Get Started: Fall Garden Planting

Everyone knows that you start seeds indoors in late winter, plant your garden in spring, and harvest in summer and fall. But that's not the whole picture. Sure, many plants take 110 days to mature, and others like indeterminate tomatoes will start producing in July and keep going until blight kills them. But what if you want tomatoes in October, cucumbers in November, or Kale in December? Well, with a lot of plants, you can start your seeds in the summer for a late season harvest! Let's take a look.

Many plants that are sold in the spring are very tough to grow in the summer. I don't know how many years I struggled with cilantro, spinach, and lettuce all bolting (flowering to make seeds, this causes the plant to stop growing big tasty leaves) as soon as I got them planted. You could prune the flowers but I swear you had to do it 5 times a day with cilantro.  Well little did I know that these, among other plants, are all cold weather crops. They don't like the heat, they think they're dying so they try to reproduce as quickly as they can. If you plant them early spring, or late summer, their main growth season is when it is cool out and you get a lot more of a harvest!

Other crops don't mind the heat, but because they are so quickly grown, you can practice succession planting, which is sowing seeds a few weeks apart for several months so that when you harvest one batch, another will be ready by the time you are done eating the first batch. Radishes are a great example of this! Some varieties can go from seed to table in just 25 days! For that reason alone, radishes are a great fall crop because you can keep planting successive batches right up until late September and still have a fresh batch by first heavy frost! Peas, Bok Choi, and salad greens fall into this category as well.

Some crops are cold hardy. My kale was still green and giving me harvests in January! And you know what? It tastes a lot better after the snow has flown too! It's a lot sweeter because it's storing sugars for the winter. You can plant kale in July and get good tender leaves from September through the first half of winter. Sometimes it will survive under the snow too and be one if your first crops in the spring! Other brassicas will be a good option for this as well such as kohlrabi and leafy cabbages. You can also do this with certain root crops like turnips, parsnip, potatoes, carrots, and sometimes beets (their tops don't like the frost). A lot of these root crops are actually bi-annual crops meaning year one, they put down their root system, they overwinter, and year two they grow their flower stalk to reproduce. This is what you need to do if you want to collect seeds anyway, so try it out!

Last but not least, fall tomatoes.  For this, you need some very specific things. It's kind of like back in the day when you were trying to work a glitch on a Pokémon game. There are some very specific steps here if you want a shot at getting October tomatoes. Step one. Familiarize yourself with "Determinate" varieties. These produce all of their fruit at once on a smaller, "bushier" plant. Next, find a variety that has a short maturity time. I like Ace 55 tomatoes as they have an 85 day harvest schedule. There are 70 day tomatoes out there! Lastly,  you may want to plant these in a pot so you can control sun and watering. What you're aiming for is a tomato plant that is young during the extreme temps of summer so it isn't stressed and susceptible to blight. Move it into shaded spaces during the most intense days, keep it evenly watered. What you should get is a plant that will produce all of its fruit at once in late fall for a rare treat: fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes for Halloween! (I do not condone growing these just for trick-or-treat tricks!)

Again, here's a list of some fall crops you can start now for back-to-school snacking;

Tomatoes 

Kale

Kohlrabi 

Bok Choi cabbage

Radishes

Cilantro

Lettuce

Spinach

Cucumbers

Green/bunching onions 

Turnips 

Parsnip 

Salsify

Basil

Dill

Bush beans

Peas