Planting an autumn vegetable garden

If you’re like most gardeners, you probably consider August to be the end of the growing season. The truth is, it’s a great time to start your fall garden.

A fall garden can produce excellent veggies and extend harvests long after your spring planted garden is done. The vegetables you pick from the fall garden are often sweeter and milder than those grown during the summer.

The type of veggies you plant in your fall garden will depend on the space you have and the types of veggies you like. Make sure you plant vegetables with the shortest growing season, this will increase the chances that they are fully grown and harvested before the frost begins. Starting seeds indoors the first week of July will also give you a good head start.

Most seed packs will be labeled “early season”, or you can find seeds labeled with the fewest days to harvest. Since seeds aren’t usually stored in late summer, you’ll likely need to purchase seeds for your fall garden in the spring. You can also easily find them online at Places Gurneys.com.

Even vegetables that love the heat of summer, such as tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and peppers, will produce well until they hit the hardest frosts, which can be quite late in some areas of the year.

There are some garden plants that normally stop producing towards the end of the summer. These include green beans, summer squash, and cucumbers. Even these, if planted in the middle of summer, can produce well until the first frosts arrive. Many hardy vegetables will grow in temperatures up to 20 degrees.

If you have rooted plants such as beets, carrots, or radishes whose tops have been killed by a freeze, you can save them by applying a heavy layer of mulch.

For fall gardening you need to know approximately when the first severe frost normally hits your particular area. The Farmer’s Almanac is a great resource for this type of information. It will give you specific dates and is accurate enough most of the time. You also need to know approximately how long your plants will take to mature. As I said, this is available by reading the individual seed packets.

To prepare the soil for your fall garden, the first thing you need to do is get rid of any remaining summer crops and weeds. If you leave leftover vines and plant debris from your summer crops, bacteria and disease can develop from these leftover remnants. If your spring plants weren’t heavily fertilized, you may want to sprinkle a few inches of compost over the next garden.

Once this is done, you will need to plow the soil and wet it. Now simply wait 24 hours and you are ready to plant.

Too often gardeners will avoid planting a fall garden, to avoid facing frosts. I can tell you from experience that robust and healthy vegetables can withstand a few freezing nights, while producing wonderfully tasty products.

Fall gardening isn’t for everyone, but why not give it a try? It can give you the opportunity to enjoy fresh vegetables from the garden for a little longer each year.