Here’s what’s happening now in the Summer Vegetable Garden. June was the last month for most of our spring vegetables to keep producing. The heat-sensitive vegetables like beefsteak tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash are all going to typically stop producing in June. Even if your plant still looks healthy when we are consistently in the 90s, the plants are just not able to produce the flowers that subsequently produce the vegetables. If you want to keep the garden growing through the summer, now is the time to make sure your heat-loving vegetable plants like okra, Asian winged beans, eggplant, peppers, and African blue basil are all planted in the garden.
These are just some of the very special heat-tolerant vegetables that will produce well into the summer. If they stop producing in August, then in September when the heat backs off a bit, they should go right back into production. The okra and eggplant will keep producing until it gets cold out, so depending on the year, it could be several months.
Spotlight On Having Your Own Certified Butterfly Habitat
Would you like to have more cucumbers, squash and zucchini in your vegetable garden? Then, one solution is to attract more pollinators. It’s a great way to add a variety of flowers to your garden for beautification, as well as deter unwanted pests. It also provides a comfortable environment for butterflies that are being relocated due to construction and other disruptions that remove their food source and force them to look elsewhere to survive.
The North American Butterfly Association actually has two certification programs. One is for creating a general butterfly habitat, and the other is specifically for the monarch butterfly. The certification program is not only a great guideline to learn how to set up a pollinator garden, but it also helps to track the monarch butterflies on their journey each year to Mexico.
It’s very easy to get your garden certified; just make sure you have the right plants and flowers to be the food sources for three different types of caterpillars, as well as having flowers that will provide the nectar needed for the butterflies. It is important to understand the different butterflies that live in Central Florida and then get the specific flowers that attract those butterflies.
Planting parsley in your garden or anything else in the Umbelliferae plant family, like carrots or dill, is a natural attractor of the black swallowtail butterfly, like the ones in the picture below. This is a beautiful caterpillar, and I wind up planting parsley for me and parsley for them. Five swallowtail butterflies will devour a mature parsley plant in a matter of days.
The closest Butterfly Garden Guide I could find is for Tampa, and the list of flowers and butterflies to choose from is quite long. Once your flowers are planted, then just submit an online application and purchase a sign to help spread the word in your community. All of this information and more can be found at the NABAbutterfly.com website.
Amber Harmon is the Owner of My Nona’s Garden, where they sell and service low-maintenance, elevated, organic vegetable gardens. Our mission is to bring health, promote growth, and provide vegetable gardening education to local communities, one garden at a time. Visit www.MyNonasGarden.com for more information.
“We make organic vegetable gardening easy!”
