Vacation Proof Your Garden

Are you ready for a vacation?   I sure hope so because the last year has been absolute crap.   The thing is, as much as we need to get out of town for a while, we really don’t want to come home and find all those plants we’ve taken so much care to grow from seed have died.

Follow these simple tips before you leave on your vacation and all of the plants in your garden you’ve worked hard growing will survive and thrive without you for a week or two. 

Task 1:  Water and Mulch

The biggest challenge, by far, is to make sure that our garden beds will get sufficient water when we are away.   The easiest and most failsafe way to achieve this is to install a soaker hose watering system paired with a smart water timer.

As I explain in the video, installing a soaker hose and smart timer is a great investment and easy to install. You will be so glad you made this small investment in your garden even if you don’t choose to take a vacation this year.

Don’t worry if your garden beds are already established and full of vegetable plants. You can still install a soaker hose system even if your garden beds are full of plants.  Actually, in a lot of ways, installing the soaker hose system when your plants are already established makes it an easier job!

This system really is as fail-proof as you can get.  The system will connect to an existing wifi signal in your home, and will stop or delay watering based on local rain forecasts. You can even observe the watering system is working via a phone app just for a little more assurance that your garden is being watered as planned while you are away.

Mulching your garden beds goes “hand in hand” with the soaker hose watering system. If you have not already mulched your garden beds, you absolutely need to apply 2-3 inches of mulch to each garden bed before you leave on a vacation.  

Mulching is critical for a stress free vacation. The first reason is that the soaker hose system isn’t going to be efficient without mulch.  We need the mulch to ensure the moisture from our soaker hose doesn’t evaporate before it has time to soak into our soil.

There is another reason why mulching is critical. Mulching our garden beds keeps the weeds down to a minimum. I spend less than 2 minutes a week weeding my garden because the of the mulch on my beds. If we put down 2-3” of mulch on all our garden beds we won’t come back from our vacation and find weeds have taken over our entire garden.

Task 2:  Harvest What We Can

Over ripened fruit that starts to rot on the vine is going to invite in pest insects that we don’t want in our garden beds.  And besides that, it’s just a waste of our hard work to waste our vegetables because we didn’t harvest before we went on vacation. 

Tomatoes – Harvest all your tomatoes that are ripe and any that are starting to turn from green to red. For those fruits that are not yet fully ripened you want to harvest those too. You can leave them on your countertop and they will ripen in a few days.

Side Note: It’s not a good idea to put our tomatoes in the refrigerator. The cold temperatures will have a negative impact on the flavor and they will end up tasting like store bought tomatoes. If you can’t consume or preserve them before you leave, then you can always give them to a neighbor!

Peppers - Just like tomatoes, peppers can be picked early and they will finish ripening off the vine.

Zucchini, Summer Squash, Eggplant and Cucumbers - I harvest everything I can before I go on vacation even if that means harvesting them a bit young. I would rather have these vegetables young then let them grow too big before I harvest.

Melons and Winter Squash - We need to let these fruits ripen on the vine. If you are growing these fruits on a trellis, use an old t-shirt to create a basket to hold these fruit so they don’t come crashing down to the ground while you're away.

Task 3:  Trim and Prune

For our melons, winter squash, cucumbers, anything that is growing in your garden that is a vining, climbing plant, we want to trim those back.  These plants grow very fast. Give them a good trim and pruning before you leave but be careful not to cut off any premature fruits.

Tomato suckers will also grow quickly while you are gone.   Remember to trim off all the foliage below your last harvested fruit and go back thru and trim of any new sucker growth. The video below explains exactly how to do this.

For your pepper plants, make sure and check to see if they need support.  Peppers, can become top heavy as they produce fruit and that can result in branches snapping off if they aren’t supported.

If you are growing Summer Squash or Zucchini vertically, strap them back before you go on holiday.   I lost a plant this year because I let it grow too long without retraining it vertically and when I tried to straighten it back out, I snapped the stem.  Don’t let that happen to you.  Train them up before you go on vacation.

Task 4:  Apply Preventative Pest Control Measures

If you are like me and have pressure in your garden from the squash vine borer and the tomato hornworm caterpillar, it’s important that we apply organic preventative pest controls one last time right before we leave on vacation.  I apply Bt (Bacillus Thuringiensis) on my tomatoes and squash plants to control these pests. If we apply Bt right before we leave on vacation it will give us 7-10 days of protection against these pests.

Conclusion

Follow these simple tasks before you leave on vacation and you won’t have to worry about your garden while you are away. Your garden is going to be fine without you and you can enjoy your vacation knowing all your plants will be super healthy when you return.