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

Quick look: Experiments in the Garden

I was just thinking about some new things we're trying this year and how I'd like to document it all. I'm just going to jump in.

- 3 sisters. We posted a quick look on this topic, but this is really a wider test of intercropping in general. One bed is specifically 3 sisters, but every bed I've planted is intercropped. I have radish and cucumbers together, peppers and bunching onions, tomatoes with herbs and greens, sunflowers with beans and peppers. This list goes on! In fact, I started some more greens and beans this week to fit in to open spaces as the beds fill out!

- Rain collection. I've never done this on the scale we are this year, but the most exciting test is how well a drip irrigation system runs on just gravity water. I figure a drip system preserves the most water, which is crucial when you only have 210 gallons of water to work with at any given time.

- chop and drop. I'm doing very little weeding this year. The few I am targeting are ones that are hard to remove once established. I was very excited for all the bitter dock that popped up. Little did I know the roots go down to the core of the planet! So, when I see dock, grass, or volunteer tomatoes and squash popping up in places that they'd cause physical issues, I pull them out. But ,I'm just dropping them around the base of the plants I want to keep to help mulch and feed them all season long.

- potatoes in pots. I don't like how when you plant potatoes in a spot, you will always have potatoes there until the end of time. So this year I'm seeing how well they'll do in planters. I like that I can move them around. Right now they're making a fun little hedgerow along the swing set!

- single stem tomatoes. Not only did I cram 7 plants into a 20 Sq ft box, I also want to try a head-to-head challenge between a single-stemmed opalka and a standard bushy opalka in a cage. 

- climbing cucumbers. I always have an issue with slugs on my cucumbers.  I planted my chompers delights at the base of my trellis to see if they'll fare better while suspended. 

- same year crop rotation. I have a crop of seedling bush beans started in trays waiting for my garlic to be ready. In a couple weeks I'll pull the garlic, drop the bean starts into their spot, and hopefully harvest those in time to plant garlic again. We'll see!

Quick look: Three Sisters Garden

I want to take a minute to talk about the three sisters garden. Not just mine, but in general. The three sisters are probably the most famous companion planting combination, in North America at least.  They consist of a tall variety of cobb corn, a climbing pole beans, and squash. They can vary between different varieties of each based on what you need, but these are the three main crops you will need.

Historically,  these three crops were very important to the indigenous people of North America.  All three crops could be dried to provide food all winter and they create a complete diet with carbs, proteins, and vitamins. But the way they interact with each other is what I was most interested in for my purposes.

The thing I find so interesting is that the plants utilize the space the others don't. The corn grows tall but isn't busy. The beans use the corn to climb so they can get more sun and airflow. The squash fills the space below along the ground. But that's not all!

If you haven't tried fried squash blossoms, you're missing out!

Corn has very shallow roots for such a tall plant, and can easily be knocked over by wind. The additional strength of the beans can help support them like guy-wires on a tower. The squash not only helps block weed growth, but also keeps the soil cool, which allows it to hold more moisture. 

 

As a bonus, I added a few cabbages to the outside of the crops, as well as some mache (also known as corn salad) which is a tender green that grows well under corn.