July 2026
We’ve had a much longer stretch of temperatures in the 90s Fahrenheit than is normal for this time of year, which has us limiting our garden working hours to early morning and late evening. I guess this must be how folks garden in the Southern U.S. and elsewhere with such heat?
I have a mantra to help me prioritize garden tasks when there is so much screaming for my attention: harvest first, plant, and then tend/weed. Otherwise, I get sucked into weeding too easily and miss harvesting something at its peak.
Harvesting & Preserving
Cherries
This is the first year we collected a proper harvest of tart cherries off our little tree. There was enough to eat fresh, make a cake filling, and freeze half a dozen quarts for pies.
Mid-Summer Berries
Every morning we’ve had some combination of fresh red/pink currants, gooseberries, red/black raspberries, and blackberries for the breakfast table. Black currants we prefer to bake into muffins or preserve as jam, cordial, or shrub syrup. We’ve frozen a lot of all these berries for later use, except the blackberries which are just getting started.
Salad and Cooking Greens
The lettuces held on until this latest heat wave, which has turned them bitter and sent them bolting. We’ve been using young kale and cabbage for salads instead. Especially in the heat, we love crunching away on raw cabbage. For cooking greens, there’s cabbage, kale, chard, sea beet, and broccoli. We’ve started blanching and freezing these greens too.
Bulb Fennel and Celery
We haven’t had good bulb fennel in years, but for some reason I have a lot that is beautifully tender right now. Both fennel and celery have been making regular appearances diced up into grain and legume salads. Eventually I’ll freeze some for winter soups and stews.
Zucchini!
This is always the first crop to have in abundance, and the first that my family starts to wish I’d stop cooking for dinner—but it is so versatile! I do have a policy, if I spot one that needs picking, I pick it. There is no looking away to come back later. Because by later, it could be weapon-sized. If one does get away from us, we feed it to the chickens.
Beets
We’ve enjoyed the first young beets mostly raw, shredded for salad. Eventually we’ll roast and freeze some and/or make pickled beets to can.
Tomatoes, Peppers, Eggplants
It’s still early for the nightshades, but we’ve eaten a few Turkish Orange eggplants, Diamond eggplants, a couple under-ripe peppers, and one cherry tomato. We will have abundance of all these crops soon enough, and I’ve been planning my preserving strategy, which is going to involve more drying of tomatoes than usual.
Alliums
We’ve been pulling fresh garlic and onions to use as needed, but they aren’t fully mature yet. I love using garlic fresh when the skin around cloves is still succulent, and the cloves are almost translucent. Running it across a sharpe microplane is effortless and creates juicy paste for raw and cooked dishes.
Herbs and Edible Flowers
All the herbs are available this time of year, and we’re almost done drying what we’ll use in winter. The options I have for flavors and garnishes are delightful.
Legumes
Fresh-shelled fava are a mid summer treat! If we have more than we’ll eat within a week, we’ll blanch and freeze. We’ve been crunching away on the Sugar Magnolia pea, a purple edible pod variety.
Outdoor Planting
Chicories
Cabbages
Carrots
Leeks
Outdoor Tending
Trimmed and trained raspberries and blackberries
Pruned and trellised tomatoes
Staked peppers and eggplants
Weeded and mulched
Pulled pest-infected fruits off orchard trees
Sprayed BT on brassicas
Seed Saving
Fava bean seed collecting
Bagging pepper and eggplant flower buds
Up Next
We’ll pull garlic when a third to half the greens have dried and turned brown. When the onion tops flop over, we pull and let the cure/dry in the sun until tops are completely dry and brown. Blackberry picking will be a daily job for a few weeks. Much more time will be devoted to harvesting and preserving once the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants get cranking.