Planting a Fall Vegetable Garden
We love fall gardening! The heat is waning but the soil is still warm. There are just three steps to consider to planting a fall garden: when to plant, what to plant, and where to plant a fall garden. Let’s get started!
Why Plant a Fall Garden
Fall gardening is much less stressful for many crops—as well as shrubs, trees, and perennials. There are less weeds, less pests, and it’s often rainier so less need to water as often.
As soon as your spring and summer crops stop producing, pull them and make room for all those delicious fall crops! There are just three steps to consider.
1. When to Plant a Fall Garden
Timing is everything. To plan what to plant in your fall garden, See our Fall Planting Dates Calendar. We’ve calculated your frost dates, backed out vegetable maturity dates (found on your seed packet), some time for harvesting and other fall factors.
Or, you can consult the Frost Dates Calcultor to find the first fall frost date for your area. Where I live, it is around September 20 but often it is another month before we get a killing frost. There is a lot of glorious gardening weather between now and then.
Even though the days are beginning to shorten, the soil is warmer than it was in May so seeds sown now will germinate much faster.
2. Which Vegetables to Grow
Here’s a list of good vegetables to plant in late summer to keep the garden going through autumn! Pay attention to which veggies are frost-tolerant and which are tender.
As the weather cools, plant crops that are cold-tolerant and mature quickly. Salad greens are fast and hardy; leaf lettuces are ready to cut in 45 to 50 days. Looseleaf and butterhead leaves can be harvested at just about any time in their development. Sometime lettuce seeds have difficulty germinating in hot soil, so I start my new baby lettuces in flats that I can keep well-watered and shaded until the plants are large enough to transplant into the garden. Some varieties of lettuce such as ‘Winter Marvel’ and ‘New Red Fire’ are more cold-tolerant than others.
A quick crop of radishes will be ready for the salad bowl in 25 days.
Other root crops, like carrots and beets will take longer, but are worth the wait since they seem to get sweeter as the days get cooler.
Fall-planted spinach does much better than spring planted spinach since it is maturing during the cool weather it loves instead of struggling in the summer heat.
Swiss chard is another hardy green that reaches an edible size in 25 to 30 days. Given some extra protection when frost threatens, spinach and chard can last well into fall. If well-mulched, in many parts of the country spinach will winter over and give you an extra-early spring crop of the best spinach you’ve ever tasted!
Broccoli and kohlrabi mature well in cool weather and will not be bothered by the cabbage moth larvae as much as spring-planted cold crops are.
Kale is a winter staple. Try blue-green ‘Winterbor’ or pretty purple ‘Redbor’. They can be harvested long after other greens have been killed by cold weather.
Bush beans take about 6 to 8 weeks to reach a harvestible size. The only problem with these crops is that they will be killed by frost unless you plan to protect them. If you live in an area with a long growing season, this will not be a problem.
Snap peas and snow peas start to bear in 60 days and peas that mature in cold weather seem especially sweet and crisp. Pea vines can survive temperatures down to 25 degrees.
The real stars of the fall garden are the Asian greens. Quick maturing varieties can be harvested in 45 days. Tatsoi, pac choi, mizuna, and napa are all in the brassica family. They can weather a frost and will last through a hard freeze if given some protection.
Continues:
https://www.almanac.com/how-plant-fall-vegetable-garden
Good morning. Wonder if there is a fall veggie grey diggers don’t like...???
On a road trip, visiting relatives. Just watched a sunset from the deck of a cabin in the NC mountains. Coffee on the deck in the morning is supposed to be outstanding (view & coffee) so I will be checking it out. We will be visiting more relatives tomorrow, one more night at the cabin, & home Monday.
After oven-like temps last week, we have “mountain AC” here & it’s just wonderful :-)
It’s been another crazy weather week here in Central Missouri. Saturday started off clear and hot and ended up with another round of ugly storms blowing through. We got 1.5” of rain in less than an hour and more bad wind. Trees down, limbs everywhere, garden thrashed. More of the same last night after I hit the rack, and it’s raining again this morning.
Mrs. Augie cut the grass cut Saturday morning before the deluge hit and I got some good stuff done in the victory garden. Took the week whacker to the undesirables, tilled up a spot, seeded the 2nd planting of sweet corn, and set up a soaker hose on that.
Pulled another bucket full of carrots yesterday morning, along with a nice mess of blue lake pole beans. Supper last night was BLTs with fresh green beans and fresh sweet corn. It don’t get much better than that.
For the first time in I can’t remember when I’m having problems with early blight in my tomatoes. 12 of the 16 plants I started from seed in new ProMix mycorrhizae potting soil and I put weed cloth down when I set the plants out. The blight started on the home-grown black krim plants and spread to the rest from there. I’ve treated with copper spray and sulpha powder to no avail. I don’t think any of the plants are going to survive past the middle of September so I’m going to have to root some cuttings if I want late season tomatoes this year.
It’s time to get busy starting seeds for other fall crop plants so I need to start thinking about that real soon now.