How to Prepare Your Garden For A New Season

Summer is coming soon and there are a lot of things you can do to prepare your garden for that transition from spring to summer to give yourself the best shot at having an epic season. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb and summer is coming. It's the opposite of Game of Thrones. What we're doing here in this video is just talking about a few, three, specifically simple things you can do and you're looking at the first one right here. So let's cultivate that like button for Epic Summer Harvests and let's get right into the video. Tip number one is to make extensive use of mulch. Now mulch is something you should be using all the time in the garden, but it's doubly important in the summer as the temps rise and the sun starts to really beat down on these beds. So I have six beans, six beans. These are all bush beans and then I have an okra and two basil. These are all quintessential summer crops. They're going to love that sun, but if they dry out, they're going to die extremely fast. And mulching does a lot more than that. First of all, this is an organic shredded straw mulch that's pre-cleaned and so this will break down and eventually add to the soil. So you have that benefit. You have the protection of the soil. The solarization from the sun can actually kill microbes and beneficial bacteria in the first little bit of the soil. So mulching helps protect that. And then just the actual purpose, the purpose we most use it for is to preserve soil moisture. So make sure you do that. But what you'll notice is I've cleared a little bit out from each of these areas. And the reason for that is you don't want wet shredded straw or whatever other source of mulch that you choose to use. Just budding right up against your stems because that can really introduce disease or rot if water is just pressed up against that living tissue. So avoid doing that. But otherwise you must mulch in the summer. Another thing you can do is if you have plants that are going to go from spring to summer and make it through that transition, you still sometimes need to come through and clean them up. So I have my African blue basil bush, which is one of my favorite varieties of basil and actually favorite plants in the garden right now for its pollinator abilities and just the general smell and beauty of it. But it was getting really unruly. So what I did is I said, okay, it's a nice globe shaped bush. I'm going to cut the half off that's blocking the sunlight from the actual soil in this bed. The other half on this side over here is going to remain. And I actually have another plant over there in my herb bed that's doing the exact same thing to the other herbs. It's shading them out. So I'm going to show you how I cut it back right now. So here's my other African blue basil. And honestly, even just right here, the smell is absolutely amazing. The pollinators go crazy for it. But as you can see, it's taking up, I would say about roughly a third of this entire herb bed, which is a little too much for my liking, especially as I think about planting some new stuff for the summer. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, okay, what am I blocking? Well, I'm blocking what's growing down here. And in fact, this might've been a smart call because I put cilantro down here and the cilantro is actually thriving as we move into summer. That's something that usually doesn't do that good in summer. But for that reason, I'm actually going to keep this section here. And that's just an on the fly decision that I just made. Sometimes you have to think about that in the garden, right? Cilantro has a hard time in the heat. This is providing a little bit of that heat pressure, taking it off. Let's leave it. So what I'll do is I'm going to come and just clean up this section right here. But I still want to let room for growth. And so if you follow my basil pruning video, you'll know how I do it. But I'm just going to go through the motions right here. So I'll admit it does look a little weird, but remember this all grows back. It's a perennializable basil and just keeps coming back. But what we've done is we freed up some space for our lemongrass, which was getting probably a bit too shaded out. We freed up some space for the oregano and our cilantro is still growing under this little basil shade cover. And so we freed some stuff up while cutting it down and preparing it so I can plant in some more herbs right there and right there. These beautiful cosmos will also make it through summer, at least a little bit of it. But by deadheading some of the spent flowers, we're going to stop the plant sending any energy towards these things that have already had their day in the sun. And we were going to route more energy towards all these budding blooms that are yet to come. By the way, don't forget to compost guys. Even if you're passively composting like I am in this bin right here, I still like to cut these down just a little bit because that will help them eventually get broken down. Remember it's, it's a static pile, so it's not using any heat, but I still like to do a little bit of extra work for all the life that's going to be breaking these bad boys down. Don't be upset about that basil by the way. It's more of an ornamental basil. The flavor, especially once flowered, it's not that great. So it's better served in the compost than in the kitchen. Our final tip, tip number three to prepare your garden for summer is to prepare your beds for summer. And this would follow for containers or in ground if that's the method that you choose. Now in this example, I still have some stuff hanging around. I've got some yellow bush beans. I have some parsley and I have one, you can't really see it, but it's a tiny little head of radicchio hanging out back there. So I'm going to let these hang on for a little bit. But if I was to change this bed out, what I would do is I would come through and I would cut at the soil surface. I'd cut stems off at the soil surface or cut the head of radicchio off, whatever the case may be. But I would generally leave the roots in. Now if you're in a container and you have this big root ball, I might actually remove the root ball and just replenish the soil like I did in a very recent video of mine that you can check out. But in a raised bed, you would much rather just let the roots sit, let that soil life start to break it down, especially in the case of beans. Cause remember they're in the legume family, they're nitrogen fixers and those, those roots eventually will release that nitrogen that they have fixed. So that's what I would do. Then I would level the soil surface out. I'd give it a nice water. I'd throw maybe a, I don't know, a half an inch of compost or so. At this point, you can also mulch if you so choose. And in a perfect world, you would start planting. You'd already have seeds, you'd get them in the ground and then you'd have your summer crop off and ready to go. The quicker you can turn a bed around, the more you're producing in your garden. It's more cycles, right? And so if you're waiting a week, two weeks, well, you're kind of wasting time. And so in a perfect world, you're getting in, like let's say a bed of corn here or a bed of potatoes and peppers, whatever the case may be. That's exactly what I would do to get this ready for summer. So it's one of the most exciting and prolific seasons of the gardening year is upon us. Hope these tips helped you to amplify your gardening this year. And until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.