Fall Vegetable Garden

The Garden in Early October

1 October, 2019 by amygwh Leave a Comment

October is a usually a great month in my garden. By now, most (but not all) of my summer crops have been replaced by fall-and-winter crops, and I am looking forward to some new vegetables.

Summer crops still in the October garden

Dark purple peppers clustered on a leafy, green pepper plant, still productive in early October. — Purple ‘Oda’ peppers

Your garden may have a lot more summer vegetables still in production, but in my own small garden there are still plenty of peppers. I did pull up a couple of pepper plants, to make room for autumn greens, but the remaining plants are still producing MANY peppers.

The tomato plant that I put into the garden as a seed in the last week of June is covered in green tomatoes, and those should begin ripening soon. That variety is called ‘Winterkeeper’, and I chose it for the long shelf-life of the tomatoes more than for spectacular flavor.

Two green tomatoes on a tomato plant; the variety is 'Winterkeeper', known for the long shelf-life of its tomatoes in fall.

Also in the garden, still productive, is Swiss chard, which is looking better after I removed the caterpillars that had been eating the leaves. We are also still bringing in parsley, to add to salads and soups, and the green onions that have re-grown from top-set bulbs; these are also called winter onions, tree onions, and walking onions.

I didn’t plant the purslane and Jewels of Opar, but they reseed all over the garden, and those plants are providing leaves for us to eat, too.

In addition, my winter-time tea plans are coming along nicely, as the roselle keeps making the main ingredient, the red calyxes that cover the seed pods, for hibiscus-based teas.

Roselle seed pods (left) and the removed and dried red parts, the calyxes, that are used to make tea.

I can’t say that any of these late-season summer crops, other than the peppers, are providing wildly abundant amounts of food, but I do enjoy it all.

Fall and winter crops coming along

My notes tell me that I was supposed to plant most of my carrots, escaroles, and radicchios around the 16th and 23rd of August, but that they didn’t actually get planted until August 26th. Considering that they are only five weeks old, I think the plants look great.

I planted more of those on September 2nd and 3rd, along with beets, kale, and watermelon radishes. I started planting salad radishes – many kinds – in gaps between the emerging leafy-greens very soon afterward.

Young carrot plants growing in a rectangular patch. Only the lacy green tops are visible. — Carrot patch in late September

Lettuces, a couple of turnips (trying a new variety), and two tiny cabbage plants went into the garden on those early September days, too, and seeds for black Spanish and more watermelon radishes on September 6th.

The very last greens to go into the garden — just last week — have been spinach and cilantro, because those are so sensitive to heat.

I also planted another small patch of beets that will probably not reach mature size until early spring, since the seeds went into the garden so late.

If you want to plant fall crops now

In my area, north of Atlanta, the first frost date is usually around November 1st. This means that planting time for fall and winter crops is almost over for nearby gardens. However, there are some exceptions.

Onion family crops

These might not be considered fall crops, since most of them won’t be ready for harvest until next June. However, October is the time to plant garlic, shallots, and multiplying onions.

Fast-growing salad radishes

There is enough time for many kinds of salad radishes, most of which can reach harvest-size in about a month. If we get actual cool weather soon, the radishes may need an extra week or two to reach that harvest-size, but you should be able to harvest them this fall.

Very cold-hardy crops

Spinach is the most cold-hardy crop I grow. Some varieties can reach mature size in 45-to-50 days. This is a good crop to plant, if you are late getting the fall garden started.

Collard greens are another option for late-planted fall gardens. Also, some lettuce varieties, such as ‘Marvel of four seasons’, are fairly cold hardy and can reach mature size in the same time-frame as spinach. If all goes well, seeds of these planted now might reach eating-size by December.

Small plants, instead of seeds

Most local garden centers still have plants/transplants of fall vegetables on their shelves. Some of these plants may do well, and others may not.

I visited two local garden centers yesterday, and at one of them all the collard greens had bolted — the central stem was growing tall, and leaves were forming very high on the stem. These elongating plants will not produce well in a garden, even if we get a miracle of cool weather tomorrow.

At the same garden center, most of the cabbage, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts plants looked healthy, and so did the cauliflower. Some of those might be worth trying, but they may need protection if we get an extreme cold snap early in winter.

