Gardening 101: It’s time to plant summer vegetables

NORTH TEXAS (CBSNewsTexas.com) – As your spring-season greens give up in the summer heat, replace them with easy-to-grow summer crops like sweet potatoes, summer peas and okra.

Summer peas include black-eyed peas, crowder peas, purple hull peas, and cream peas and they can be started as early as mid-April. All of them do very well in the Texas summer heat (if watered regularly) and can produce all summer long into fall. 

Here’s a pro tip! Get the bush variety and let them cover some real estate in your garden if you have the space. This will help limit the weeding and keep your soil heat down. Make sure to mulch around them and water deeply at least once or twice a week.

Pick the pods as soon as they are full-size on the plant. This tells the plant to make some more. If you don’t harvest regularly then the plant will halt production.

Okra is the summer king of crops. It thrives in our heat but the trick to okra is to harvest it about every other day. The pods come from the edible flowers and once they are about three inches long you can cut them from the plant. 

Like summer peas, this tells the plant to grow more. It’ll grow up as it produces pods, keep an eye out for any branches because the pods are well hidden in the green stems. 

The picture above is from a couple of summers ago, my okra plants got over ten feet tall. At the end of the growing season, it was like pulling out a small tree. You can plant them close together to limit their height.

Summer is not the kindest of seasons for the vegetable garden. But a couple of tried and true crops will keep you in your garden with a colander and scissors in hand. 

Bounty knows no season.

Jeff Ray is the senior First Alert Meteorologist at CBS News Texas and an avid gardener. When not covering the weather, he is finding stories about Gardening in north Texas. If you would like Jeff to talk to your group about how changing weather patterns are changing the way we garden in this area, please email jaray@viacomcbs.com

Jeff Ray

Jeff joined CBS 11 and TXA 21 in December 2010 as a staff Meteorologist. An avid gardener, you can catch his weekly Gardening 101 series on Fridays on CBS 11. Born in Lubbock, Jeff received his bachelor’s degree in broadcast meteorology from Mississippi State University. He also holds a master’s degree in science education from the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Jeff’s broadcast career spans over 35 years.

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