Planting For Fall

Even though the heat of summer is still at it's height, my thoughts have turned to autumn crops.  A few of my beds are done from their spring plantings, and even though I am plenty busy processing my summer harvests I needed to find a little time to clean these beds up and put in some crops for fall.

The first bed that I worked on was the garlic bed.  I hate giving the weeds a head start so I planted this bed as soon as I had pulled all the garlic from it.  I choose to plant cabbage, turnips and rutabagas in this bed.  The turnips were planted down the middle as I expect those to mature first.  I should be harvesting those just in time to give the cabbage and rutabagas time to fill in the gaps.  All three of those crops are frost tolerant so they should be fine growing at the cooler end of the season.

The second bed that I worked on was the bed that held the spinach and a variety of lettuces and radishes.  I had already collected seeds from the spinach and lettuce, so all that was left to do was to remove the overgrown plants and weed the bed thoroughly.  In their place I planted a round of fall peas and carrots.  I hope the peas have time to flower and mature before the weather gets too cold.  The carrots should be just fine under a layer of mulch this winter.  If they grow fast enough I may be harvesting them well into the colder months of the year.

The bed that contained my spring peas will be my next project.  There is a row of carrots hidden in this bed so I will have to be careful when I am cleaning out the old plants.  I have harvested some of the dried peas from the finished pea plants and used them to plant my fall bed.  When I get around to cleaning out the rest of the bed, I will finish gathering the dried peas to save for future plantings as well.  I plan on replacing the peas with spinach which will hopefully provide me with fresh greens this winter.

The last crop that I will be planting this fall will be my garlic.  Garlic does best when planted after the first frost, so I will be saving my largest cloves until then.  I am still deciding where I want this crop to grow next year, but chances are they will be going where the summer squash are growing currently.  Those plants will die back at the first frost and once I clean out the bed all I will need to do is plant the cloves into the soil and cover them with a fresh layer of mulch.