July is the beginning of the so-called Northern New Mexico “monsoon” season, when this area gets much of its moisture for the growing year. Many folks come into Payne’s stores looking for tips on water harvesting.

One of the best and easiest ways to take advantage of the season is to place a Payne's rain barrel beneath a canale or gutter spout. Then, when you are ready to water your yard or plants, simply attach a hose to the built-in spigot and let gravity take over, sending your free water to thirsty grass, trees, plants and shrubs. (For info on using gray water systems in Northern New Mexico, click here.)

July is also the month when the first flushes of early-season tomatoes ripen. You can plant our earliest ripening varieties as late as the 15th to have ripe tomatoes before frost! We still have lots of great quarts available, so call Frannie at our South Store (988-9626) or Leanne at our North Store (988-8011) for availability. See JULY VEGETABLES below for more info.

July is also the month when summer perennials and annuals start to come into their own, when spring-flowering perennials have finished blooming and need to be cut back, divided, and fertilized to stimulate next year’s show.

July is also the month for critter invasions! Hungry bunnies, big ole scary tomato hornworms, grasshoppers — we’ve got ‘em all! You’ll find suggestions for dealing with them and other garden pests below (neighbors’ kids and dogs not included).

July Annuals & Bedding Plants

Deadhead, deadhead, deadhead. Annuals live to flower and set seed, so if you hinder them from forming seedheads, they’ll keep flowering all summer out of sheer baby-yearning frustration. Also, if any of your cool-loving annuals have wilted with the onset of summer’s heat, tell them good-bye, pull them out and put them on the compost pile. Replace them with any of the gorgeous, colorful new crop annuals we're getting in weekly at both our retail stores!

July Bulbs

To produce the largest flowers on your dahlia plants — especially those big dinner plant dahlias — pinch off the side shoots on your plants’ main stems, allowing only the final terminal buds to develop. And be sure your dahlias have adequate support as they grow taller. Otherwise you could wake up some morning to find your tall dahlias face down in the monsoon mud.

July Composting

Your garden will love homemade compost, so keep moistening your piles once a week (unless they’re open to the monsoon rains) and turning them every two weeks. It is important to keep alternating layers of green refuse (kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, dead pansies) with layers of dry (straw, shredded non-color newspaper).

Use a compost thermometer to determine if your piles are heating up the way they should. If they need help, sprinkle some blood meal or other compost starter (all available at Payne’s) into the layers and mix thoroughly.

If you don’t have a compost heap yet, and would like to start one, it’s never too late! For complete instructions, click here.

July Fertilization, Soil Preparation & Watering

Keep watering regularly unless it has been raining daily. Even if it has been pretty wet, use your bare hand to feel under your mulch to find out how far the rains have penetrated.

A few deep waterings each week (1-2 hours on a drip system or soaker hose) are much better for your plants than many brief, shallow waterings. Shallow waterings encourage your plants’ roots to stay near the soil surface, where they can be dried out easily by our intense sunlight.

Speaking of mulch, your spring-spread organic mulch should have melted down by now, so you may want to renew it with another application of bark or compost. A 4-inch layer of mulch is a good depth for inhibiting soil moisture evaporation and protecting soaker hoses from biodegrading under the bright, high-altitude sun. Some of our most popular bagged compost-based mulches include Payne’s Soil Conditioner; Happy Frog Soil Conditioner; Black Gold Garden Compost; Forest Magic Organic Compost; and Nature's Way Composted Mulch and Organic Compost. If you use a bark mulch, sprinkle some high-nitrogen fertilizer, such as blood meal, over your bed before you add the bark. The bark will then take nitrogen from the fertilizer, instead of your bed, in order to break itself down. Some great bark mulches include Coco Brown Mulch; Florida Gold Cypress Mulch; Soil Mender Cedar Mulch; and Sunland Pecan Mulch.

It’s also time again to fertilize your spring-blooming perennials and flowering shrubs so that the energy they expended flowering can be replaced against the oncoming stresses of winter. We recommend a slow-release organic such as Yum-Yum™ Mix, which is made in the Southwest for Southwest soils; Michael Melendrez’s wonderful Soil Food™ products; the Grow-More™ organics line of fertilizers; and the Happy Frog™ organics line. There are many other organic and high-organic fertilizers available at both our stores, so come in and let us help you choose one.

If you garden in containers, keep feeding your potted plants weekly with a liquid all-purpose plant food such as Gro-Power™. Feed your chrysanthemums lightly every 2 weeks. Feed your rose bushes once a month. (We even know a tomatoholic staffmember who feeds her containerized tomato plants every other DAY!)

If you grow June-bearing strawberries, their harvest should be over, and now is the time to feed them (they love well-rotted, aged manure). It is also time to feed your everbearing strawberries, to give them the oomph they’ll need to keep pumping out the fruits until the fall frost.

If for some reason your lawn hasn’t gotten any rain for a couple of weeks, avoid using fertilizers on it till the monsoons reach you; fertilizing grass in hot, dry weather can burn the plants and cause die-off.

