What can you do in July? Moreno walks us through his garden to show us the different gardening tasks to perform this month.
Thanks to Moreno for sharing his wisdom and knowledge! I wrote the following notes watching the video published on The Dutch Farmer’s channel.
You can watch it using this YouTube link.
Harvest of garlic
It usually happens early on the month of July.
Personal note
This year 2023 was my first year to grow garlic and with over 100 cloves planted, we are happy with the green garlic we enjoy in May and June and the dry garlic we’ll enjoy the rest of the summer.
Moreno is quite happy with the multi-crop beds. Remember, he talked about it in his March episode.
He shares an interesting fact about soft neck garlic: it can store up to 12 months! The hard neck garlic usually doesn’t store longer than 6 months.
Once you harvested the garlic, you will need to cure them, e.g., clean them for storage.
It is important to remember that to dry them, you shouldn’t set them in direct sunlight, yet they need to be hanging in a ventilated, warm and dry place. It will take 4 to 6 weeks to dry.
Fruit trees
Trees provide many benefits:
- extra food
- shade for the crops under them
- help preventing bolting on the spring crops
It can become more difficult, however, to have fruit trees above market gardening crops, adding more labor to harvest them.
So plant your vegetable beds well to make it easier.
Tomatoes
You can see above that Moreno uses as much as possible the available space, planting lettuces or flowers at the bottom of tomatoes or cucumbers.
In market gardening, tomatoes have a highly profitable value, even though the work you need to perform more important.
When you harvest them, it is important to harvest them not fully ripe; otherwise it will shorten the time you have to sell them.
Even though you harvest them not fully ripe, they continue to ripen.
All this applies to large tomatoes. In fact, the cherry and cocktail types are better harvested fully ripe because they sell more easily.
Conclusion
July is the month when harvesting is the focus and it is when you will make most of the year’s revenue.
Still, soon, it will be time to prepare for the fall and winter crops.
