I remember the moment I reached for the knife: I was attempting to divide a clump of irises with rhizomes so thick that my shovel refused to cut through them.  I thought to myself, “a serrated knife would cut right through these”—and after a moment of reflection, couldn’t come up with a reason not to do precisely that. And just like that, a bread knife that saw no action in the kitchen became one of my most valued garden tools.

The key to being efficient in the garden is to use the right tools for the job, and there's no rule that says those tools have to come from the garden center. If you identify a non-traditional tool that can do the job, don’t be afraid to claim it from whatever part of the house it usually lives in and reallocate it to your garden. 

Serrated knives

When your shovel can’t get through roots, and a hori hori is too short, it’s time to take out a long bread knife. What I like most about using a bread knife is that I can stick it right into the ground and use it like a saw on resistant root balls, rhizomes or roots.  As long as you wipe off the knife when you’re done with it, it shouldn’t rust, and should remain a trusted tool in the yard. 

PVC pipe

PVC pipe being used as a dibbler. Credit: Amanda Blum

A traditional dibbler is a tool you use to make indentations in the soil, to place seeds in. Turns out, a stick of PVC pipe does roughly the same thing. And if you misplace a piece of PVC in the yard, it won’t drive you crazy the way it does when I misplace my dibbler. In fact, PVC is more effective than a dibbler when it comes time to plant leeks, which you dig up and replant every few months so that more of the stem is blanched underground. When you replant them, you want a hold that’s very narrow and 10 inches deep—and PVC gets the job done. 

But PVC can do more. It’s the perfect material for building hoops for a low tunnel over your beds, and because of all the connectors and fittings for PVC, you could even build a small greenhouse out of it.

Electric toothbrush 

While you’re not going to find a method for pollination better than good ol’ bees, there are instances where your plants are going to need an assist. Sometimes, you don’t have a lot of pollinators around, and sometimes you’re gardening indoors. In those cases, you need an electric toothbrush, or, uh, anything else that vibrates.  Once the plant has blossoms, and those blossoms are open, you hold the vibrating tool against it, and you will see the air fill with pollen, like a yellow cloud. Some of that pollen will land on other flowers and pollinate. I’ve found this method wildly effective on my indoor gardens.

Copper pennies

Copper pennies being used as a slug shield. Credit: Amanda Blum

With pennies about to be decommissioned by the US Mint, here’s another way to use up the ones you have. If they were made before 1982, they’re made of copper, and if there’s one thing slugs hate, it’s copper. It gives slugs a shock, and they usually will not cross it. Sure, you could buy copper tape—or you can just glue copper pennies around your raised beds. I like epoxy for this, rather than hot glue, since hot glue is just going to melt again in the heat. 

Wire trash cans

Wire trash can as plant cage. Credit: Amanda Blum

Perhaps you don’t have chickens who want to devour all your plants and are instead just dealing with the average birds, raccoons, rats, and squirrels. In any case, a wire trash can serve as an excellent cage for your plants, keeping animals out while the plant gets big enough to stand on its own. The dollar store is an excellent place to locate these gems, and when you do, grab a bunch of them. 

Five-gallon buckets and milk crates

5 gallon buckets being used for weed collection Credit: Amanda Blum

Look, I’m convinced five gallon buckets—the cheap ones you get at Home Depot—are the unsung heroes of garden work. There’s always eight to 10 of them kicking around my yard. When I’m weeding, I look for the closest bucket to toss them in. When I get into a tight squeeze where my wheelbarrow can’t reach, a bucket is great for scooping and dumping. It’s easy to toss a bunch of buckets in the back of the car if I’m running to get sand or soil for the garden, or if I’m picking up a freebie plant from a neighbor that needs something to ride in until I plant it. Fill a bucket with water and dunk entire plants in that have become hydrophobic. You can use buckets to mix soil amendments. Buckets can make a decent planter, too, if you drill holes in them. I’ve seen driveway gardens full of tomatoes and peppers in five-gallon buckets. 

In a similar vein, milk crates are invaluable for garden storage, since water can’t pool in them. You can see everything stored in them at a glance, and they stack. Being able to stack things in a garden is an equivalent to discovering a dress has pockets: priceless. But the best use of milk crates is to use them for planting bulbs. Flower farmers often use the crates that bulbs are shipped in (which look like milk crates) for planting that year’s bulbs, and once the crates are filled with soil and start flowering, you won’t notice the crate.