July Herbs

Sweet basil (Ocimum basilicum) should be in its element this month, since basil loves warm, moist conditions. Keep the flowers pinched off so the tender, more aromatic new leaves keep sprouting. And if your boyfriend or girlfriend dumps you this month, do what Italians in the Renaissance did: as a parting gift, give your ex a basil plant in a pot. In the language of flowers, such a gift carried the message, “I hate you!” (Why would such a delicious herb get such a bad reputation? Because centuries ago, a Greek philosopher claimed that scorpions were born from the roots of basil plants. Maybe he was unlucky in love!)

July Perennials

You can continue planting perennials this month as long as you do it in the cool of the day (early morning and late afternoon to early evening). Divide and replant your spring-blooming perennials now, too, including your once-blooming bearded irises (you might want to wait until spring to divide your reblooming irises). Cut off any diseased or shriveled iris parts and put them into the garbage (not the compost heap). If you’ve been pinching back your mums to make them bushy, stop doing so by the 15th, so they can set buds for fall bloom.

July Pests & Disease Control

Aphids, whitefly, slugs, thrips, and spider mites continue to proliferate indoors and out with the increasing summer heat. Grasshoppers have been with us for weeks already, so if you aren’t dusting with Nolo bait or Semasphore® powder, you should still find some available at our stores.

Tomato hornworms will be making their appearance if they haven’t already. They’re unmistakable: fat green worms with hornlike projections on their heads. They devour the leaves, flowers, and fruits of anything in the deadly nightshade family, which includes tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. Bt, a powder containing caterpillar-killing Bacillus thuringiensis, can be dusted on your plants to cut down the hornworm populations, but handpicking will still be necessary, because the hornworms have to eat the powdered leaves to get infected with the disease (hornworms tend to come out at night, so get your flashlight ready. Look for them in their favorite hiding places: under leaves and plastered against stems).

Having said this, I feel obligated to point out that tomato hornworms are only pests in the caterpillar stage. Once they cocoon and rehatch, they grow up to become a beneficial insect, the hawk moth or hummingbird moth, which is an important pollinator of many Northern New Mexico plant species. So I prefer handpicking to applying Bt, which will paralyze the digestive systems of not only tomato hornworms, but also any caterpillars, including the larvae of butterflies.

Confession Time: Poor tenderhearted me, when I lived in Santa Fe, I used to drop my hornworms over into my non-gardening neighbors’ yard, a practice I don’t recommend. For one thing, it can make for bad neighbor karma. For another, hornworms are surprisingly athletic, and can easily scale a wall to get back to their nightshade buffet. So it’s better just to drown them in a bucket of water as you pick them, or, smash them quickly with a brick if you’re feeling vengeful. I still feel guilty doing it, though.

July Shrubs & Trees

You may continue to plant shrubs and trees this month. Be sure to water them in thoroughly once you’ve planted them. For complete tree planting instructions, click here. For complete shrub planting instructions, click here.

Prune your spring-blooming shrubs for shape, removing any dead or diseased branches (remember that lilacs will bloom next year on this year’s wood, so just remove the spent flowering sprigs; don’t whack them way back). Fertilize your shrubs and trees, especially your shrub roses, lilacs, and forsythias. Watch for the ripening black fruit on your golden currant (Ribes aureum) and serviceberry (Amelanchier sp.) bushes, and be sure to grab some before the birds do (they’re delicious — the berries, I mean, not the birds).

July Tool Care

Put your metal rakes, shovels, spades, forks, and hand tools away every evening when you’ve finished using them. If you leave them outside during the monsoons, they’ll rust.

July Vegetables

If you haven’t planted any tomatoes yet, or your yard is just a flagstone patio, you can still get in on the tomato action!

Another bunch of super-extra-early tomato plants are ready at Payne’s. These varieties are so early to ripen fruit that they’ll give you tomatoes way before the first frost if you plant them this month. If you have an indoor sunroom, you can plant any tomatoes in containers and bring them indoors in the fall. Then you’ll have ripe fruit until Christmas!

Here are just a few of Payne's super-early varieties still available at one or the other of our stores as of this writing (6/24/09): 'Homesweet' yields loads of 4-6 oz, scarlet fruits of addictive lusciousness on determinate, compact vines. ‘Koralik’ bears tremendous yields of sweet red cherry tomatoes on very compact bushes. 'Peron' (aka "Peron Sprayless") is a highly disease resistant bush variety from Argentina that yields tons of 2-4 oz scarlet fruits that contain over 2-3 times the vitamin C of most other tomatoes! 'Stupice' (pronounced stoo-PEETS-ah or STOO-peets-ah) makes compact, potato-leaved plants with clusters of 2-3", 2-4 oz delicious red fruits all season. It's often the first tomato to bear in our gardens here! 'Thessaloniki' (THESS-sah-LON-ick-ee)is a wonderful drought tolerant Greek variety known for its big crops of uniform, baseball sized, round red fruits. Great flavor, too! For a complete list of the Payne's 2009 tomatoes, click here.