Thinking about our crazy-hot September, an early extreme cold snap seems unlikely, but we may be at a point in time when improbable weather is the most likely of all.

Zinnias in my garden. Hummingbirds are still visiting these.

Planting Crops for Fall and Winter Harvest

3 September, 2019 by amygwh

Over the past few weeks, I have been planting crops that can stand up to cold weather to harvest in fall and winter. So far, I’ve planted carrots (four kinds), beets, winter radishes, escarole, heading chicories, radicchio, kale, and cabbage.

Still to be planted: more escarole and other chicories, lettuces, more winter radishes and beets, a few turnips, cilantro, and many kinds of salad radishes. Arugula will go into containers to grow, so it won’t need space in my in-ground garden.

We start the fall crops in summer?

I know, it seems weird to plant our “cool season” crops in hot weather. However, planting in August and early September gives the crops their best chance to reach harvest-stage before December.

Fall Garden Planning book explains how to choose crops, create a schedule, and prepare the garden for fall planting. — This book explains what, how, and when to plant for the fall garden.

If your fall planting gets a late start (like now, or next week), that is not a disaster. It just means that some of your crops might not be ready for harvest until late winter or early spring. Also, some crops, like the more tender lettuces, might not survive into January.

Gardeners can adjust a bit for a late start by choosing varieties that mature more quickly than others. Most of my carrot varieties this year mature in about 70-75 days (“days to harvest” listed on the seed packets). I planted them all a couple of weeks ago.

Some varieties mature in less time. ‘Little finger’ carrots, for example, mature in about 55 days. If planted now, they could be harvested in about two months.

Rows of carrot seedlings in partly shaded garden — Carrot seedlings — each variety in its own row, to help me know which is which.

Protecting the seedlings

I am looking forward to cooking with the new escaroles and other chicories in this year’s garden. However, many hazards await our cool-season crops in late summer. One is the risk of drying out in the hot sun. My seedlings get water, from a watering can, almost every morning while they are small.

When they are larger, and I am confident that their roots reach deep enough that they are protected from the worst heat and from the quick-drying surface of the garden, the seedings will get less frequent watering.

Snails, slugs, and roly-polies

Even though the weather is dry, and the forecast is for more dry, snails and roly-polies are still present in my garden. Both of those pests are known seedling-eaters. To protect the emerging seedlings, I sprinkled a little iron phosphate bait (Sluggo – organic-approved – this one includes spinosad) on the seeded areas.

Accidental removal

Seedlings emerging in the garden within white paper circles — Escarole and other chicory family crops

The chicory family crops (escarole, heading chicories, radicchio) are planted within rings formed by the tops of paper cups.

I cut off the lower half of each cup, then pressed the top part into into the soil, about an inch down. The seeds are planted inside the cylinders, to remind me where they are. This keeps me from “weeding” them out of the garden by accident.

Moths, butterflies, and their hungry caterpillar babies

My cabbage family plants — the kale (not yet emerged) and two tiny cabbages — are under netting. I put the netting over the area immediately after planting, to protect these crops from cabbage moths and cabbage butterflies.

The bird netting over my support-structure has large enough holes (5/8 inch) that some insects, like ladybugs, can get through. The holes are small enough, though, that the cabbage moths and butterflies cannot get to my plants, which keeps them from laying eggs on them. No eggs, no caterpillars.

Fall planting continues

Assorted summer crops are still producing good food, which means they continue to take space in the garden. Planting for fall crops, for me at least, is a hodge-podge affair as a result.

Swiss chard planted in a curved line around the June-planted ‘Winterkeeper’ tomato.

The first patch of chicory family plants is in the space that held Southern peas earlier this summer. The carrots and some beets are in the spot that held zucchini. Winter radishes are in the spot vacated by an heirloom tomato. Kale and cabbages are in the space previously held by pole beans.

The space taken by the Swiss chard and the late-planted ‘winterkeeper’ tomato will not be available for planting until after the first freeze, unless horrible things happen to them (always possible) before then.

By the time a hard freeze arrives, though, some of my cool-season crops will already be coming into the kitchen.

How are your fall garden plantings coming along?

