Category Archives: Garden Advice

Garden Advice

12 Easy Ways to Help Your Garden Thrive in Hot Weather

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So far this summer is promising to be a hot one. With the temperatures climbing and much of the east coast worrying about droughts like the ones they faced last summer a productive garden may seem like a mere dream. However there’s several easy tricks that can keep your plants cool, productive, and even lessen your water usage.

Install windbreaks.

Wind tearing through your garden can not only damage plants but also causes soil moisture to evaporate. The easy solution to this is to install or grow windbreaks in your garden. Windbreaks don’t need to be solid and stop all the wind. They can be quickly made from snow or pallet fencing. If you’d like living wind breaks consider tall annual crops, shorter perrenials that won’t shade your garden too much like berry bushes or dwarf fruit trees depending on your space, or hedge species. These should be placed perpendicular to the direction of the wind.

Invest in or diy some shade cloth.

Shade cloth can be super helpful for keeping those cools seaosn plants like peas and spinach producing longer. It can also be used over new new transplants that are adjusting to field conditions or seeds like lettuce that prefer cool soils to germinate.

Use a lot of mulch.

Mulch is one of the easiest ways to keep soil temperatures cooler and moisture levels up. Plus mulch cuts down on the weeding. Great mulch options include grass clippings, straw, hay, or old leaves all of which can be combined with cardboard or newspaper.

Water your garden consistently.

Your watering schedule will obviously be unique to your garden but you sould work hard to maintain moist soil conditions. Waiting for plants to start wilting before you realize it’s time to water harms your plants’ health and reduces your harvest.

Water at the right times.

Watering consistently is half the battle but you should also try to water at the best times of day. The early morning and evening are the best times to water. Less water is wasted waisted to evaporation because it has a chance to soak into the soil before it’s exposed to the mid-day sun and heat.

Practice interplanting.

Growing vining plants like watermelons, cucumbers, gourds, squashes, sweet potatoes, and nasturiums under taller plants like corn, sorghum, and sunflowers can help you make the most of your space and keep the soil cool. The vining plants will shade the soil, block weeds, and hold moisture once they’re mature enough.

Check out our The Three Sisters Garden Guide.

Build a shade trellis.

Create a trellis for climbling plants like cucumbers or runner beans and then plant a cool weather loving crop in the shade they create. These trellises are often set up so they’re slanted to provide maximum shade.

Learn more about trellising from Vertical Gardening: The Beginners Guide to Trellising Plants.

Use intensive planting. 

Intensive planting is a principle of biointensive gardening. Plants are grown in beds, not rows and are often planted hexagonally. This style of planting maximizes space. Mature plants may touch leaves but still have plenty of room for their roots. They shade the soil reducing moisture loss and blocking weeds.

Note: planting intensively will work best with healthy soils as you’ll be growing more plants on less space.

Transplant at the right times.

If you’re transplanting crops into your garden it’s best to avoid the heat and sun as much as possible, for your sake and the plant’s! Transplant in the early morning, late evening, or on a cloudy day for best results. The plants will suffer less transplant shock that way.

Catch rainwater around your plants. 

For transplants dig your hole a little extra deep and create a basin around each plant that extends outwards a little beyond the edges of the plant’s crown to funnel rainwater towards the roots.

For planting seeds dig your trench slightly deeper than necessary so that rainwater stills runs down into it even after you’ve covered your seeds.

If you’re feeling really productive go ahead and install some rain barrels on your gutters too!

Choose crops wisely.

Early Moonbeam Watermelon

If you live in an area with hot summer temperatures it’s a good time to start direct seeding crops that can handle the heat. These include plants like watermelon, okra, roselle, lima beans, and southern peas.

Learn about Direct Sowing Roselle.

Practice good soil and crop management. 

Whenever gardening you should be thinking about keeping your soil and therefore your plants healthy. Doing maintanence work like crop rotation, cover cropping, and applying compost will keep your soil and plants healthy. Well nourished, disease free plants will tolerate the stress of hot weather much better than those already struggling.

