Seeking tips for planting a fall garden

[alp]

Kale will definitely be OK, so will Mizuna, a very hardy salad leaves. If you grow something next to a slab which is facing south, you will be surprised at what you can grow ..

 

[marlingardener]

If you grow something next to a slab which is facing south, you will be surprised at what you can grow ..
Alp is exactly right! A brick wall, cement house foundation, any heat-retaining material makes a micro-climate for plants.
We had fresh herbs in upstate NY in December, snow on the ground, but the herbs were tucked up against the stone foundation of the house and were just fine. Not the delicate herbs, but rosemary, oregano, marjoram. I always took a few cuttings in late fall before frost, and had some herbs rooted and potted on our windowsill.

 

[alp]

In this programme called The Beechgrove Garden with Scotland as its target audience, a presenter called George would emphasise again and again that if you put a slab alternatively and plant lettuce or salad leaves right next to it, you will have a very good harvest for an extended period.. He also suggested adding ammonia ???? to replenish the nutrients. I had a lettuce which was standing up in freezing winter. An iris now showing up 3 buds.. (it's a brave one, has braved the snow!) and a rhubarb growing crazily in the summer next to a slab too.

 

[DirtMechanic]

This is all I came up with on a once around for zone 6, which I believe is your area. It is probably true the temps are warmer than they have been in previous years.

 

[Purrfluff]

Thank you all for the replies. I'm going to look into building a cold frame next year. The garden isn't up against any walls. It's several yards from the house. I'll look into the slab thing. I suppose I could try and make my own. I was thinking of taking a piece of plywood, painting it black, and then hammering it into the ground. Possibly something only a couple of inches tall but long enough for a row.

I probably mentioned this before but the garden has both raised beds and the native soil (i.e. the ground). The raised beds are filled with imported topsoil. Our regular in ground native soil is something called "jory" soil. It's this nasty, red clay which gets very compacted, heavy, and hard.

From that table it looks like most of the planting action starts in May. For direct sowing at least. The majority of what I will be doing is direct sowing into the garden.

I'm thinking I may get some oats and crimson clover and sow some of this in late February. They will probably only have a month or so to grow before I have to till them under to make room for veggies. Is putting in a cover crop for only a month (maybe two) even worth it? Assuming the seed will even germinate in February.

Just like roadrunner I got a packet of cat grass (oat) seeds in October and sowed them into one of the empty beds. I did get germination and have been pleasantly surprised to see that the seedlings are still alive.

The endive is finally giving out. Most of it has turned brown and died. It could be a fungal disease, actually. I took a string trimmer to it and a few other beaten down rows. I am hoping this will just kill the plants and let them rot into the soil. If that doesn't happen soon I will just dig and hoe them in.

The weather is flipping between cold and dry (below freezing at least at night) and warm and wet (sometimes up to forty something degrees). I don't know if this cycling is good or bad for the plants.

The corn salad looks perfectly healthy despite the cold and the rain. That stuff must be indestructible.

Next fall I think I am going to take a chance and try to plant cereal rye in unused portions of the ground as the winter cover crop. The hope would be that the roots of the cereal rye would punch into and fracture the clay soil. Because the roots of my plants usually can't penetrate into the clay at all. I have read that cereal rye can easily get out of control above ground.

Thoughts?

 

[Purrfluff]

Update on 2/5/2018:

We have had a strangely warm, dry spell this week. I took advantage of this to take a look at the garden and pull some weeds.

I am going to pay dearly for not thinning enough in the fall. The broccoli and brussels sprouts plants are much too close together. Not only does this screw up air circulation but the plants are competing for root space.

It could be my imagination but I could swear I am seeing some small signs of growth in the plants that are still alive. But this is still the depth of winter and a hard frost could come along and whack everything.

This has been a very wet winter with little frost. Overall this has probably been better for the plants. But the rain has taken its toll. The corn salad/mache, still looks perfect. The kale looks pretty good and the most of the brussels sprouts plants are still alive.