Why Did My Radishes Split?

30 December, 2018 by amygwh

There are two main reasons for my salad radishes to split apart. Both reasons, though, are related to my not paying enough attention to the crop.

Some background — I planted the first salad radishes, several kinds, in late September, but more seeds have gone into the ground since then. Until now, all the radishes have been whole, unsplit, but a few have been a bit spongy, which means some radishes definitely stayed in the ground too long.

Salad radishes harvested in late December from my Georgia garden.

Of the five radishes in the nearby picture, only one has split, but the split is huge. The texture and flavor of this radish, the fourth from the left, was fine, but the little veggie was hard to clean. Dirt really stuck tight to that white, inner part of the root.

Reason 1: Radishes left in the ground too long

One reason salad radishes split is that they have been left in the ground too long. University of Illinois Extension says this about harvesting radishes:

Pull radishes when they are of usable size (usually starting when roots are less than 1 inch in diameter) and relatively young. Radishes remain in edible condition for only a short time before they become pithy (spongy) and hot.
Radish, by University of Illinois Extension

Reason 2: Uneven watering

University of Illinois Extension adds this note: “A flush of moisture after a period of relative dryness also may cause mature roots to burst and split. Try to avoid uneven moisture availability.”

I haven’t done any watering this fall/winter. I haven’t needed to, because rain keeps falling and the soil never dries out. In the past week or so, though, the sky has dumped even more enormous quantities of water on north Georgia.

Radishes from my garden harvested on the 17th, just a week before that last batch, were not split. A couple of radishes harvested on the 26th were split. I am thinking that the massive rainfall contributed as much as age to the splitting.

How to have radishes that don’t split

Salad radishes from my north Georgia garden.

You can probably guess the logical solution to the split-radish problem: harvest early and put your garden in a less rainy location. That first part of the solution is reasonable, but it can be impossible to move your garden to a less-rainy location.

It is possible, though, to block some of that rainfall with a row cover. A non-woven row cover will let some rainfall through, but not all of it. If I had been thinking more about my radishes, I would have set up a cover for them, to prevent the excessive rainfall from soaking their planting bed.

My experience

My spring-planted radishes grow faster than my fall-planted radishes. In fall and winter, I think I have oodles of time to harvest those little roots. They stay crisp and sweet much longer in fall than in spring! However, the amount of time they can stay in the ground, even in fall/winter — and still be delicious — is limited.

There is one variety that hasn’t split, in any year, in my garden: ‘French Breakfast’. Maybe its longer, narrower shape protects it from splitting. This variety is a little spicier than some of the round types, but ‘French Breakfast’ is great on an open-face butter sandwich.

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Winter Harvests at Plant a Row for the Hungry

12 November, 2018 by amygwh

The local Plant a Row for the Hungry (PAR) gardeners plan to cut back on their whole-group meetings through much of the winter. That doesn’t mean the gardeners won’t still be providing garden-fresh produce to a local food pantry, but it does mean that they are using the reduced workload of the winter garden to take a break.

Instead of meeting as a whole group every week (the usual schedule), PAR gardeners are signing up in pairs to harvest and deliver greens and root-crops. If the garden seems to need more attention, larger-group workdays can be scheduled, but those will be less frequent. There is no need for watering or continuous weeding, and no more heavy work like spreading mulch, until spring comes back around.

Fall crops at Plant a Row for the Hungry Garden, well-grown and ready for harvest.

Last week’s workday was the last major workday for the season. While some gardeners harvested, weighed, and bagged greens for delivery, others pulled the last of the peppers and eggplants. A freeze was tentatively forecast for the weekend, with a bigger chance of freezing early this week. An early-week freeze looks less likely as the target-dates get closer, but it was good to move those plants out of the garden while there was a small crowd of gardeners to complete the task.

Even better, there was a basket-load of peppers to deliver to the food pantry, in addition to the greens.

Kale and garlic share a bed at the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden. Kale can be harvested all winter. Garlic will be harvested in summer.

In the next week or so, the irrigation system will be turned off. Turning the system off and draining it for the winter will protect the equipment from freeze damage. This is a more complicated task (than pulling up old crops, for example) to prepare the garden for cold weather, but it is important for the success of next spring’s garden.