Cardboard

Cardboard sheet mulching. Credit: Amanda Blum

In my neighborhood, large cardboard rarely makes it to the recycling station. It is quickly claimed for gardening, because clean tape- and paint-free cardboard is the basis for sheet mulching. If you want to kill your grass, tamp down weeds, and/or create walkways in your garden, you start with a layer of cardboard. It will smother whatever is under it, and as the cardboard decomposes, add nitrogen to the soil. In a similar vein, cardboard can be the brown in your composting bin, which should be balanced with the green (grass clippings, leaves, stems, etc). 

You can also use cardboard in germination. Some seeds, like carrots, are a real bugger to germinate, and need consistent moisture, and don’t much like the sun at this stage. A sheet of cardboard over your carrot seeds will keep the soil moist and ensure darkness. Lift the cardboard after a week or two and check the germination. Once you see seedlings, remove the cardboard. 

Scissors

Cutting sweet peas with a scissor. Credit: Amanda Blum

I have every pair of pruners out there (I tend to lose them, somehow), but for some situations, nothing beats a pair of scissors. For delicate flowers like sweet peas, trying to get a pair of pruners between the growing vines will do more harm than good. I consistently find myself needing to cut twine while out and about in summer, and pruners rarely give a clean cut. 

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If you need a reminder that summer has finally landed, berries are here to remind you. Home gardens are spotted with tiny colored jewels of strawberries, currants, and oso berries. Cherries, raspberries and blueberries are beginning to blush with color as they ripen, just as the peonies and irises fade. Peas are popping off of tall vines, nasturtiums have begun to sprawl across garden beds, and spring-planted spinach and chard are sky high. This is your first chance to enjoy the spoils of your summer garden.

Cherries, blueberries, and raspberries about to ripen. Credit: Amanda Blum

Pruning and trellising

Within two weeks of your lilacs finishing blooming, you should consider pruning them back. This is when plants will determine blooms for the next season, and in some lucky cases, you can spur a second, fall bloom. You want to take as much as ⅓ of the plant's stems, so you encourage new growth each year. This is the case for all your early summer blooming shrubs and trees, like azalea, forsythia, Japanese kerria, weigela, deutzia, mock orange, St. John's wort, viburnums, and red or yellow dogwoods.

Lilac after blooming Credit: Amanda Blum

The pruning should extend to your tomatoes, now established in the ground. You’ll want to prune for suckers, depending on what kind of trellis system you have set up. If you’re allowing indeterminate tomatoes to only have one strong “leader” or stem, prune aggressively, but you’ll need tall trellises. Also be sure to cut away any diseased parts of the plant, but remember you only want to touch your tomatoes after the morning dew has dried, and with clean shears. Spray with Lysol or other disinfectant in between plants, so you are not spreading any disease. 

Tomato plants growing in trellises. Credit: Amanda Blum

Once your strawberries are done fruiting, mow them back and mulch them, so they won't continue to spend their energy growing runners, but will focus on root growth for next year.

Fruit-thinning

Fruit drop is when a tree drops fruit it cannot support (left). The remaining fruit, on the right, ripen. Credit: Amanda Blum

Your pears, apples, stone fruit—like peaches, plums, cherries and nectarines—and even fig trees will have set fruit by now, and also gone through fruit drop, a normal phenomenon where the trees drop what they can’t handle. With the fruit still on the tree, you must decide on quantity or quality. Thinning the fruit on each branch will allow the tree to create larger, tastier fruit. You can also shroud the fruit at this point, covering the fruit with gauze bags, to protect it from invasive bugs or animals. The same is true of grapes. Your vines should be well flushed out at this point, which means you can harvest grape leaves to use fresh or preserve for use later, and then shroud all your growing grape bunches. This will make them much easier to harvest, and also protect them from birds, raccoons, and rats.

Small grape clusters shrouded in gauze bags. Credit: Amanda Blum

Fertilizing

It’s important to not simply water your vegetables in raised beds, but also feed them. In addition to plant -pecific fertilizer (tomato fertilizer, blueberry and azalea fertilizer, etc.), you should consider a weekly treatment of compost tea. If you don't have a vermicomposter to make your own compost tea with, purchase compost tea bags and make some. Apply the tea with a sprayer folicularly (over the whole plant). Your tomatoes can also benefit from a treatment of Cal-Mag or Rot Stop, which will provide the plant more calcium to help prevent tomato blossom rot on forthcoming fruit. With most asparagus done harvesting by June, apply a nitrogen-heavy fertilizer for next year. 

