There is so much happening in the vegetable garden right now as spring is in full bloom. Pollination, pruning and powdery mildew are three hot topics! The weather is hot, and we have gotten some rain. This is a recipe for a thriving garden with branches and vines and vegetables everywhere. When gardening in small spaces, if this is left untamed, you’ll wind up with an unruly garden that can attract pests and issues like powdery mildew. Therefore, on a weekly basis we must attend to the challenges in the garden and do a pruning dance with our plants that helps to keep them healthy and aerated for maximum vegetable production.

While we have all been stuck at home, the bees and other pollinators have been hard at work. If a spring vegetable garden was planted sometime in March, everything should be produced by May. As we know, pollination must occur for a vegetable to be produced. What you may not know is how many ways pollination can occur. Everyone thinks of bees and butterflies as our main pollinators, but you can add wasps, flies, birds and anything else traveling from one flower to another to share pollen to that list. 

Even though there are countless pollinators, the conditions need to be right in order to attract these pollinators to the garden. Flowers are the natural attractor, so by default, the garden should have plenty of flowers. However, there are also environmental factors like construction and pollution that can disrupt the pollinators and lower the number of active pollinators in a community. If this is the case, consider manually pollinating certain plants in the garden. This is only needed for vegetable plants that have separate male and female flowers, like most varieties of squash, zucchini and cucumbers. For these plants, it is necessary for the pollen to travel from the male flower to the female flower in order to produce. Many other vegetable plants are self-pollinating. This means they have both male and female parts within the same flower as most varieties of tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. For these plants, pollination can occur from the wind,  insects landing on the flower, or even just giving it a little love tap for a few seconds.

Manually pollinating flowers is easy and fun. You can use a paint brush, Q-tip, or even your finger. It is important to identify the male and female flowers. The male flower typically has a straight stem, and the female flower has the bulge of a small vegetable at the base. When the female flower receives the pollen from the male, the tiny vegetable will grow to full size, given the proper nutrients and sunlight. If the female flower is not pollinated, the small bulge will shrivel up and die. If you see that happen, get out there early in the morning when the flowers are open and beautiful and manually pollinate those veggie plants!

When gardening in small spaces, as the garden grows and matures, the plants naturally extend and grow into other plants’ spaces. Be sure to keep on top of pruning those plants weekly. It’s important because it will cause the least amount of impact to the plant if branches and leaves are pruned when they are small. This will also help to ensure the proper airflow through the branches of the plants and, in turn, reduce the number of pests while helping to increase focused vegetable production. Pruning can be especially helpful with tomatoes. Only prune what is necessary and let nature take care of the rest.

 In humid environments, powdery mildew is a common occurrence. It is caused when there is too much moisture in the garden for a plant. Cucurbits like squash, zucchini and cucumbers are the most susceptible. So, if you get powdery mildew, here’s an effective way to treat it.

1. Fix the moisture issue. If you catch it early, remove the affected leaves.

2. Spray other affected leaves and stems as well as the base of the plant with solution below only in the early morning or early evening when there is no direct sunlight. Test one leaf first.

3. Repeat every 10-14 days as needed then once more after it has cleared.

Recipe: In a 16 oz. spray bottle, mix 1/2 tsp. of potassium bicarbonate (food grade), 1/2 tsp. of vegetable oil, and 1/2 tsp. of soap with water.

Happy gardening! 

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!”