The Best Time to Plant Your Garden

“It’s too late to plant my garden this year. Maybe next spring.”

I was chatting with someone about gardens this week, and she said this to me. She has always wanted to grow some of her own food in her backyard, and she has a perfect spot for it. But she thought she had missed the window to plant.

The reality is we truly live in a year-round growing climate, which means we can put in our gardens at any time in the year. If we want to be always harvesting, we need to be always planting. When you understand this, you start thinking about gardening in a different way. What we plant may change based on the season, but the truth is we can plant something every month of the year, and I have a simple method I shared with this client to help her see that the window to plant isn’t closed, it’s just shifted slightly.

So right now it is the last week of May. It’s rainy and warm, getting hotter and more humid. We are moving into our three hottest months of the year. If you want to put in a garden during the hottest months, what could we plant? What would grow? There are some amazing food crops that love the hot weather, and if we focus our attention on what grows best in this season, even a brand new garden can be productive in the heat of summer. Do you like peppers, eggplant, basil, okra, ginger, sweet potatoes, or squash? They grow all through our hot and humid summers. Kale grows year-round, from the hottest parts of summer to the coldest winter weather, so they can literally be planted any time. Perennial herbs like sage, thyme, oregano, chives, and rosemary are perfectly happy to grow in the hot weather. I’m not saying that the heat of summer doesn’t provide challenges, we must water more and deal with an increase in pest and disease pressure during these months, but there are plants that will thrive in this season. If we plant the right plant for the season we’re going into, we can have success even with the heat of our summers.

The biggest roadblock I see with people is what I call the “northern gardener” mindset. As a former NY gardener, I spent many years growing food in this way. We used to put our gardens in every spring and rip them out in the fall. the soil was empty all winter because it was covered in snow and frozen solid. But here in the Wilmington area, we can grow edible crops year-round. You can harvest lettuce all winter from the same soil you grew peppers or okra in all summer. Your tomato bed in the spring and fall can easily grow carrots  all winter.  This is the magic of year-round gardening. There is no “best time” to put in your garden . The best time to put in your garden is last year, The second best  is right now. If you’re ready to get your summer garden in, we are booking consults now for install dates in the next few weeks. It’s not too late to start your gardening journey this year. Book your consult today!