5 Vegetables To Direct Sow Now For A Big Garden Harvest

Hey again from the garden. Are you still hoping to get your garden in yet this summer? Well don't worry, it's not too late. In this video I'm going to share with you five crops that you can direct seed right now in your garden and still get a harvest by fall. While it's too late to start tomatoes from seed, peppers from seed, plant your potatoes, and while it's getting too hot to direct sow things like lettuce and radishes, there's still plenty of warm season crops that you can seed right now that will be ready just in time before your last frost. So let's get started going through the list. So the first one on the list and one of the easiest crops that you can plant right now to harvest this summer and into fall is beans. Now there's two different types of growth habits of beans to choose from. One is a bush bean and one is a pole bean. I happen to have pole beans started over in my garden and they are really starting to take off. In fact these grow so easy they self-seed themselves every year so it's like I get free beans in the garden. Bush beans you can grow pretty easy in any garden space. They get about a foot tall but pole beans you definitely need something vertical to grow them on which is why I use this cattle panel trellis and it works amazing. Just plant your seeds in the ground and you should see germination within five days. Pole bean varieties typically take about 60 to 70 days till they're ready to be harvested. So if you plant them right now you'll have your first harvest in about two months. Number two and probably one of the most popular things that everyone grows in their garden are cucumbers. There's pickling cucumbers and slicing cucumbers, there's mini cucumbers, there's huge cucumbers, there's so many different varieties. Cucumbers typically take 50 to 70 days to be ready to harvest once you plant the seed in the ground depending on the variety and how large they are but they are one of the easiest varieties to sow and will pop up in probably about five to seven days just like beans. Now there are bush varieties of cucumbers but most of them are vine crops so it is helpful to have a trellis just like my pole beans. A lot of people like to plant succession plantings of cucumbers or more than one planting staggered. That way if your first plantings start getting a little sick of the heat they start petering out a little bit you have another crop of cucumbers that's still going strong that you can harvest off of in the heat of summer. We grow a lot of cucumbers in our garden. We grow slicers to eat fresh but we also grow a lot of pickling cucumbers because my husband and my daughter love pickles. We make both the fermented pickles and the refrigerator bread and butter pickles. All right let's move on to number three. Number three on the list is zucchini. It's one of our favorite vegetables to grow in the garden. When you go to local garden centers in the spring you notice a lot of them are selling zucchini plants but you can easily direct sow it in the garden just as easy and in fact that's what we like to do. Zucchini has a similar germination time to beans and cucumbers. In fact our zucchini popped out of the ground faster than our cucumbers this year and it typically only takes 45 to 55 days for you to get a harvest from your zucchini plants. Now zucchini plants are heavy producers so if you have a small family like we do one plant is definitely enough and we like to eat our zucchini both fresh and using baked goods such as my daughter's favorite zucchini bread. Number four on the list is one that a lot of people like to grow just for fun other than eating and that are pumpkins or squash. I happen to be planting some butternut squash today which we love to eat fresh and I like to use in baked goods but I also plant a lot of pumpkins in the garden and I happen to just sow some a few days ago and they have just started coming up and they are looking really good. Now butternut squash depending on the size of the variety can take about 80 to 110 days to harvest. Pumpkins on the other hand can take anywhere from 80 to up to 125 days to be ready to harvest depending on the variety. These happen to be miniature pumpkins and they're a semi-butch variety and so I'm just going to let them vine over the side of this garden bed but a lot of larger varieties that can take you know 120 to 125 days to be ready will have big long vines and you're going to need a large area to grow those. Now I start by planting a few seeds in the hole and I thin them and in fact I have one that I need to thin right now so let's go ahead and do that. So this is another mini pumpkin variety and while I could leave all three of these seedlings they may overtake each other in this small area so I'm going to take the middle one out just to give the other two plants a little more room and I'm going to be really gentle pull him out of the soil and then gently put the rest of the soil back around the plant and while it's tempting to plant this plant vine crops don't really like their roots being disturbed very much and so I'm going to put them in compost because if I planted him chances are he's not going to be happy anyway. Pumpkins and squash are one of the easiest varieties to direct stow to start from seed in your garden and they're also one of the most fun to harvest so I definitely encourage you to try some of these this year. All right let's move on to number five. So number five on the list and one of my daughter's favorite things to harvest out of the garden are melons. The two most popular that a lot of people grow are cantaloupe and watermelon. Cantaloupe are a little trickier to grow especially in my area they take about 70 to 80 days to harvest and we have had luck some years and we have had no luck other years but we have had more luck growing watermelon. Now watermelon depending on the size can take anywhere from 70 days to be ready to harvest up to 120 days to be ready to harvest. Very similar to pumpkins the larger the variety the longer it takes to be ready. Now there's different ways to tell if melons are ready to harvest. Sometimes melons will have a yellowing on the bottom of the fruit and that tells you it's ready to harvest. Other varieties will completely break away from the vine and then you definitely know it's ready to harvest. So just be sure to read your seed packet on how many days it takes and then look up the certain varieties and read about the tips and tricks on harvesting melons. Okay so that's going to do it for the five things that you can direct sow in your garden right now. I hope you guys found this video helpful and I hope some of you head right out to the garden and plant those seeds in the ground right now because if you do you will have vegetables and fruits ready just in time before that fall frost and you'll be really glad you planted them. So stay tuned for a lot more vegetable gardening content throughout the whole season straight from our small urban gardens here in small town northwest Iowa. Thanks again for watching we'll see you in the next video.