In the summer garden

By Don Shor Special to The Enterprise

With soil and night temperatures finally getting warm, it’s time to plant the heat-loving summer vegetables and flowers.

In the vegetable garden: pepper time

Peppers have been sulking due to the cold temperatures earlier in the month. They’ll be much happier with warmer nights. This is an excellent time to plant sweet peppers and chili peppers.

Interesting fact: the sweet pepper is a relatively new member of the type, historically speaking. There are five to six important species of peppers in the genus Capsicum that we grow for food, and all had capsaicin and other compounds in them that cause the pain or joy, depending on your viewpoint, of eating spicy food. Though hot peppers have been used in Mesoamerica for centuries and in Europe since the 16th century, modern sweet peppers arose due to a recessive gene in paprika peppers only about a hundred years ago.

Although bell peppers are the most popular variant of sweet pepper, gardeners locally find them susceptible to sunscald during heat waves. You can plant bell peppers where they get afternoon shade; you’ll get less yield, but perhaps more usable fruit in a hot summer.

Most of the other, thinnerwalled sweet peppers are less likely to have the fruit damaged. Alternatives that perform well here include Gypsy, Sweet Banana, Jimmy Nardello, Marconi.

If you want some peppers with mild to moderate heat for salsas, plant jalapeño, Fresno, and serrano. For cooking, some of the best for our area include Anaheim, a California variety that’s just mildly hot, and the Hatch pepper strains from New Mexico.

Very hot peppers that yield prodigiously here include cayenne (insanely hot), and Thai Dragon (same).

If you want to grow the super-hot peppers, it’s best to wait to plant them until the soil is even warmer. Peppers bred from Capsicum chinense such as habanero, Trinidad Scorpion, Bhut Jolokia, and their ilk contain startling amounts of capsaicin. They need soils about 70 degrees F, which is typically early June.

These are literally dangerously hot. As your mother would say: make good choices.

Plenty of time to plant: Cucumbers

The most common complaint I get about cucumbers it that they are often bitter here. While that can be exacerbated by insufficient watering, I’ve found bitterness varies by variety.

Newer hybrids, especially the burpless and Persian types, are rarely bitter and continue producing all summer. Lemon cucumbers, a round heirloom type with especially sweet cukes, is not bitter. I stopped growing regular green cucumbers years ago due to the bitterness problem. All other types have been much more satisfactory.

Anaheim and New Mexico peppers are excellent choices for our area. They yield large crops well into the fall, can be used fresh or can be dried, and have just mild heat. Great for cooking and for chiles rellenos.

Armenian cucumbers are never bitter. They’re not actually cucumbers, their fruit is a type of melon that isn’t sweet and has a crunchy texture, so we use it like a cuke. They are very vigorous vines, and the fruit are usable even when they’ve gotten quite large.

Bell peppers can be frustrating here due to sunburn injuring the fruit. Other sweet peppers such as Gypsy are more productive and successful here. As with bell peppers the fruit can be used green, or allowed to ripen and get sweeter.

Eggplants yields are highest from the long, slender types such as Millionaire or Japanese Long. If you pamper eggplants with plenty of water and light fertilizer they’ll yield very heavily.

Tomatoes can continue to be planted anytime through June.

I’ve even planted in July with good results. Corn. Most sweet corn takes 10 to 12 weeks to harvest so it’s best to get it in by mid-June. You can speed it up by buying seedling transplants.

Squash and melons

Summer squash such as crookneck, patty pan, and zucchini squash all can be planted through July, as they grow rapidly in warm weather and start yielding just a few weeks after planting.

Plant melons and winter squash at the end of May or early June. This includes cantaloupe and other musk melons, honeydew, crenshaw, and more.

See GARDEN, Page A5