Gardening is never easy but hot weather can be especially tough on you and your plants. Follow these tips for a healthy and productive garden even in hot, dry weather.

Garden Advice

Direct Sowing Roselle

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Now that the hot weather has really begun to set in it’s time to focus on heat loving crops. While many people will be setting out peppers and seeding melons there’s another summertime crop that deserves a place in your garden, roselle. The roselle plant is a member of the hibiscus family grown for its flavorful calyxes (part of the flower). It’s not as showy as ornamental hibiscus varieties but it is extremely useful.

It offers a citrus flavor earning it another common name, the Florida Cranberry. Roselle can be used for candies, syrups, or jam but it’s probably best known for its use in making delicious, bright red tea called Red Zinger. The tea has more going for it than just being tasty though. Roselle has long been used to safely lower blood pressure and is full of vitamin C.

The young leaves and stems of the roselle plant can also be used as salad or cooked greens or be made into jam as well. The leaves are naturally high in pectin, prefect for jam.

While Roselle is technically a perennial it is extremely frost sensitive so here in Virginia (zone 7a) it’s grown as an annual. Roselle can be started early and transplanted, much like tomatoes, or it can be direct seeded during hot weather. It requires temperatures between 75°- 85°F to germinate but germinates readily outdoors making it an ideal candidate for direct sowing.

Roselle will do best in well-drained, fertile soil. Compost amendments are fine but beware of over-fertilizing. Too much nitrogen can cause it to put energy into growing a very large plant instead of many calyxes. Be sure to keep your roselle plants well weeded until they’re established and can shade out weeds by themselves.

Tips for Direct Sowing

  • Plant extra seeds and thin later choosing the best looking plants to keep. This will ensure you get a good crop of healthy, hardy plants.
  • Water, water, water! Do not forget to water your roselle especially while the seeds are germinating.
  • Watch the weather and make sure your area has warmed up enough!

If you’re going to direct sow and thin your plants (or have plants ready to set out) it’s important to give Roselle a lot of space. Plants should be thinned to 3 ft apart in rows 5 ft apart. It sounds like a lot but plants with less space will produce less calyxes.

Pests aren’t typically a big problem with roselle though it can be susceptible to stem and root rot. Both are easily avoided by planting in well drained soil and carefully monitoring watering to avoid over doing it.

Thai Red Roselle, the variety grown at Southern Exposure, should begin flowering in the mid summer. Calyxes can be harvested after the blooms drop off and are most easily harvested when full grown but still tender. If they’re not tender enough to break off by hand you can use clippers.

For high quality tea calyxes should be removed from the seed and dried out of direct sunlight. A dehydrator can be helpful especially in very humid weather. Once completely dry they can be stored in airtight jars for making tea throughout the year.

If you’d like to try your hand at growing roselle there’s still time to direct sow! Find Southern Exposure’s Thai Red Roselle seed here.

Garden Advice

Sweet Potatoes From Order to Plate

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Sweet potatoes are really underutilized in backyard gardens. They’re so easy to grow, nutritious, and tasty. They’re often overlooked and many believe that the store-bought and homegrown versions are virtually indistinguishable but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Store-bought sweet potatoes tend to be of a few hardy, orange varieties. While they’re absolutely still delicious there’s so much more variety to be had if you grow your own.

Just like other crops there’s sweet potatoes that are better suited to different growing conditions and cooking methods. The classic orange Beauregard is an excellent baker while the white fleshed O’Henry is one of our favorites for mashed potatoes. The Bunch Porto Rico has compact vines better for small gardens while the All Purple is especially hardy.

There are also dry and moist varieties. Dry varieties tend to be starchier and are more like regular potatoes. Some people consider them to be more versatile. Moist varieties are often sweeter and usually are the ones you find at the grocery store.

Choosing a variety can be tough so it may be wise to try a mix. Southern Exposure has two mixed packages available.

Bed Preparation

Sweet potatoes thrive in loose, well drained soil. If you have heavy soils it’s a good idea to work in a lot of compost and maybe even broad fork your garden bed before planting. To help with drainage you can grow sweet potatoes in raised beds, ridges, or hills.

