Best Practices for Fall Vegetable Gardening
Fall vegetable gardening can be a bit of a relief after the chaos of summer. Sometimes, after relishing in months of delicious, juicy tomatoes, colorful beans, and tall sweet corn, we just want to go back to our crisp lettuces, bitter greens, and heads of cabbage. Funny, as the seasons change, our cravings do too. Luckily, the cooling temperatures allow us to enjoy these crops one more time before winter fully sets in. While in some ways, fall gardening is very similar to growing in the spring, there are some key differences to keep in mind as you prepare for your autumn crops.
Cold Weather Crop Selection for Fall Gardening
The key to successful gardening in any season is crop selection, but this is especially true in fall. Some cool-weather crops can withstand heat as the temperatures warm up in spring, while others may be bred to withstand cooling temperatures better, making them more effective fall crops. This is usually a question of variety, rather than species, as most vegetable species that can be planted in spring can also be planted in fall.
Some species are hardier than others as a whole! Peas and lettuce, while being cool-weather crops, typically don’t withstand frost all that well. Kale and spinach, on the other hand, sometimes appear to live all winter long, actually getting sweeter after being touched by frost. There are steps you can take to extend your growing season or even overwinter certain crops. More on that later. Here are some popular cold-weather crops for fall gardening.
Carrots
Behold the delicious orange wand! Or any other number of colors. Carrots are a great cool-weather crop that is easy to grow—IF—you’ve got the right soil. Loose, loamy, well-draining soil will produce gorgeous long, tapered taproots, while clay soil can sometimes be difficult for the roots to push through. But, fear not, there are plenty of short, stocky varieties that fare far better in our tough mountain soil. For those with loamy soil (or if growing in raised beds), we recommend the Tendersweet or the Scarlet Nantes carrot. If you have clay soils like we do, try your hand at the tough but delicious Danvers 126 or Parisian.
Beets
Beets are underappreciated, in our opinion. A humble vegetable, the beet is high in fiber, antioxidants, potassium, and vitamins A and C. They shine on the dinner table in an endless number of dishes and are a well-known two-in-one, as folks love the leafy greens as well. They can grow just about anywhere, and you’ve got size and color options for this veggie too. When it comes to beets in autumn, you really can’t go wrong. However, we love the Early Wonder for a quickly maturing beet as the growing season comes to a close, or the Lutz Green Leaf, which keeps particularly well through the winter.
Greens
Some of our favorite cool-weather greens include Arugula, Bok Choy, Mustard Greens, and Mizuna. Arugula, which is well known to bolt quickly in the spring, does great in the fall as the temperatures slowly reach its preferred climate. We especially love Wild Arugula, a perennial that is particularly cold-hardy. Mustard greens, another spicy favorite, are well-known for being cold-hardy. We recommend the Feaster Family Mustard Greens for fall planting, as they really shine this time of year.
Broccoli
Even your kids will love home-grown broccoli—when it’s covered in cheese! This infamous and, of course, delicious vegetable is a member of the cabbage family, but unlike cabbage, it’s grown for its flower heads and stalks, which are packed with vitamins C and K. We especially love Green Sprouting Calabrese and Waltham 29 for a fall harvest, as they are both very cold-hardy.
Lettuce
Nothing beats crisp, cool lettuce in your salad bowl! Unless it comes straight from the garden. Whether you’re looking for a crunchy, buttery, bright green flavor or a crisp, bitter red leaf, you could be growing lettuce in your garden! Lettuce, in general, is not particularly frost-tolerant (or heat-tolerant, for that matter), but we love New Red Fire and Tango for how long they last into the fall. Extend your lettuce season with a cold frame or row cover!
Cauliflower
Another one of our beloved heading Brassicas! We like a self-blanching cauliflower (the leaves wrap themselves, keeping the head nice and white), and this Snowball variety performs particularly well in the fall while the leaves curl inward in the cold.
Collards
You don’t have to live in the South to love collards! These greens are notoriously tolerant of a wide range of conditions, including hot, cold, and less-than-ideal soil types. They tend to have a cabbage-like flavor and stay fairly tender even with large leaves. We recommend Champion and Morris Heading Collards, which both get sweeter when touched by frost.