I am curious as to what will happen with these brussels sprouts plants. They didn't have enough time to actually produce sprouts in the fall. So what will happen in spring? Will they resume growth and give me an early crop of sprouts? Or will they go to seed instead?

I let the radishes get much too large and they are kind of inedible. They did create some weird, cool shapes though.

Now I have to figure out when to start tilling. I am tempted to till at the beginning of March. Most stuff will probably till under just fine (kale, spinach, etc.). Some of the stuff in the raised beds is iffy though. I have several medium sized kohlrabi plants that may continue to mature but they might not be worth keeping in the beds. I need the room for new spring plantings. I can probably put it off until April but before too long I need to decide whether to keep them or not.

I'm thinking of trying to sow peas in early March. It might be too soon nut I am eager to plant something. But jumping the gun might simply lead to a bunch of rotten seed or stunted plants.

I also need to figure out when to incorporate the compost, finished or not, into the raised beds. I would like to do it with the mini tiller/Mantis.

 

[roadrunner]

I planted broccoli for the first time this year as one of my winter crops; however, I just read something somewhere that says Floridians (or people in my Hardiness zone) should start Broccoli early in the growing season, i.e. around August time frame, because of their long growing time. I started mine in November, so not sure how they're going to handle the heat as it starts to warm up.

On the plus side, I don't garden so much for me, but rather for the pollinators -- I just like to see bees

EDIT/CORRECTION: Everywhere I wrote Broccoli should have been Brussels Sprouts.

I've been growing Broccoli for the last couple years, this is my first year growing Brussels Srpouts

 

[alp]

I harvest my early broccoli two days ago. They were pathetic - just tiny florets at the top and about 5 of them. But I will keep it as it will yield the same till probably next April!

 

[Purrfluff]

Do you think the the brussels sprouts plants that didn't mature enough to produce sprouts will start producing sprouts in the spring? Or will the plants just bolt?

 

[Purrfluff]

Update on 2/20/2018:

After a fairly balmy period a couple of weeks ago the weather has done an 180 degree turn. We got snow yesterday and it's supposed to get down to 26 degrees fahrenheit tonight. And stay pretty cold.

This may be the cold snap that finally kills most of the plants still in the garden. At this point it's only the carrots and brussels sprouts that I hope to get a spring harvest from so this isn't the end of the world. Still, it's slightly annoying for the plants to have survived this long just to get slaughtered by a cold snap this close to spring.

The bok choy finally bit it. I thought it was going to last all winter but I think the rain finally did it in. The broccoli is looking awfully ragged. Which I think is a result of being overcrowded and being under a tree that sometimes blocks sunlight.

With a couple of exceptions those plants which survive all look pretty ragged. Winter has slowly but surely taken its toll on my plants and they are reaching the end of their rope.

The two exceptions are the kale and the mache/corn salad. The kale looks pretty healthy though even it is starting to drop leaves in a few places. The corn salad, on the other hand, looks totally undamaged. This is the toughest non-weed plant I have ever seen. If humans ever colonize Mars we should bring this stuff with us for terraforming.

Another plant that has been doing well up until now is the napa cabbage. It was taking the cold and rain like a champ. Bur it's starting to have rotting leaves now as well. And to my surprise it is bolting. I always thought bolting was something that occurred in hot weather. But the napa cabbage and a couple of other leafy greens (I think it is beet greens) are bolting. I've cut the flower stalk in hopes that will stave off the bolting.

Admittedly I will be unhappy if the cold snap kills my plants. But there would be some utility in them winter killing and rotting into the soil as organic matter.

Officially, spring isn't that far away. But when I see the snow on the ground it seems impossible it on its way.

Even so, I've jotted down what seeds I want to order. I'll be getting most of my seed from Territorial Seed, here in Oregon. I may order some seed from Burpee as well. They have a good herb selection.

 

[alp]

Admittedly I will be unhappy if the cold snap kills my plants. But there would be some utility in them winter killing and rotting into the soil as organic matter.

If something dies, I will invariably weed it out. I must change my mentality!

 

[Purrfluff]

Update on 2/23/2018:

The cold snap, replete with snow, continues. This is pissing me off and I don't know what's going to survive this.

