8 Essential Summer Gardening Tips For A Lush And Thriving Season

Summer gardening can be the most challenging yet rewarding time for any gardener and plant lover. This is the season when most plants, flowers, fruits, and vegetables thrive, and they need a lot of help in doing so.

Every gardener must get familiar with the basic summer gardening tips, from selecting the right plants to preparing the garden. Summer gardening requires time and effort, but it will reward you with colorful summer flowers, edible fruits, and various wildlife to watch and enjoy.

So, without further ado, let’s explore some essential tips for summer gardening and various plants that you can grow in your summer garden.

8 Summer Gardening Tips

1. Prepare The Soil 

Summer heat can affect the soil and decrease its quality. Therefore, for better summer gardening, you need to protect the soil in your summer garden by adding a layer of mulch to it. Adding a 2-inch layer of mulch, consisting of organic matter such as shredded leaves, pine straw, and shredded wood, can help keep the soil cool.

Mulching also retains moisture and prevents excess water loss due to evaporation. Moreover, as organic matter decomposes, it replenishes the nutrients in the soil. Furthermore, organic mulch provides a habitable environment for many microbes and beneficial organisms such as worms.

2. Remove Unwanted Plants

One of the most recommended summer gardening tips is to remove dead plants and weeds from the garden. A lot of weeds thrive in summer and can quickly grow, affecting the plants in your garden. Weeds like dandelions can grow quickly and produce a lot of seeds, therefore, it is important to identify such weeds quickly and remove them when they are young.

Moreover, for better summer gardening, make sure to prune and remove dead flowers and plants as they ruin the appearance of the garden and also promote pests and diseases.

3. Clearing Winter Damage

Winter can be harsh on the garden, and before you start planting summer plants, you need to manage any damage that has happened during winter. Frost and windburn can damage a lot of plants and fill the garden with dead plant debris, therefore, winter plant care is also very necessary.

Prune any dead or damaged plants and support plants that can be recovered to health. You can also shift indoor plants that were brought during winter back to the garden. Also, replace the winter mulch with fresh one to maintain healthy soil conditions.

4. Start Planting

Upon the arrival of summer heat, many spring annual flowers begin to fade away. This is the right time to replace them with sun-loving plants that can tolerate summer heat. Select from a variety of plants such as lantana, coleus, zinnia, and more.

These summer annuals bloom quickly and provide a burst of color in no time. Moreover, you can also select various summer bedding plants to keep your garden alive and full of color all summer long. Based on your local climate, you can opt for many edible plants such as vegetables and fruits.

5. Continue Spring Tasks

Plant care for summer and spring is mostly the same. Therefore, continue with your spring gardening tasks such as watering, fertilizing, and pest control. Summer gardening is not just about preparing the yard and planting the plants.

A healthy garden is regularly monitored and taken care of. Therefore, this is an essential summer gardening tip. Regularly check on your plants and stay on top of their needs. Each plant can have different needs, and you should be familiar with them.

Some important plant care tasks, such as watering and fertilizing, should be carried out carefully and according to the requirements of the plants.

6. Remove Spent Plants

By continuously removing spent blooms and plants, you can encourage more flowers. By removing dead flowers regularly, plants put more energy into reblooming instead of producing seeds. Deadheading plants also decreases the risk of pest infestation and plant diseases.

7. Monitor Pests & Diseases

To keep your summer garden healthy and lush, you need to keep an eye out for pests and plant diseases. Even little negligence can attract deadly pests and diseases to your garden and harm the health of your plants. Therefore, for better summer gardening, you need to regularly monitor the health of your plants.

Just like weeds, pests, and diseases can ruin the health of your plants and degrade the overall condition of your garden.

8. Prepare For Fall

You also need to prepare for the fall garden during summer for a smooth transition. Start planting for cool-season vegetables and fall flowers that will thrive as soon as autumn arrives. Just like summer gardening, preparing for autumn will help your garden thrive in the cooler season.

Late Summer is a great time to start preparing for fall, such as changing the mulch, getting rid of dead and decayed plants, replenishing soil nutrients, and planting seeds/bulbs for autumn.

Plants For a Summer Garden

You can select from a variety of plants for your summer garden –

Summer-Flowering Annuals and Perennials

• Celosia: Distinguished by its distinctive, vibrant blooms that mimic coral or flames. This plant has a long vase life, attracts pollinators, and thrives in hot, dry regions.
• Sunflowers: Famous summertime flowers that adore full sun are sunflowers. They are pollinator-friendly, simple to maintain, and come in both traditional tall and bushy kinds, such as ‘Suncredible Yellow’, which blooms profusely throughout the year.
• Daisies: These are low-maintenance flowers that brighten any garden with their months-long blooms of white and yellow.
• Delphiniums: These are tall, eye-catching perennials that come in pink, purple, blue, and white hues. Choose well-drained soil and either full or partial sun.
• Lantana: Clusters of vibrantly colored blooms that are drought-tolerant, sun-loving, and hardy.
• Morning Glories: Vibrant climbing vines that grow quickly and are perfect for fences or trellises.
• Portulaca: Vibrant blooming succulent groundcover. Excellent for borders or containers, it thrives in hot, dry environments.
• French marigold: Perfect for summer gardening, it’s small and simple to grow. Blooms in orange, maroon, and yellow.

Heat-Tolerant Perennials and Shrubs

• Coneflowers: These are long-blooming, vibrant perennials that draw birds and pollinators.
• Perennial Hibiscus: Excellent heat tolerance and garden presence, with large, spectacular blooms from June to fall.
• Perennial salvia: Purple, pink, or blue flower spikes that rebloom all summer long; pollinator-friendly and resistant to deer and rabbits.
• Stonecrop: Succulent groundcovers with vibrant leaves and summer blossoms are known as stonecrops (Sedum). Incredibly low-maintenance and drought-tolerant.
• Juniper: An evergreen shrub that thrives in sunny areas and is prized for its texture and ability to withstand dryness.
• Crapemyrtle: Heat-tolerant flowering shrub with vibrant summer blooms and eye-catching leaves.

Fruits and Vegetables for Summer Gardening

• Tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers are classic summer crops that flourish in warm temperatures and full sun.
• Melons, squash, okra, beans, and eggplant are heat-tolerant and productive options for summer harvests.
• Strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries are easy to grow in summer beds or as potted plants. These fruits are very flavorful.
• Stone fruits such as peaches, apricots, and plums are also great for summer gardening.

Conclusion

Summer gardening can be tedious and time-consuming; however, with the right guidance, you can grow a variety of plants in your summer garden. These summer gardening tips will help you create a lush garden filled with a variety of fruits, vegetables, and flowering annuals/perennials. For more such summer gardening tips and basics of gardening, download the Plantora app. This app will help you learn about the basics of plant care and provide information on every gardening-related query.