a notebook, you could be using an app, you can put it in a spreadsheet, whatever.

We just want you to track these things because it is going to help you figure out what worked and what didn't.

If you are having a ton of problems in your late summer garden, write it down.

Identify which crops are having the problems, what they were paired with, which bed they're in.

And that way at the end of the season or the beginning of next season, you can go back and you can look and you can figure out what failed, what succeeded.

You know, whether it was the heat or shade or the pests, right?

Because you should also be, you know, entering the weather conditions too, if they are unusual for you for this time of the year.

The more you do this, the more.

Years you do this, the more information you're going to have to go back and look on, right?

So if you can do this weekly, especially after a rainfall or after a harvest or after a very long period of 0 rainfall.

Late summer especially is a really good time to capture results and lessons.

What you have figured out in the garden, you're seeing what's worked and what has not.

And so if you can take 5 minutes a week just to write it down, bonus points if you're like drawing diagrams or taking photos, then next season you're going to be off to an even better start right away and you might be able to eliminate some of these late summer problems altogether.

OK, So what can we do right now to help us with these late summer problems that we might be seeing?

OK, spend 10 minutes this week just checking your soil moisture and thinning out any crowded plants that might need to be thinned.

Switch over to some drip or soaker hoses if you're still using the sprinklers right.

Pull out your garden journal or start 1 whatever log.

What is blooming, what yields you're getting, what issues you're having.

Review this year's varieties that you are using and see whether or not you think they're doing well for you.

They might be, you know, some varieties that are doing really, really well for you right next to some that really are not.

Specifically if you're talking like cucumbers or squashes or something that maybe 1 variety you bought actually has a resistance to say powdery mildew and the other one doesn't.

And maybe you're seeing that side by side in your garden.

All of these different things, right?

If you are over water, make sure that you are shifting to less frequent, more thorough waterings.

Mulch is your friend here.

Okay, let's look at the overcrowdering.

Make sure that we have the mature spacing properly and that's something else that we can note to make sure we don't repeat that next season.

Figure out which of your plants are not compatible with each other and maybe fix that problem.

And then just make sure that you are tracking and you are reflecting and you can plan with notes on the varieties and the type of care and the outcomes that are going on in your garden right now.

OK, Late summer can be absolutely a time of reflection, but also correction in the garden.

There is still plenty of gardening season left, so a few small changes can make a big difference in your harvest going forward.

If we can just make a few little tweaks right now.

OK, that's all I got for you today.

If you find this episode helpful, hit a follow, right, leave a review, share this with a friend, do something.

We're still growing this podcast and I would love to have more people along for the ride.

Until next time, my gardening friends, keep on cultivating that dream garden, and we'll talk again soon.