June 2025 – Spring into Summer with your  Garden

The month of June starts off a bit cooler than we had hoped for. It’s supposed to be summer, and the month does start with some rain, which isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s also cooler than normal, especially overnight. This means that we’re off to an uneven start for our 2025 summer garden.

So far this season, we have been harvesting Simpson Black Seed Lettuce. I love this lettuce for so many reasons, but I’ll highlight two here. The first reason is that I can clip what I need for a salad, and it regrows for more harvesting. That’s very useful for a lazy gardener. The second reason is that it’s delicious. The Black Seeded Simpson lettuce has a great nutty flavor and is good raw in a salad or cooked. This is the first time I planted lettuce seeds, but this will be a new garden crop every year.

We also harvested a few  asparagus spears and radishes.  Next year I need to add some sand to the radish plot to break up the clay soil.

Our strawberry plants have been producing a consistent crop each week

June 5, 2025 – Growth and Maintenance

Our plantings arte coming to a close. I dug a hole for each plant and added a handful of topsoil into the hole. Then, I filled around the plant with topsoil, pressing the soil around the roots into the ground, and watered it.

GARDEN PESTS – The biggest complaint about having a home garden is “My garden got eaten up” by critters including both insects (grubs, caterpillars, etc.) and animals (rabbits, groundhogs, deer).For garden pests such as rabbits, groundhogs and deer, I dust cayenne pepper around the perimeter of the garden as soon as I have cleared my garden plot. I continue this nearly every day for the duration of the season.

GWEEDS