Popular Garden Vegetables for Summer Planting

There are many popular garden vegetables that can be planted late in the summer season that will produce great crops to harvest in the winter. There are also popular garden vegetables that you can plant in early summer for fall and early winter harvests. When you plant late it requires a bit more planning than your spring garden needed. You will need to know which plants will tolerate the heat of summer along with the frost of the colder months.

Many popular vegetables adapt quite well to planting during the summer for harvesting in the fall. Your gardening season can extend by planting a fall garden so you can have another harvest shortly after the early crops have given you some produce. This fall harvest can even be extended further by providing the crops a little protection from early frosts by planting in covered garden vegetable cold frames. Many of the cool-season vegetables produce some of their best quality and flavor when they mature in cooler weather. In order to grow a fall vegetable garden that is productive will require some thoughtful planning. Mid-June, July and August are generally the planting times for fall and winter vegetable gardens.

Before you prepare the soil for a fall and winter garden, you need to decide what to do with what is remaining of the spring vegetable garden. You need to remove any crop residue and weed growth before you can prepare the soil. Once that is done you want to till or spade the soil to a depth of about 8 inches. If you heavily fertilized the spring crops, you probably will not need to fertilize before planting the fall crop. If you did not you can apply one to two pounds of 10-10-10 fertilizer to a 100 foot bed space and completely incorporate the fertilizer.

For good germination in late-summer, it is imperative to keep the surface of the soil from drying out and not let the temperature of the soil to get over eighty degrees F. An easy solution to this problem is to use shade netting over wire hoops. The seeds that you plant for your fall vegetable garden need to be sown twice as deep as the ones you sow during the spring. Natural shade coming from a tall plant or a trellis will provide a good area for seeding that second crop of vegetables.

Most of the popular outdoor vegetables will need at least one inch of water each week. It is better to give them a single watering that deeply permeates instead of shallow sprinklings that are applied frequently. But young seedlings and seeds that are germinating may need light waterings more often. You do not want the seedlings to excessively dry out. The new transplants can also profit from shallow waterings until their roots develop. Some of the fall maturing vegetables will benefit from a little nitrogen just as the spring vegetables. Most leafy vegetables benefit from an application 3 to 6 weeks after they have been planted.

Some of the garden vegetables that can be planted in early summer are: purple sprouting broccoli plant the end of June for March and April harvests; Brussels sprouts from late May to early June for Christmas harvest; carrots such as Royal Chantenay, through July for late fall and Autumn King in late summer because they will survive throughout winter; fennel plant in late June to harvest in the fall; winter-hardy leeks plant through mid-June for April harvesting; and Oriental greens can be planted in mid-June and mid-July for fall harvest.

Some of the late season planting of vegetables include: for overwintered cauliflower you want to plant seeds indoors in mid-July and transplant to the garden in mid-August, they will not start curd formation until after the spring frost; onions can be planted in August and you can pull out the thin crop through February to used for green onions and harvest the bulbs in summer; spinach you can keep planting for a continuous supply. Start new seeds every 3 weeks through summer and fall for a supply in winter and possibly spring; and turnips, a fast growing crop that can be sown from May to August not just for their roots but also the tops. These are just some popular garden vegetables to be planted for fall and winter harvests.