Week 11 - Garden Vacation Checklist

For episode/article 11 for This Week in the Garden, we’ll cover how to prepare your garden for vacation. We’re getting into the time of year where we’re counting down the days until our vacations. Maybe you’ve already begun to make a list of items you need to remember to bring or tasks you need to do before you leave. While you’re working on those lists, don’t forget to get the garden in shape before you go. In this article, I’ll cover a few garden chores that should be done before you go so you don’t come back to an overgrown jungle.

The first and most obvious job is weeding. If you’ve watched our Week 6 video on weed control, hopefully you have a good handle on the weeds. If the weeds have started to win the battle, take a few afternoons to go out and clean near your plants and the alleys. It’s important to get rid of as many weeds as possible because they are areas where pests can hide and proliferate. If you don’t have the time to get every weed, make sure you remove the larger weeds that are putting out seeds. If you allow weeds to seed, you’ll have issues in years to come getting rid of them. While removing weeds, be careful around the base of your vegetables. If the soil is wet, you’re likely to pull up some of your plants’ roots as well.

Once the weeds are taken care of, the next task is to get the insects under control. This can seem daunting, especially if you’re new to gardening and aren’t familiar with which insects are beneficial or pests. Fortunately, we’ve done articles on both insects to get you up to speed. Before you leave on vacation, you’ll want to remove as many pests as you can. I’ve mostly seen squash bug, stink bug, and cucumber beetles in my garden. I’ve been removing these by hand and haven’t had any infestations yet (knock on wood). In general, it takes most insects about a week to go lay eggs, develop, hatch, and start eating your vegetables. If you can remove the pests and eggs before you leave, your vegetables should make it.

The third of the pest trifecta are diseases. Before you leave, make sure to remove any dying/ diseased plants. Yellowing leaves and stems are a good indicator of disease. Thinning the understory can help remove shaded leaves, which can be a harbor for fungal diseases. I made a special edition article/vlog on pruning tomatoes that can be used as a guide to prune other vegetables as well. The most important thing is to remove leaves that are growing close to the ground and are being shaded by the rest of the plant. These leaves aren’t contributing much energy to the plant and are more risk than reward. Just remember to clean off your pruners when you go from one plant to the next to make sure you’re not spreading any disease!

The next garden task before you leave for vacation is harvesting your vegetables. Hopefully, you have enough to take with you on vacation. If you’re running low, some vegetables can be harvested early and ripened on the counter. This is a great option for vacation because they’re usually more firm, making them less susceptible to bruising. Tomatoes are a great example. Tomatoes can be harvested as soon as they turn from green to pink/orange. Quality of early harvested tomatoes is not an issue, as quoted by the Postharvest Cooling and Handling of Field and Greenhouse Grown Tomatoes, “However, tomatoes harvested at the mature green stage will ripen into a product indiscernible from vine-ripened fruit.” To prolong your vegetable’s harvest, you can remove blossoms of quick-growing vegetables like cucumbers and squash. Doing so will prevent the production of enormous fruit while you’re gone and will allow the plant to focus that energy on root and stem growth.

The final task, watering, is optional depending on the weather. As long as you don’t water your vegetables every day, they should be able to manage a week without watering. If the weather forecast looks particularly hot and dry, you should water your garden the day before, or the morning that you leave. Make sure you thoroughly soak the roots of the plants. Soaker hoses work well, but any hose will do. Just be sure you’re focusing on getting the water to the roots. Watering the leaves can spread diseases, and isn’t as efficient. If you have the option, water in the morning. This will allow any water that splashes on the leaves to dry, rather than sitting overnight providing moisture for diseases.

Those are the main errands that need to be accomplished before relaxation. I’ve included a .pdf checklist of these five tasks and a few others to consider before you leave. As with most things, and this garden process all along, the more effort and time you put into preparing your garden, the better results you’ll have and the less pest pressure you’ll come back to.

That’s all for this article from This Week in the Garden. If you’ve missed any articles, check out our website where we keep them archived and fill out our form if you have any comments or questions. Of course, stay tuned until next time for This Week in the Garden.

-Adam