Fall Gardening

It is the time of the year when I have to clear out the summer vegetables, and get to work on my fall and winter garden. I’ve actually been working on it for a while, but I have been remiss in posting about it.

A couple weeks ago, my brother and his family were in town from Germany and our oldest son and his fiancee came down that Friday with a boat that he borrowed from work. (He works at MasterCraft boats.) While they were here, they helped me get a scoop on planting mix so that I could fill the troughs back up to the top. In the fall and winter the rim of the trough can actually shade what’s growing there because the sun is so low in the horizon. They all needed about 6″ of landscape mix to bring them back up to the rim. Our son’s fiancee planted all the troughs with carrot seeds. Last year I only did 2 and we got about 8 lbs. of carrots. This year we’re doing all five, so maybe we’ll get close to 20 lbs? We did all different varieties, so it’ll be fun to see how they all do. By the way, troughs are great for carrots because they need deep soft soil with no rocks.

The hardest part about growing carrots is getting them to germinate. They need to be kept evenly moist to get them to start growing. The second hardest part about growing carrots is keeping the deer from eating the tops off of them. I had to come up with a solution for that. It’s not pretty, but I think it will work. I bought some little metal fencing meant to keep dogs from digging. I hung it from the plant supports facing down where that worked, and attached them to stakes upside down where that worked.

I pulled everything out of the left side of the garden on the south side of the house at the same time because we had more planting mix that we needed to put somewhere, so we slung it there. Once that was spread out, I sprinkled some general purpose fertilizer and planted the little kale plants and swiss chard plants that I had started. The kale had been chewed on pretty well by some bug and they were TINY, so I wasn’t sure if I would end up having to start over, but they have done surprisingly well.

I planted Lacinato kale and the leaves on this variety are absolutely HUGE, so it’s not a lot of plants, but I will have PLENTY of kale.

I planted Fordhook swiss chard. I planted a few more this morning, and I planted some seeds where I lost some plants.

In the past couple of years, I have grown bok choy and decided not to do that this year. It grows REALLY well, probably too well because we definitely had trouble eating it all, and I found that it doesn’t freeze well.

In our area, I can grow dill through the fall and into winter and I get a lot more greenery and no flowers, so it works well for cooking. I started some more that should carry me through the first really cold weather–20’s.

I didn’t use quite as much basil this year as years past, so I still have a lot. I plan to make some basil pesto in the next couple of weeks. I have friends who say mine is their favorite, so it’s great to use as gifts for them.

I love growing lettuces in the fall. This year I am trying radicchio. It is sprouting a lot better than the romaine that I am starting.

I pulled all the tomatoes, marigolds, and squash up yesterday to get this bed ready for lettuce. So far I have only hoed up the very front (really thoroughly because it was packed pretty hard) and raked it smooth for arugula which is one of our favorites. It’s so satisfying to grow because it’s ready to start picking in less than a month.

I know that it looks very shady in this bed, but it does get really good afternoon sun and when the oak tree loses its leaves, it is sunnier than it is right now.

I really enjoy fall gardening because you can kind of set it and forget it. Weeds are much less of a problem in the fall/winter than in the summer and you generally don’t have to water as much because of the cooler weather. If you’ve only been gardening in the summer, I would encourage to try fall/winter gardening if your area doesn’t get too cold. It’s amazing what kale can withstand, and lettuce too!

Our weather has finally started to moderate, and we have had some spectacular sunrises. So this picture has nothing to do with this post, but it’s pretty.