I was thinking of sowing some oats or buckwheat as a cover crop in very early March. And then till it under in April or early May. There are only a couple of raised beds that I can spare for this. Is it still worth doing?

Once the native soil dries out some I am going to take the roto tiller to everything and kill what remains. The only thing I really thought I might get a spring harvest from is the red cabbage. But the snow and cold are damaging the leaves and frankly I'm not sure whether a couple of heads of cabbage are worth holding off the tilling for.

 

[alp]

Damp and cold here too. Hold out perhaps. Plants will catch up very quickly. Or put a fleece over what you have got. You could use a thermostat to find out the temperature of the raised bed and then do it again with a fleece and gauge if it is worth your while. I think next week is the high cold time.. Worst is yet to come!

 

[Purrfluff]

Update on 3/12/2018:

It finally feels a bit like spring. The trees are starting to bud out with leaves. The grass is starting to grow again.

We just had a couple of nice, warm days in which I was able to get out into the garden and get some work done.

The works consisted of pretty much clearing out the raised beds. I yanked what was left over in them, put in some lime, bone meal, and osmocote (slow release fertilizer) and raked it in. The coming rain should, I hope, wash the lime and bone meal into the beds and activate the fertilizer. My aim is to have all the beds ready for planting within a month.

The nasty, clay ground is trickier. It will take forever to dry out and warm up. I think that is where most of my (rather lackluster) compost will go. One reason for this is that the raised beds are so full of soil that there isn't physically room to add compost in much quantity. I will attempt to add some anyways.

The good news is that most of the plants I sowed in the fall lived through the winter. This has been a pretty mild winter temperature wise so it's not that surprising. Even the cat grass oats I sowed lived and they are supposed to winter kill.

The bad news is that everything is bolting now. The crop I had really hoped would produce in spring were the brussels sprouts. That is almost certainly not going to happen. I'm seeing flower heads forming on all of them. I'm going to cut the flower heads and see if perhaps they produce sprouts but I doubt it. The plants are too small and too crowded anyway. Some of this my fault for not thinning adequately.

In fact all of the brassicas are bolting. The Chinese napa cabbage is not forming heads, it's sending up flower stalks. Same with the savoy and red cabbage.

I take from this behavior that you cannot expect a plant that overwinters to simply pick up from where it left off in fall. It's going to go to seed.

But new brussels sprouts will be sown in spring. New cabbage will be sown in July. I'll leave the brussels sprouts alone for a month and see if they show signs of fruiting.

One type of veggie that did exceptionally well this fall/winter was the turnip. I got a significant harvest of very large turnips. Yes, I let them get too big. The rutabagas didn't do quite as well but many of them also made it.

I planted two types of kale. I don't recall the variety names but one had curled leaves and the other flat leaves. The curled leaf variety did better and shows little sign of damage. The corn didn't have much time to grow but what did grow totally shrugged of the cold. I'm thinking of letting some of the corn salad go to seed so I can capture the seed for more fall planting. Has anyone else done this?

The beets also survived the winter but they suffered from a severe lack of thinning. While this is my fault I'm not going to beat myself up over it. Unlike the brassicas which tended to form one central stem the beets and carrots came up from seed with several stems per plant. What this means in practice is that I couldn't differentiate between one plant and another. Which meant I couldn't figure out how to thin them.

I hope to get around this in the spring with the carrots by using pelleted seed. I'll space the seeds I sow about 4 inches apart. Then I should be able to tell who is who and thin accordingly. The beets...I haven't figured out yet.

The kohlrabi just didn't have enough time to mature. The edible portion of the stem didn't swell up to harvestable size in 90% of the plants.

Once my seeds get here I will start a new thread for my first solo planted spring garden. I will, I am sure, need a great deal of advice from my betters.

 

[alp]

Chinese napa cabbage

I had a disastrous result last year. They all bolted. No round and stout body, but a stem sticking out. How disappointing. They are most delicious. I don't think I have any seeds left this year. I must say I placed them in a wrong area, not enough morning light, too much heat!

Do post your pics. Nice to have a graphic update!