Swiss Chard
Swiss chard is related to beets—grow the plant but just get the delicious aerial parts! This is a very reliable crop in many temperatures and soil conditions, and it’s beautiful to boot! Try the Fordhook Giant or the Rainbow Blend.
Peas
Peas are quick-growing legumes that are an easy and delicious part of any garden! All peas will benefit from being trellised but do not need anything super intense to grow and climb. Choose from snap peas, shelling peas, or snow peas—or grow all three! We love the Mammoth Melting Sugar snow pea for its early and high yields, and the Oregon Sugar Pod II for its disease resistance in the fall.
Spinach
Boy, do we love spinach. These delicious, nutritious, and easy-to-grow greens seem to last all winter long, as they’re very cold-hardy. Winter Giant will blow your mind with its huge leaves and frost tolerance. Grow the Bloomsdale Long Standing as well for its heavy yields of crinkled leaves.
Cabbage
Cabbages are vegetables with their own season extension—the tightly wrapped leaves keep heads warm and help protect from frost! Certain cabbage varieties store really well too, meaning you can have cabbages all winter long—even if they don’t overwinter in the garden! We love the Perfection Savoy cabbage for its frost tolerance—down to 15 degrees Fahrenheit. The Red Acre cabbage, if you’re looking for a different color, matures early and is ideal for growers with limited space, which, in fall, is a gift.
Kale
Kale matures quickly, is easy to grow, and gets more delicious when touched by frost! What’s not to love? The Dwarf Siberian kale is extremely frost-tolerant, and you can harvest from these plants almost year-round. Red Ursa kale has similar frost tolerance to Dwarf Siberian but with the beautiful veins of Red Russian kale.
Herbs
You don’t have to go all winter with unseasoned food! Some of our favorite herbs are cool-weather crops and grow beautifully in spring and fall. They’re not the most frost-tolerant plants out there, so extend their season with a row cover or a cold frame.
Parsley
We might be done making pickles for the year, but we’re not done with dill! This herb can easily become a weed in your garden, and we like it that way. It’s beautiful, attracts pollinators, and smells delicious! If you don’t grow it for the aromatic greens, grow it for the abundant seed heads.
Dill
We might be done making pickles for the year but we’re not done with dill! This herb can easily become a weed in your garden and we like it that way. It’s beautiful, attracts pollinators, and smells delicious! If you don’t grow it for the aromatic greens, grow it for the abundant seed heads.
Cilantro
If you’re a cilantro lover—what won’t you put cilantro on? This herb is great in the spring or fall, but when grown at the end of the season, it can be slower to bolt, resulting in a longer harvest.
Preparing Your Garden for Fall: Soil and Structure
After a long season of growing all summer, our soils can get a little tired. One of the best things you can do as an organic home gardener is to focus on your soil health annually. Fall is a great time to do that, as winter can serve up some less-than-ideal soil situations.
Because very little is growing in the winter, rain, snow, and other weather events can cause the leaching of nutrients and even erosion of your soils. This, of course, does not set you up very effectively to start the season strong come spring. There are some steps you can take to preserve your soil structure throughout the winter.
Mulch
Using a natural mulch on overwintering crops does a few things for you and your garden. Mulch, like chopped leaves or straw, helps keep temperatures up in the soil, which can help protect certain frost-tolerant plants from the extreme cold. Further, this organic matter begins to break down, which generates heat and also adds nutrients to your soils. You’ll get the greatest benefit from this the following season when temperatures heat up and microbial organisms spring back to life. But even as it sits there all winter long, it can serve its purpose by holding the soil in place, while bare soil is just washed away by weather.
Cover Crops
Cover crops are another great tool for protecting and feeding your soils throughout the winter. Any cover crop planted in fall will be beneficial to your soils in some way. Cover crops that will winterkill, or in other words, will not live through the winter and are killed back by frost, will lay on top of your soil, holding it in place similar to mulch. Cover crops that will not winterkill will live through the winter. These cover crops have strong and lively roots that hold soil in place throughout the winter—even more so than mulch alone would. All cover crops, if turned into the soil once killed back, will add nutrients and organic matter into your soil as they decompose. Learn more about cover crops and how to use them in your garden.
