While summer rages on, now is the time that I put my mind towards planting for an autumn harvest. Due to my lack of decent gardening skills, I have a lot of space in my vegetable garden to plant late season crops. Here in the Pacific Northwest of the US, gardens can be harvested into the early days of November, if you know what to plant. After the autumnal equinox, plants grow very little, but certain veggies can sustain themselves until a hard frost.
This week we are two months from the autumnal equinox, which means up north here, that it's time to plant seeds like kale, swiss chard, lettuce, collard greens, and green onions. These vegetables mature in 60-70 days, grow under cool conditions and tolerate light to medium frosts. The cabbage family vegetables improve in flavor after a frost, even. In another 3 weeks (about August 10) it will be time to plant spinach, mustard greens and radish. These three have a shorter growing period (about 30-45 days) than the first set of veggies.
If you live further north (Canada and northern parts of Europe and Scandinavia), you may be best to plant only the second set of vegetables, if your first frost date falls in early September. If you live south of Oregon, and/or coastal, you may have 2 1/2 months or more of growing weather, plus harvest well past November. Adjust your late crop planting accordingly. And if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, lucky you, you're still in the garden dreaming stage. But it may be time to start some seedlings for your spring planting.
This week, I started seeds for swiss chard, leaf lettuce and kale. They are compact for my small garden and grow reliably well here. Swiss chard and kale also have the bonus of returning in early spring to give me fresh vegetables by late March.
I start my seeds indoors under a light, as seedlings tend to disappear to my abundance of slugs. I will plant mine out in the garden in 3-4 weeks. I also have been preparing the spots where they'll be transplanted -- pulling weeds, setting slug traps and pulling up any spent vegetables.
It only takes a few minutes to get new seeds started. But I'll be harvesting fresh vegetables for weeks as my reward.
