Today I want to share what you can plant or be growing in June in Zone 7 and also many gardening TIPS for this season! Hey there, welcome back to my corner on the web! I’m located in northeast Arkansas in Zone 7 and I love to garden and share educational content with people who are new to gardening, looking to get into it or where ever you are in life right now. Welcome!
Today I want to share what you can plant or be growing in June in Zone 7 and also many gardening TIPS for this season! Zone 7 spans across a large part of the United States. The zones are the USDA agricultural zones and what determines your zone is pretty much how intense your winter is. So most people in zone 7 have a pretty mild winter. We do get below freezing but not for extended periods of time.
The biggest thing to be mindful of throughout the whole month of June is that when the weather starts to be warm consistently, this is when we begin to see problems with garden pests! So you’re going to have bug problems, but you’ll have less if you’re gardening in containers, more if you’re growing a variety of things. The cool thing about plants, it’s also kind of weird but it’s neat, is that plants put off a smell that certain insects are drawn to, more so in certain situations. When plants are under stress, like if it’s super hot or you have under-watered them and they’re parched, they put out these stress hormones that signal a specific smell that draws in specific pests so that’s why typically when it starts to get warm outside, suddenly you get aphids or beetles and lord knows what else!
So you want to keep an eye out for pests, you can look for black spots on leaves as this would be insect poop. You can look for leaves that have been munched on, this is a sign of worms. There are lots of garden worms out there that are not our friends. I’m not going to go more into details about this as I could write an entire article on garden pests alone.
There are two things you could do to be on your game when it comes to garden pests. One is to keep an eye out for pest damage but it would really be a big favor to yourself to do preventative insect repellent. There are numerous ways you can do that like planting companion plants to act as a repellent or using an organic insecticide. In companion planting the idea is that since plants put off smells, there are certain plants that do well to be grown near others. I’m not going to go deep into details on the specifics but note that there are also plants that do NOT like being near one another! When you do companion planting this will help deter some insects so this is a good step to take. It’s also beautiful to do companion planting, like growing things like marigolds and basil with tomatoes!
Another thing you can do to prevent insect damage in the garden is to use a good preventative organic insecticide. There are lots of insecticides out there but most of them are chemical laden and you don’t want those taken up in your veggie plants because then they will literally be in your food. So look for the organic ones, they do exist, they’re probably more expensive but they’re worth it. So once you find the one you’d like to use, make sure and read the back of the container and decide if you’re going to do a spray schedule that is weekly or bi-weekly, whatever works for you. If you do this as a preventative and you get started in June you’re going to be way better off then come mid to late June or late July and you have bugs and bug damage everywhere!!!
If you are growing brassicas, like broccoli and cabbage, it’s time to cover them with insect netting if you haven’t already. They are likely at the end of their season as they prefer to be grown in the spring during cooler temps because they really can’t take the heat. Just make sure in June that they’re covered well with insect netting and you rarely fully open it because so many insects love these crops, they are super susceptible to pest damage that can ruin an entire head of cabbage.
Also if you’d like to just peruse my favorite garden goodies, on my Amazon Storefront LINKED HERE I have a board that is specifically all just gardening products, tools and gear and every item listed on there has been bought and happily used by me.
SEEDS you can be sowing in June still….
Sunflowers
Zinnias
Marigold
Borage
Basil
Other warm weather herbs
Southern peas
Corn
Okra
Pumpkin (depending on how many days to harvest they are)
If you have been doing succession planting you still have some time to continue to do that for corn, squash and cucumbers.
Do note that it’s too late to start crops like tomatoes and peppers by seed right now because they do take so long to fruit and ripen fruit and you always want to check how many days until your frost date and that will let you know your CURRENT garden window. You can google “when is my last frost date in zip code…” and it will give you a specific date. This is an estimate but it is based on historical data and typically they’re accurate within 1-2 weeks.
If there are any plants that may take a little longer or seeds you forgot to start or didn’t realize back in February you wanted to grow it, go ahead and buy some more mature plant starts at a local nursery or a big box retailer. These plants are MONTHS old and will allow you to grow something you wanted to try, even though you didn’t plan ahead in early spring. No matter how many seeds I start every spring, I ALWAYS end up buying starts from others, including retailers.
With herbs, when they start to flower you want to pinch the flower off, so that the plant grows bushier. I find that really hard to do because I actually love the flower on most of the herbs that I grow and I grow so many perennial herbs in the landscape because I do edible landscaping in all my flower beds. So a lot of my herbs here not only I grow for medicinal purposes but I grow because they’re beautiful. So if you’re doing that then disregard this next piece of advice.
BUT IF you are growing herbs to harvest and dry the herbs or just to harvest for fresh eating and cooking, then you want to pinch the flowers off because not only will this make the plant grow bushier, but the plant flowering can actually change the taste of the leaves and sometimes making them bitter.