Amendment Incorporation and Soil Health
A long season of growing heavy-feeding vegetables can result in soil nutrient depletion. As the gardener, it is your job to give back to the soil. This can be in the form of cover crops, compost, organic matter, and even soil amendments. Incorporating amendments into your soils in the fall can help prepare them for spring planting. While many water-soluble fertilizers can be applied at planting time, you can also apply fertilizers in the fall that will be available for plant uptake by spring.
A great example of this is lime. When applied in the garden, lime raises the pH of your soils. This results in more alkaline soil, which you may need if your soils are particularly acidic. Acid soils grow beautiful blueberries and hydrangeas but are not ideal for most vegetables. However, lime is not a quick fix. It is often recommended to apply lime to soils in the fall so that by spring, it will have started to work its magic on your soil pH. Whereas if it’s applied at planting time, it’ll have no benefit.
Fall is also a great time to add compost, manure, or worm castings to your soil. At the end of summer, the soil tends to be easier to work with than in early spring. Mixing compost into your soil in the fall means it’s ready to grow come spring! This can also aerate the soil, which may make it easier to plant into in the spring.
Managing Fall Pests and Diseases
The one thing about fall gardening that proves the biggest challenge for every grower is pest and, in some cases, disease pressure. Pests carry over from summer and can pose a challenge to developing plants. With a little proactive planning, however, you can definitely mitigate most of the damage.
Row Cover
Row cover is a great friend in summer and fall! While row cover can be used as a season extension tool as well (more on that later), 0.5 ounces per square yard (often how this fabric is measured) or less is what you’ll want for pest prevention. Anything heavier starts to trap heat, and we get into season extension territory.
Row cover literally blocks pests from landing on your plants entirely. When used with fruiting crops, you have to remove the row cover as the plants start to flower so that they can get pollinated. But with non-flowering leafy greens and brassicas, your crop can live safely under row cover all autumn long! Make sure the fabric is pinned securely to the ground to ensure that no pests find their way underneath it.
Hand Picking
Hand-picking is the organic home gardener’s best friend—or worst fear. But we really mean it when we say, on a small scale, this really works. Walking through your garden and keeping an eye on things will ensure you know when an infestation is starting to become a problem. Stop it in its tracks by hand-picking the pests off your crops and dropping them in a cup of soapy water.
Garden Clean Up
Garden hygiene is the number one way to avoid the spreading of diseases in your garden. Towards the end of summer, when things get a little crazy, be sure to remove past-due plants from your garden and put them in the compost. Remove any plants or limbs that have succumbed to powdery mildew, blight, or any other unsightly plant disease. This will ensure that your young fall crops don’t immediately fall prey.
Watering
Sufficiently watered plants, especially while it’s still hot in early fall, are less stressed plants. Plants that are not stressed by their environment withstand pest and disease pressure much better than plants that are underwatered or underfed.
Crop Rotation
Crop rotation is a systematic approach to crop planning that takes into account what the garden needs, pest pressure, and soil health. There isn’t one main way to do it, but there are guidelines you can follow if you’re just learning about it! When you plant the same kind of crop in the same bed over and over, year after year, the soil is quickly depleted of the nutrients that crop needs. Future iterations of garlic, corn, or tomatoes in the same bed will not perform as well because last year’s tomatoes already took what they needed. Beyond that, crop rotation can also help with pest prevention. By planting crops in the same place every year, the pests know where to come back and find them (and sometimes lay their eggs right at the base of those plants, ensuring infestations for future iterations of that crop). If you move your plants around, you help the soil, and you mitigate pest pressure—even if just for a little while.
Maximizing Fall Harvests: Succession Planting and Timing
Succession planting is a great way to maximize your harvest in both summer and fall. The benefit of succession planting in fall is that some of your last successions can even be overwintered, ensuring a harvest in early spring that not even the most timely of gardeners would otherwise have.
