April in the Garden

• Give flowers and vegetables a foliar feeding of liquid seaweed or compost tea; spray the liquid nutrients on foliage early in the day before it gets too hot.
• Plant black-eyed, purple hull and crowder peas, okra, peanuts, sweet potatoes, squash, melons, cucumbers, and corn—all can withstand the heat that will arrive in less than 2 months.
• Keep planting basil—it loves the warm weather.
• Keep adding kitchen scraps and grass clippings to your compost pile.
• Replenish your mulch!
• If slugs and snails are decimating your plants, collect them in the evening, when you're most likely to spot them.
• Plant pumpkins, summer squash, melons, and other vegetables that thrive in heat.
• Every 2 weeks from now until late summer, plant small blocks of bush beans and sweet corn to extend the harvest until frost.
• Thin fruits on fruit trees to increase their size and keep branches from breaking.
• Sow seeds of nasturtiums, marigolds, portulaca, amaranthus, salvias, vinca (Catharanthus roseus), sunflowers, and zinnias.
• Attract beneficial insects to your garden: provide them with their chosen  foods and habitats. Umbelliferae family members such as anise, carrot, caraway, coriander, dill, fennel and parsley, with many tiny flowers arranged in tight umbels, and those in the Asteraceae (Compositae) family, such as black-eyed Susan, goldenrod, and strawflower, with a central disc flowers surrounded by many ray petals, attract many beneficials. Mustard flowers attract lacewings that control aphids and parasitic wasps that keep down cabbage caterpillars and coddling moths.