Trio of gardeners harvesting lettuces and kale from the first planting bed.

Gardeners who are new to fall/winter gardening in the South may be unsure about how much to harvest each week from the garden. It may help to know the guidelines the PAR gardeners discussed, to guide their harvest of winter crops:

Closer view of one 'Red Russian' kale plant that has plenty of big leaves ready for harvest. — Closer view of one ‘Red Russian’ kale plant that has plenty of big leaves ready for harvest.

For leafy greens, harvest lowest/outer/larger leaves.
Harvest no more than 1/3 of the mass of any leafy greens plant each week.
Wait for warm-enough temperatures (above 32 degrees F, with no frost on the leaves) to harvest any/all of the crops/
For root crops (beets, daikon radishes, etc), pull the entire plant at harvest, including the leaves. Those are good food, too.
For the broccoli, some leaves can be harvested before the actual head of broccoli is ready to harvest — leaves of broccoli plants taste pretty much like broccoli; harvest sparingly, though, so plants have enough energy to make a good-sized head of broccoli.

Hope that other gardens are doing as well as the PAR garden!

Fall in the Garden, Continued

7 November, 2018 by amygwh

When I listed tasks for the fall garden in an earlier blog post, and again in the more recent one on fall tasks for herbs, I totally forgot to mention gathering and saving seeds. For many gardeners, this is such an automatic behavior — like breathing — that it is easy to forget to mention it, but I should have remembered.

A few last seedheads for 'Red Rubin' basil, set aside to dry for collecting the seeds. — A few last seedheads for ‘Red Rubin’ basil, set aside to dry for saving the seeds.

The last quarterly meeting for the year for Cobb Community Gardens was held near the end of October, and it featured a seed-swap. One person who could not attend sent an enormous bag stuffed full with seedheads from her purple coneflower patch.

If I hadn’t already saved seeds from my earliest-blooming ‘Red Rubin’ basil, the meeting should have been enough of a reminder.

If there are still unexploded seedheads in your garden, for plants you’d like to have more of next year (coneflowers, coreopsis, milkweed, basil, horehound, mints, etc.), gathering those seeds now, to dry for several days and then store airtight and in-the-fridge, is a good idea.

Basil seeds typically don’t shake out easily until the stalks are dry. Removing leaves from the stalks speeds up the drying, and any leaves still in good condition can be used in the kitchen.

If you have tree onions (aka: walking onions, winter onions, top onions) that have dropped bulblets to the ground, these can be separated and replanted, to grow more onions. Mine are from my stepdad, Bill, and he called them winter onions.

These plants make bulblets (or top sets), that look like tiny onions, on a stalk. You can see a cluster of sprouting bulblets in the photo collage below. Anyone who doesn’t have a free source of these (another gardener) might look into buying a few. They multiplied in my garden pretty quickly, from an original cluster of five bulblets.

One source of bulblets is Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which is a great resource for gardeners in the Southeast.

Elsewhere in my garden, I still have chicory roots to dig up. The roots have not grown as large as I had hoped, so I plan to harvest only half of the plants this year. This would leave the other half to continue growing next year, to make bigger roots for coffee-roasting. I may have to buy some extra chicory this year to stretch my supply.

Collection of photos showing state of the garden in fall: radishes, green onions, carrots, cilantro, and more.

Pictures in the photo-collage above are representative, but do not show all the good things growing in my garden. Kale and lettuces also are growing. There would have been beets and spinach, but critters ate those while they were still small.

The radishes you see up above are ‘French breakfast’ salad-type radishes. The winter radishes (not pictured) are bigger. We will be able to use a few in our family gathering that is coming up later this month.

How is your fall garden?

Preparing for the First Frost

23 October, 2018 by amygwh

The National Weather Service posted a frost advisory for my area (north Georgia) for last Sunday night. One bit of good news is that the frost did not appear. The other bit of good news is that I know how to prepare my garden for the first frost in fall.

Most of that preparation started many weeks ago, but there are always some last minute things to consider. This is what I did to get ready:

I harvested the largest peppers in response to prepare for the first frost.. — Pepper harvest before the projected frost.