Succession planting is especially great for crops that really only produce once. This includes root vegetables like carrots, radishes, beets, and turnips, as well as heading brassicas like cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflower. While you can succession plant just about anything, these crops will ensure you’ve got harvests into the winter. You’ll just want to make sure that later successions are frost-hardy or that you have the season extension tools you need.
For quickly maturing crops, between 20 and 60 days, stagger your plantings by about two to three weeks. For longer-maturing crops, you can stagger them more like three or four weeks apart. You’ll want to seed your last succession of long-season crops like cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower no later than the first week of August in zone 7. Your timing will vary in other zones. Due to the shortening hours of sunlight, your plants may take longer to mature.
Protecting Your Garden from Temperature Fluctuations: Season Extension
What fall will be like is anyone’s guess. Sometimes it’s 70 degrees through early October, and other times we get that autumn chill as soon as Labor Day weekend is over. Whatever your fall looks like, you’ll want to take steps to navigate the temperature fluctuations that come with fall gardening. One advantage of fall is that your soils are already warm, which can help protect your crops. In spring, we often have to wait for the soils to heat up before we can plant certain things. In fall, the soil is warmed by the summer sun and holds onto this heat even as the air temperature drops. This is what we refer to as thermal mass, and managing thermal mass can be a major part of fall gardening.
Thermal Mass Management
There are key points to keep in mind when thinking about how to care for your fall garden. Soils are excellent at holding onto heat, and depending on how your garden is designed, some sections may retain heat better than others. The parts of your garden that have been exposed to full sun and are southern-facing all season long will have the most thermal mass. Any areas of your garden that are north-facing or shaded for part of the day will retain less heat. While raised beds tend to be the first soils to heat up in the spring, they are also the first to lose heat in the fall. Crops planted in raised beds may, in some cases, require more mulch to survive the winter. The same goes for pots and containers, as the roots of the plants have more exposure to the elements being above ground level. Consider the hardiness of your crops when you decide where in your garden to plant them. Spinach, in many cases, can survive a cold winter in a raised bed, while lettuce may benefit from warmer soils and even some other season extension tools.
Tools for Season Extension
Season extension goes both ways. These tools help you start early in the spring, extend the life of cool-weather crops into the summer, and grow your fall crops into the winter as well.
Shade Cloth
Cold frames, on the other hand, are used to retain heat when temperatures cool down. They’re often built fairly cheaply and placed over crops or garden beds to create a greenhouse effect. Many cold frames have a top that opens up for ventilation during the heat of the day.
Cold Frames
Cold frames, on the other hand, are for holding onto heat when temperatures cool down. They’re often built fairly cheaply and are placed over crops or garden beds to create a greenhouse effect. Many cold frames have a top that opens up for ventilation during the heat of the day.
Row Cover
There’s row cover for pests and row cover for heat. Heavier weights of row cover (1 ounce/square yard or heavier) trap heat while still allowing light through. The heavier the fabric, the less light gets through, so you may consider removing the row cover during the day.
Yielding A Bountiful Fall Garden
Keeping these simple tips in mind, you can grow a beautiful fall garden and continue to harvest veggies as the weather cools down. Nothing beats a winter stew with delicious garden carrots, right? Here’s a quick summary:
- When selecting crops for your fall garden, choose varieties that withstand frost well and, where possible, are good storage crops too.
- Soil health is key to successful gardening, especially in the fall! Take time to incorporate soil care into your schedule by mulching, cover cropping, and/or adding plenty of compost and organic matter.
- Fall gardening involves staying on top of garden hygiene and pest management. Clear out diseased or dying summer crops and handpick pests to ensure your fall garden matures healthily, giving you a bountiful harvest.
- When planning your crops, consider the thermal mass layout of your garden and use season extension tools where necessary.
Ready to get growing this fall? Put these fall vegetable gardening tips to work and browse Sow True Seed’s selection of heirloom and organic varieties for your fall garden.
|
Article Written by: Hannah Gibbons |
|
About the Author: Hannah Gibbons, an employee at Sow True Seed since 2020, has nearly a decade of experience in the agricultural industry. Their passion for environmental education and regenerative agriculture has been the cornerstone of their work, aimed at making gardening accessible to all. |