Another tip I’d like to share is to be careful not to spread disease in your garden by walking through and leaves rubbing up against you or your clothes. You could transmit diseases from one plant to another by these means. So if your pathways are not really wide, just be careful not to touch plants if you’re fearful of this. I feel like this would most likely be an issue in gardens with small walkways where you get a lot of rain because a lot of plant diseases in summer tend to have to do with excessive moisture due to over watering or rain. Another good rule of thumb is to just not walk through your garden when the plants are wet, so back yourself out when hand watering and don’t walk through it after a rain.
Water your garden in the evening after the sun has gone down. Most people know it’s bad to water when the sun is high in the sky midday but I always like to share even obvious gardening tips in case you’re brand new and just haven’t ever heard it before!
If you like video format I think you’ll love my Youtube channel which you can find in this link here! This information I’m sharing on month specific gardening content you can find in a dedicated video on a special series I’ve been filming in 2024 which you can find here as well!
If you transplanted seedlings within the last few weeks, you have probably been worried about and babying your plants. You have probably been watering them every day or every other day, but whatever your schedule has been or whatever rainfall you get, now is the time to start backing off on hand watering. When we’re starting to get into the real heat of the summer, it’s time to start getting plants ready to get stronger. It’s time for plants to do their job and start putting their roots down. As long as you are frequently hand watering them then plants roots are getting what they need just a few inches down in the soil. But if you pull back on watering plants will naturally push their roots DOWN to find water which makes them stronger plants. You want them to do this before we get into the heat of July and August!
June is when I will personally take daily watering to watering every other day for a week or so and then push it out to once every 3 days. Again, if it rains then I won’t water but otherwise I want the plants to start to get used to less and less water from me.
In the process of weening off hand watering you want to keep an eye on the health of your plants so you need to understand plant wilting. Most newer plants WILL wilt daily in the dead heat of the summer during the day or by the evening. So if you check on your garden at high noon or even 5pm in the summer and the leaves are wilted slightly or even a lot, you need to know this is normal and the plant is doing this to protect itself from the sun. It’s doing it just because it’s so dang hot outside. So as long as your plant is not literally falling over, I say leave your plant, maybe go ahead and do your evening watering if it’s the day you planned to do it. But for the most part, those plants are going to rebound and perk back up overnight.
If you check on your plants in the morning and they are STILL wilted, then that is a plant I’d be concerned about. If I see that I will do a spot watering on that plant, maybe pull the soil back near the base and do some deep root watering to help that plant recover. A plant still wilted down in the morning may not make it through another hot day without some water.
Spring Crops Dying
Anything that doesn’t love the heat of summer is going to start bolting. If you were growing things in early or late spring like peas, greens or lettuces, know that these guys have ran their course more than likely. They can last longer for you if you have them in a pretty shady spot so they aren’t getting directly scorched by the sun. If you’re new to the term “bolting”, it just means the process the plant goes through when it’s going to die. When a plant feels it has lived it’s life and there is nothing left for it to do, it will try to secure the next generation before it dies. It will shoot a flower up to make its seed. That plant will flower then go to seed (ie, bolting) and then the plant itself will die back. If you were to leave this plant alone entirely, the seeds it made would fall to the ground and likely germinate in that spot NEXT YEAR when the soil is the nice, cool temperature that plant needs. It’s an amazing process and would be so cool to have an entirely self seeded patch in a garden but most gardeners don’t allow veggies to reseed themselves as they likely will change up the garden layout year over year.
But if you decided to have a perennial lettuce bed in a garden space, you could just dedicate one space to allow everything to flower and come back naturally each year and that would be such a fun, joyful experience. The one thing I’d find difficult about that is come next spring when things start to sprout, you would need to be experienced or really patient to know what to weed and what to leave.
Dead Heading Flowers
Now is when you want to be on top of dead heading your flowers because MOST flowers will produce many more blooms if you pull off the old blooms. Roses and Zinnias are wonderful examples of these! I just walk through and either pull or pinch off the spent blooms as I’m making my usual passes by and it takes almost no time at all! Marigolds will also re-bloom like this.
Fertilizing Schedule
This time of year I specifically do a weekly organic fertilizer on my edible crops and then I do a bi-weekly fertilizer on all my landscape flowers, fruit trees, berry plants, shrubs, trees, etc. I like to give everything in my yard food throughout the growing season to help them either bloom, fruit, put root down, get strong, etc. I almost always have a flower garden bed that is less than 30 days old in the growing season for me, which is between March and November, because I’m constantly remodeling or adding to flower beds or even expanding existing ones. So because of that I like to make sure all my newer plants, be they annuals or new perennials, are getting ample nutrients to live their best life!
Thank you for taking the time to check out this gardening article! If you loved it I hope you will subscribe to my blog as I love to share gardening content, recipes and other helpful articles!
If you’d like to read my personal story, you can find it here!
If you like this article and would like to follow along when I post new ones, please join my reader community below where you’ll only be notified when new articles or books are published!