The evening before the projected frost, I harvested the largest of the remaining peppers. The peppers are the last of my warm-season crops, along with a little basil still standing out there. The cucumbers are already gone from the garden.

That is pretty much all I did, because most plants in my garden are ready for colder weather. The cool-season crops will do just fine in the early freezes of autumn. Some flowers will look terrible after a frost, but that is the way it goes. Some perennials, including a few herbs (thyme, rosemary, for example), will keep green leaves through the winter, and others will die back — turning brown and crunchy — but grow back from their roots in spring. I don’t worry about any of these.

This is a more complete list of some steps I take most years to get ready for the first frost:

Garden checklist to prepare for the first frost

Harvest remaining warm-season crops that are mature enough to either finish ripening indoors or use “as is” in the kitchen.
Check soil moisture. If the soil is dry, water the garden. Roots in moist soil are better-protected from cold than roots in dry soil. (We have had enough rain recently that soil moisture is plentiful.)
If I had frost-tender plants that I wanted to protect (like a still-healthy tomato plant), to keep them growing another few weeks, I would cover them with row-covers or other fabric. Often, the first frost is followed by a stretch of warmer weather that allows warm-season crops to keep producing, if they survived.
If I hadn’t already done this, I would pinch off any flowers and flower-buds that were on my warm-season crops (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc), to encourage the plants to put their remaining energy into maturing their existing fruits.
Cool-season crops do not usually need protection (like row-covers) for the first frost, so I don’t cover these. An exception would be if the plants were late going into the garden and, as a result, still just seedlings. Another would be when the frost follows a stretch of very warm days (highs in the 70s, for example), which could leave the plants unprepared to withstand a sudden drop into freezing temperatures. In the South, this happens.

Carrots in the garden can withstand the first frost without being covered for protection. — Garden carrots do not need to be covered through the first frost in Autumn.

Where I live, north of Atlanta, the first frost usually shows up around the first of November, which is soon.

When the first freezes finally arrive, it will be time to remove the last of the summer crops. If you are taking a break from gardening this winter (some people who aren’t me do this), be sure to cover the soil with some kind of mulch. Mulch protects the soil, preventing erosion by rain/wind and helping to maintain its fertility.

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmons ripen near the time of the first frost in my yard.

Cucumber Bonanza Nearing its End

2 October, 2018 by amygwh

My late-planted home garden cucumbers have been coming into the kitchen for three weeks now. The fridge contains a small pile of them, and I harvested more today, but the cucumber bonanza is nearing its end. The older cucumber leaves have spots/lesions that look like downy mildew; the leaves that still are unspotted and beautifully green droop in the afternoon sun. The droop makes me think that the plants have another disease, in addition to the mildew.

Cucumber plants, wilted in the afternoon sun, but they look fine in the morning and evening, if you ignore the spotted/mildewed older leaves.

There is a bacterial wilt disease for cucumbers that is carried by cucumber beetles. I have checked the plants — leaves, stems, and flowers — very closely, and I have not seen these beetles. I have seen several bumblebees, some brown skipper-type butterflies, a few flea beetles, tiny snails, ants, a tiny native bee, a jumping spider, and one squash beetle on the plants, but those critters are not known to carry the bacterial wilt disease.

It is possible that cucumber beetles are very good at hiding. When I finally pull up the plants, I will check the stems for the white stringy goo that is a sign of bacterial wilt (as seen on the Missouri Botanical Garden page on bacterial wilt).

Cucumbers and peppers from small home garden, in October. — Today’s harvest of cucumbers and peppers.

Meanwhile, I have a small basketful of cucumbers in my kitchen. Some of them will be peeled before we eat them, because something else has scraped the outer part of the skins. If I had found cucumber beetles, I would have suspected that they caused the damage. Since I haven’t seen those beetles, and since squash beetle damage looks different (remember the semicircular troughs?), tiny snails are my current top suspects.

It is hard to say whether the cucumber part of my late-summer-garden-experiment is a bust. The harvest seems short (three+ weeks), but we have a lot of cucumbers. The zucchini part is definitely a bust. There is zero chance of getting zucchini from the sad plants in the half-barrel garden.