Your lawn should get a low-nitrogen-based fertilizer in June. Your roses should get a phosphorus-based fertilizer treatment after their first bloom, which should be about now. All your trees and shrubs should get a summer fertilizer before July 4. Your garden center can help you find the right fertilizers, since not all plants should get the same one—and fertilizer is heavy, so you'd do well to buy it locally instead of have it shipped to you.

Preventing and eradicating pests

Cabbage moths. Credit: Amanda Blum

Garden pests are absolute terrorists this time of year. Just this morning I noticed many bean seedlings peeking through the soil had been thwarted by slugs. Sprays won’t be the only solution at this point—you’ll need to manually remove the pests from your plants as well. Aphids may be sprayed off with water, but without a treatment like soapy water or a nearby trap plant like nasturtiums, they’ll be back. If you don’t have nasturtiums nearby, plant them now—the aphids will be more attracted to the nasturtiums and will choose them instead. You just leave the aphid-infested nasturtiums in place. Treatments like Sluggo can help reduce the slug population, but manual extraction is still necessary. Leave shallow lids of beer or yeasty bread starter around as a trap, and collect the slugs that run to it each day.

Each plant in your garden has a number of pests that are trying to feed off of it; a daily walk around your garden will help you notice what might be attacking your plants. Get a butterfly net, and use it to capture and kill the white cabbage moths flitting about the garden.

Dealing with sick plants

Diseased leaves on a cherry tree. Credit: Amanda Blum

Gardens are highly susceptible to virus and fungus; one of the best ways to prevent them is to water at the root of plants, rather than overhead, which splashes onto the ground, causing water to spray back up onto plants. As you see blight or mosaic virus in your garden, you must cut it out quickly, dispose of those plants in the trash (not compost), and be sure you wash your hands and tools before moving onto the next plant. If you see powdery mildew on your plants, you can treat it with a diluted vinegar spray. Now is when you might catch sign of infections like leaf curl on your stone fruit trees, which can be treated if caught quite early with copper foliar sprays. Fungicides can go a long way to helping prevent problems like black spot on roses. You want to be very judicious when using fungicides and copper sprays: These are mostly preventative treatments, not reactive. If you’re questioning what you see in your garden, take a picture and head to the garden center. 

What to plant

The summer vegetables should all be in the ground by the end of June. Your tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and tomatillos need to be planted in early June, and if the weather hasn’t met planting conditions yet, you need to consider putting mitigations like Agribon in place and planting anyway. The Agribon tenting will create the warm conditions you need, and you can remove it when temperatures get warm enough on their own. 

Beans, cucumbers, corn, edamame, eggplants, melons, okra, summer squash, and sweet potatoes should get planted this month. If it’s early enough, they can still be direct seeded, but by mid-June, you should plant starts instead.  

Sweet peas. Credit: Amanda Blum

You can still plant almost all your summer annual flowers, including zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, salvia, and celosia from seed or as starts. Planting them in waves ensures multiple successions of flowers later in the season. Remember when planting these flowers to check seed labels for heights, so you can vary them. 

Now that your spring flowers are wilting, deadhead them appropriately. Your tulips need to have just the heads cut off, but no lower—remember they need leaves to mulch in place to return next year. Iris stems may be cut to the ground, but in a chevron, to ensure good growth next year. If you commit to religious harvesting of your sweet peas, you can make them last well into the summer. Each day, cut fresh blooms at the base of the stem, and you'll notice that the stems get shorter and shorter. Once the sweet peas go to seed and produce pods, it's time to pull the flowers out of the ground and plant something else. Deadheading your snapdragons will encourage the plants to branch, creating more blooms, but as soon as the snaps go to seed (the flowers will look like skulls), they should be cut to the ground, in hopes they might return the next year.

Through June, the best course of action is to take a walk through the garden once a day, even if it’s a quick one. Each morning, I wander the garden, grabbing weeds as I find them. Harvest what you can, take note of action items like pests or pruning, and be sure to take pictures and write in your garden journal. It’s the reason you planted the garden: to enjoy it.