Sweet potatoes also prefer warm temperatures and a relatively long season. Using black plastic mulch to help heat up the soil may be a good idea for those in cooler climates.

Surprisingly sweet potatoes don’t require especially fertile soil. In fact using chemical fertilizers often leads to tiny potatoes and huge vines. Simply adding some compost before planting is more suitable.

Planting

Unlike regular potatoes, sweet potatoes cannot be planted using seed potatoes. You need to use slips. Slips are the eyes on sweet potatoes. These are grown and then broken off to be replanted.

Note: for information on saving sweet potatoes and growing slips for next year check out our growing guide.

Slips should not be planted until 3-4 weeks after your last frost date. They’re very susceptible to frost. They should be planted 2-3 inches deep with their leaves above the soil. The slips you receive may or may not have grown roots already but they’re fine to plant either way.

Sweet potatoes have large sprawling vines and require quite a bit of space. You can plant sweet potato slips 10-18 inches apart in rows 3 feet apart. Water them the evening after you plant them and be sure to keep them moist for the next few days as they get established.

Care

Sweet potatoes should be mulched soon after planting. If you’re in a warm area where black plastic isn’t required straw or old leaves can be used. This will help keep the soil moist and block out weeds. Until they’re large it’s a good idea to keep them well mulched or weeded occasionally to keep weeds from overtaking them.

While sweet potatoes don’t like to be soaked (too much water can cause rotting) they do better with consistent waterings especially in dry areas. Too little water can lead to splitting and poor yields.

Pests & Diseases

Sweet potatoes can be affected by a number of pests like sweet potato weevils and diseases. The best way to combat them is purchasing healthy disease free slips, using simple crop rotation, and through maintaining healthy soils.

They’re also a favorite of deer so make sure you fence them off or cover them with netting.

Harvest & Curing

Aside from the potato itself the sweet potato shoots can also be harvested for cooking greens throughout the season. Just ensure you don’t take too much and kill the plant. 

Choose a dry, sunny day to harvest your potatoes. It will make both harvesting and curing much easier. Potatoes can be dug whenever they’ve reached an ideal size. It is best to harvest them all before the temperature dips below 55°F. Any lower temperatures can harm their storage capability.

Use a garden fork to lift them from the soil before collecting them by hand. Be careful and try to avoid nicking or damaging the potatoes. You may have to search a bit as they can grow up to 1 ft away from the plant itself. Sweet potatoes should be dried before any excess dirt is shaken off. Do not wash them, they don’t store well when washed.

For the first 7-10 days they should be kept at about 85°F and 90% humidity to cure. Then they can be stored at about 55°F in a dry, dark, well-ventilated area. Colder temperatures will affect their flavor so don’t refrigerate them until they’ve been cooked.

Any sweet potatoes with nicks or bruises will not keep well and should be used up first. You should regularly check you potatoes in storage and remove any bad ones as needed so they don’t spoil the whole crop. Properly cured sweet potatoes stored under the right conditions will keep 5-12 months.

Summertime Sweet Potato Ideas

If you still have have sweet potatoes in storage from last years garden (or are now craving them) there’s a couple simple ways to cook them even in the summer heat. Unlike in the autumn where I don’t mind baking them and heating up the house, in the spring and summer I typically cook sweet potatoes outside.

The simplest method is to clean them, poke a few holes in them, and wrap them whole in tinfoil before popping them onto a grill or into the coals of campfire. Alternatively they can be thinly sliced and wrapped in tinfoil packages with slices of onions, other veggies, and seasonings. All the ingredients should be drizzled in oil oil and the edges of the foil should be rolled or folded tightly to avoid leaking. Then they can be cooked just like the whole potatoes they’ll just cook much quicker.

Sweet potatoes truly are a wonderful crop. They’re high in vitamins and their storage ability makes them great for people looking to lessen their dependence on a global food system. It’s not too late to order slips! Try one of our productive varieties in your garden this summer.

What’s your favorite sweet potato variety?