Now is the best time to start your vegetable garden

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – One of the best parts of growing your own vegetables, is that it can save you a trip to the grocery store.

And now is the best time to get you summer plants in the dirt.

“Those are things like your tomatoes, your peppers, squash, cucumber. You can go ahead and get all your herbs in as well,” said Jeff Wallitsch of Wallitsch Gardens.

Once you've cleaned up, pulled your weeds, and loosened up the soil, it's time to plant.

“Tomatoes love airflow. So don’t plant these too close together when you're doing your vegetable garden,” Wallitsch said. “Cucumbers and squash -- those things are going to spread out a little bit more. There are also varieties that they’re called bush cucumbers, or bush squash to where they don’t have all those runners. They're really more like a big bush.”

You could also use a tomato cage to grow typical cucumbers and squash vertically if you don’t have a lot of room.

And don’t forget — you have to feed your plant, before you can eat your plant.

“We like to use Garden Tone. Which is like a slow release fertilizer. It lasts about a month. I'm a horrible fertilizer person so it's kind of like an insurance policy,” Wallitsch said. “Now if you're a good person and if you do fertilize, I like to use Montys. It's a local product. It's very easy to use. It's already in liquid form. You just add water.”

Once we get to the scorching hot summer days of July and August, don’t judge a book by its cover.

“Don't get discouraged if your plants don’t look good. They're producing food. They're not supposed to look pretty all the time. They're doing a lot of work. So just keep that in mind and then just do a little bit of maintenance during the week if you can,” Wallitsch said.

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