Of course, the pepper plants continue to grow and make peppers, unmarred by disease. Some stink bugs have found them and blemished the skins a bit, but the peppers are all still good enough. The late-planted basil will be big enough for pesto soon. Chicory is looking good, too, and so are the carrots and assorted radishes.

I will transplant the rest of my cool-season seedlings into the garden this week. Currently, they are in a flat, where I planted them in late August. The new crops are kale, spinach, beets, cilantro, and lettuce. Those will all provide food for our kitchen in the cooler months ahead.

Coffee Grounds for Gardens

9 September, 2018 by amygwh

The season of falling leaves is nearly upon us, which means it might also be the season for collecting used coffee grounds from nearby coffee shops. The grounds combine well with raked-up leaves in a compost pile to create compost for your next-year garden.

Used coffee grounds can also be mixed directly into the garden soil, as a soil amendment, but then the soil-microbes need a few weeks to start breaking those grounds down before anything is planted in the area.

An explanation is in the video below (video – for a change of pace!). If you can’t see the video on this webpage, you can find it here on YouTube.

The information from Oregon State University is linked here.

Hoping that all your gardens are growing well!

Many Kinds of Chicory

27 August, 2018 by amygwh

My family has been growing and eating chicory for years.

Some of the many kinds

The first variety I grew may have been ‘Italiko rosso’, a loose-leaf type with red leaf-veins running through its dark green leaves. Others have been ‘Pan di zucchero’, a less bitter variety that makes a head like Romaine lettuces, and ‘Catalogna’, an all-green loose-leaf type. Including chicory in our meals turns out to have been good practice for traveling in Italy, because at restaurants we visited, the cooked greens served with the second course of a meal often were chicory, not spinach.

Emptied seed packets for two kinds of chicory. — Bringing home seeds from Italy isn’t allowed, but these two packets were emptied prior to travel. The packets are 7.5 x 4.5 inches — huge!

Radicchio, a heading-plant that is usually red instead of green, is also a kind of chicory. Endive and escarole are other forms of chicory that are familiar in the U.S.

These are all good to think about right now because they are cool-season crops that we can plant in our fall gardens. In general, the loose-leaf forms mature in 45-55 days, and so do most of the radicchios. Those can be planted in my area (zone 7b, with a first frost around Nov. 1) in a couple of weeks.

The heading type ‘Pan di zucchero’ takes 80 or more days to mature — it should already be coming up in the gardens of anyone nearby who wanted to grow it. Gardeners south of Atlanta, with later frost dates, still have time to get that variety started.

All of the above chicories are grown for their leaves, which are a lot less bitter in fall/winter/spring than in summer.

Chicory in the kitchen

I haven’t served chicory as a pile of cooked greens, Italian-style, at home, even when they haven’t been bitter. I am not a huge fan of cooked greens. Instead, I usually add raw leaves to a salad or to soups or sauces, where they end up cooked.

If I were going to cook chicory as a “mess of greens”, I would drop them into boiling water, let cook for about half a minute, drain off the water, then finish cooking in fresh water, just like for any other potentially-bitter green (collards, mustards). When we cook greens this way (because Joe does like greens), much of the bitterness goes down the drain with the water that we pour off.

The chicory in my garden right now

This year, I planted seeds for ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, a variety that has a bigger, tastier root for making chicory coffee.

The seeds went into the garden a few weeks before we left town, but the seedlings were not big enough for me to mulch their patch before we left for the summer. When we got back, the patch was a weedy mess. Among the weeds, though, were some chicory plants.

I weeded as carefully as I could but ended up pulling some chicory plants with the weeds in spite of the care. A few days later, yard-bunnies found the patch and nibbled it nearly to the ground. Wild yard-bunnies can be hard on a garden.

Deciding what to do about wildlife damage is not easy. There are many options for “pest control”, most of which don’t work. In the end, I poked some sticks into the ground near each plant, thinking that the sticks would be an annoyance for the bunnies.

As the plants regrew, the bunnies returned. Last week, I added a lot more sticks to the bunny-blockade. The more-crowded assemblage of sticks looks strange, but it seems to be working.

If all else fails and the bunnies are undeterred, I may be able to find a patch of wild chicory to use in making coffee. The bright blue flowers are easy to spot. The hard part will be finding a patch in an unpolluted place (not by a road, for example), where I can get permission to harvest the roots.

