June 21-27: In the garden, it’s time to...

Celebrate the solstice. Because the sun is highest in the sky on this day, your shadow at noon is the shortest it will be all year. Once you have run outside to verify this, and said hello to all your fellow gardeners searching for their shadows, it will be officially summer — and you will have officially missed all your spring planting deadlines. Celebrate by putting in a new crop of flowers — plugs, cuttings, or seeds. I would say water faithfully, but being that we no longer can go more than two days without rain, water when you feel the urge, or when the ground looks dry.

Plant a second round of vegetable seeds. Succession planting means a second or even third crop of something you already planted two or three weeks ago can be on deck while the first crop is putting out an edible yield. This works great for beans, greens, beets, carrots, and other root veggies. If you missed the first planting or even the second entirely, there’s still time to get in a round of the aforementioned food crops.

Watch for lightning bugs. Although these have been a favorite my whole life, I learned stuff about them this week I never knew: Lightning bugs (or fireflies, depending on where you come from) are Lampyridae beetles, not flies, and eat mostly pollen and nectar. Their young, which also glow, eat soft-bodied insects, snails, slugs, and mites. Apparently only the males fly, and the females are the wingless characters on the ground, waiting for the right signal overhead before they flash their come-hither patterns. How they get the word out to the right petitioner, though, is still beyond me.

Sally McCabe is associate director of community education at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (phsonline.org) and winner of the AHS Great American Gardener Jane L. Taylor award.