Your garden should be green and lush, and you may have already enjoyed many harvests by now. As temperatures rise this month, you’ll start to see the fruits of your labor.

Make shade in the garden

While many plants like tomatoes, peppers, corn and squash enjoy full sun, others are happier in partial shade. Give shade to broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower to slow flowering and encourage tighter heads. Leafy greens will turn bitter and bolt quickly in our hot summer sun, so planting them in a spot with some afternoon shade will make for more tender leafs.

Getting away from the idea that our gardens need to be in full sun is a step towards creating more robust and resilient garden ecosystems that are more inviting habitats for beneficial insects, toads and birds.

Vertical space invites shade and creates a more dynamic garden environment. Sunflowers and corn cast shade on shorter plants to protect them from the hot afternoon sun. A wall of trellised cucumbers or squash can act in the same way. Seed buckwheat with carrots to create a shady canopy for carrots as they germinate.

Layer plants according to height, days to harvest and sunshine needs to help better utilize your space and harvest tastier vegetables.

Let's talk about lawns

Lawns are easily taken for granted, and yet they come with great controversy and serious consequences for people, our watersheds and our planet. Huffington Post referenced a study by NASA in 2015, which estimated more than 63,000 square miles of lawn in the U.S.—that’s about the size of Texas!

The green spaces that lead us from our homes to the outside world are places of play, habitat for critters, and in my book, a big step up from concrete or asphalt. Like all living plants that promote life in our soils, lawns sequester carbon from the atmosphere and pull water into underground watersheds.

But maintaining a lawn in the high desert requires a lot of effort, especially if you’re aiming to achieve a low-cut, weed-free monoculture of super green grass.

By incorporating other greenery into your lawn, like dandelions, clover, alfalfa or mint, you’re allowing for greater biodiversity in your space and facilitating natural cycles that benefit the earth and its inhabitants. Allowing for diversity, a polyculture, also lessens or eliminates the perceived need to use chemical herbicides, which seep into the water cycle we rely on.

Keeping your lawn a few inches longer lowers the amount of water needed to keep the lawn green, and by watering for longer periods of time and less often—only a few days a week—your lawn grows deeper, healthier roots. You can also leave clippings on the lawn to recycle nutrients back to the roots, or spread a thin layer of compost on your lawn each year.

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• Invite shade into the garden using trellises; sheer fabrics; tall annual plants; new trees and shrubs; hanging baskets; canopies; climbing vines, cucumbers and mini melons; hops and pole beans.
• Direct sow succession plants: lettuce, cilantro, green onion, spinach, dill and basil.
• Direct sow beans, beets, carrots, corn, peas and radishes.
• Direct sow or transplant celery, cucumber, melons, okra, onion, parsnip, potatoes, pumpkins, summer squash, potatoes, Swiss chard and herbs.
• Hardneck garlic plants will send up scapes this month from the center of the plant. Harvest the scapes when they’re curly to use in stir-fry and pesto. Cut the scapes to help the bulbs grow bigger.
• Bring houseplants outside for a good soak and sunshine.
• Deadhead annuals.[/checklist-box]