Stay on top of your harvest.

Harvesting Vegetables -- Keep up with the harvest from your vegetable garden. Be sure to pick small and often. Tiny filet green beans, for example, need picking daily. Corn is ready when the tassels start to turn brown and a kernel, when pierced with a thumbnail, runs barely milky.

Harvesting Vegetables

• Keep new plantings well-watered, but this time of year, pay attention to other parts of the landscape, too. Container plantings can need watering as often as twice a day in hot, windy weather. Bluegrass and other cool-season lawns need about an inch of water a week; buffalo and other drought-tolerant grasses need less.

Watering -- Water deeply and well rather than shallow and often. Educate yourself by taking a trowel after a watering or two and digging down a bit to see how deeply the water has penetrated. Also, when running the sprinkler, set out a pan so you can gauge just how much you're applying.

Watering

Drought Survival for Your Lawn -- Check out our lawn drought-survival tips.

Drought Survival for Your Lawn

Whack Your Weeds -- Time weeding for after a good watering. Weeds will come out easier and with more of the root.

Whack Your Weeds

Planting Trees and Shrubs -- You can continue to plant container-grown trees, shrubs, perennial herbs, and perennial flowers. But do so with caution. As the weather gets hotter, they're more likely to suffer heat stress and therefore perhaps die out. Improve your chances by planting on an overcast or drizzly day.

Planting Trees and Shrubs

Deadheading 101 -- Keep deadheading! For the most flowers and tidiest garden, deadhead daily. Some gardeners take a few minutes each morning, making it part of their daily routine.

Deadheading 101

Feeding Roses -- Continue to fertilize roses. In cold regions, Zones 5 and colder, keep fertilizing to a minimum. Studies have shown that keeping your roses a little "hungry" helps them overwinter better. A lean diet prevents too much lush green growth, which can get badly zapped in the winter.

Feeding Roses

• If weather is dry, keep an eye out for aphids and spider mites. Treat with insecticidal soap. Spider mites, which also thrive in dry weather, can be treated with pyrethrums, an extract from mums.
• Continue to pinch suckers off tomatoes. Suckers are miniature stems that grow out at a 45-degree angle right at the crotch of where the larger stem meets a main stalk. If not removed, suckers will grow to the size of a whole new plant, creating a tangle of stems that can be a mess to harvest.