Chicory flowers are the same here as in Italy. — Chicory flowers in Italy are the same as those that grow wild here. PHOTO/Amygwh

Planting Begins for My Fall Garden

23 August, 2018 by amygwh

The first seeds in the ground for my fall garden are two kinds of carrots and a winter radish. I also planted one last round of basil, so there will be more pesto in my freezer to use in wintertime meals.

First seeds planted for my fall garden, plus one last summer herb. PHOTO/Amygwh

This year’s carrots: ‘Bolero’ and ‘Short Stuff’

The two varieties, ‘Bolero’ and ‘Short Stuff’, are shorter carrots that will do well in the clay soil of my in-ground garden.

‘Short stuff’ is also recommended as a good choice for container plantings. The fully-mature carrots will be only about 4-inches long, but wide at the top.

‘Bolero’ will be longer, closer to 6-inches at harvest, but slender all the way down.

I amended the soil by adding a nearly-full bucket (5-gallon size) of yard compost to the garden bed before planting. This addition will loosen the soil and improve the odds that the carrots will grow as they should.

The seedlings have not yet come up, but when they do, they will get a dose of the kind of fish emulsion fertilizer that promotes root growth (higher phosphorus than nitrogen).

You may be wondering why I already planted seeds for carrots, in mid-August. The reason is that crops mature more slowly in fall than in spring. If I want to harvest carrots before mid-December, they need to be in the ground, in my garden, now. (For more details, read my book.)

The first winter radishes

‘Watermelon’ winter radish seeds also are in the garden. The current packet says they take 60 days to reach maturity, but older packets from other seed companies have claimed 70-days, which is closer to the speed they grew in my garden. I decided to use 70-days as my working number to determine the planting date, as a result.

Most of the winter radishes will only make good bulbs in fall, in the time of shortening day length. I don’t know why. Some plants are just like that.

That means, though, that this is a crop that can ONLY be had from a fall garden. If anyone in your family loves radishes (a rare thing, I know), plant these soon!

Heat sink surprise

Raised bed planted with beet seedlings and young onions, in mid-August, in Chicago. — Raised bed with beet seedlings and young onions, in mid-August, in Chicago. PHOTO/Amygwh

When I was in Chicago last week, I noticed that many vegetable gardens already contained plenty of cool-season seedlings. Considering how much further north Chicago is from here, it made sense that fall gardening would already be well-underway.

However, when I looked up its hardiness zone, I was surprised. Chicago is in plant hardiness zone 6a, according to the newer USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. The plant hardiness zone where I live, north of Atlanta, is 7b. That difference in hardiness zones, between Chicago and north-metro-Atlanta, is less than I expected.

Most of area around Chicago (all the northern half of Illinois) is in plant hardiness zone 5, according to the USDA map. That seems more reasonable than 6a. Chicago, which is a large city containing a lot of concrete, must be the same kind of heat-sink that Atlanta is (most of Atlanta is in zone 8a). That could account for part of the difference. Lake Michigan could account for the rest, since enormous bodies of water also help keep nearby air temperatures more moderate.

Update on the ‘Astia’ zucchini

Flower buds forming on young 'Astia' zucchini plant. — Flower bud on young ‘Astia’ zucchini plant, in the “v” between two stems (main stem and leaf petiole).

The ‘Astia’ zucchini that is growing in my half-barrel planter is still alive. There are no signs yet of leaf-mildew-diseases, which is good news. The other good news is that, even though the seedlings have only been up for a couple of weeks, I can see the buds of flowers forming on the plants.

These flower buds will keep growing, until the flower buds open. Some flowers will be “girls”, which are the ones that make the zucchini that we eat. Some flowers will be ‘boys’. After the boys have done their job of pollinating the girls, I plan to harvest those boy flowers to use in cooking.

While in Italy over the summer, Joe and I enjoyed fried squash blossoms at the Sax Wine Bar in Montepulciano. We are going to make those ourselves, since the good ladies at Sax Wine Bar are in Italy and we are not.

The Garden in Early October

Summer crops still in the October garden

Fall and winter crops coming along