Plant Now -- Relax Later!

by John Dromgoole

 

It is hard to believe that the fall garden is started in July when gardening couldn’t be more stressful and difficult, but it does.  Summer and winter squash, corn, eggplant, tomatoes, black-eyed peas, limas, okra and pumpkins (for The Day of the Dead) are just a few of the veggies for fall that should already be well underway.  If you are just starting your fall & winter garden, there are still plenty of wonderful vegetables and herbs to plant, but first let’s amend our soil.  Remove any of the summer weeds by pulling & hoeing them out.  Then, add about a one-inch layer of compost and turn it into the existing soil.  If you are preparing a garden for the first time, or you are looking to make your present garden much more productive, read John Jeavon’s book How to Grow More Vegetables.  This is probably the best book around for preparing a garden bed with the bio-intensive technique.  This technique will allow much more production of vegetables (and anything else you’ll want to grow) through soil building & double digging methods.

When adding soil amendments such as rock phosphate, green sand, bone meal, and others, it is difficult to know when to add them and how much to use.  A soil test can be your roadmap to the application rates if any of these amendments are needed. Slow- release organic fertilizer blends worked into the soil in advance of planting can help when no test is available.  Nitrogen is almost always low and organic matter is always beneficial.

The transition from summer to fall is a dramatic change from really hot and dry conditions to ideal cool and moist conditions.  With a little protection, most Texas gardeners can grow all winter long then glide into the early spring season.  This continuing harvest, for me, has the highest yields as veggies are maturing under less stressful conditions.  Winter protection for my garden includes the use of floating row cover.  This lightweight and rather inexpensive white fabric keeps bugs off of seedlings and frosts off of veggies.  It can be used to protect tomatoes, peppers and other warm season crops from the early frosts, then it can be used all winter long to protect leafy crops such as spinach and lettuce as well as head crops like broccoli, cauliflower, broccoflower.

Supporting the row cover or sheet plastic during really cold weather iseasily done with p.v.c. (1/2") pipe placed over the ends of 18" rebar that has been driven into the soil on each side of the bed.  This makes a hoop that can be spaced about every 3 feet along the garden bed.  This single structure has gotten us through many frosts and moderate freezes.  There are many ways to build a cold frame, but no matter what style you use, it will be a safe place to start seeds and hold transplants.  Cold frames can also be used to grow crops all winter long.

Late Fall is also the very best time of the year to plant trees, shrubs and perennials.  These plants will be able to set roots and establish themselves securely into the surrounding soil long before summer stress (drought and heat) comes back.  Summer after summer, I have seen so many damaged trees and shrubs as a result of spring planting.  Many spring-planted plants are just not established long enough or well rooted before summer sets in.  For at least 5 years now, sparse summer rains and record-breaking high temperatures have been the norm for four to five months of the year.

Nature is telling us to plant in the fall. We get winter rains, the cool air makes for little to no insect problems, and working with the soil is much more enjoyable.  You don’t really even need to mulch in the fall.  An exposed soil warms more easily than one that has mulch and the warmer soil has much more microbial activity, increasing the availability of nutrients to the newly established plants.

Outside of a highly productive vegetable garden, the perennials really show the benefit of being planted in the fall as well.  When you plant a 4" size perennial in the fall, by mid-spring it is usually as big as a 1-gallon size plant.  This means that a $2 plant will usually grow to be as big as a $6 plant in just a few months.  That same perennial will struggle to get any increased size at all when it is planted in mid- to late-spring. There is a better return for your money in the fall than any time of the year.  If saving money means anything to you, a fall planted garden is the best placement of your hard earned cash.

 

John Dromgoole is owner of The Natural Gardener in Austin. He is also host of Gardening Naturally on KLBJ radio and appears regularly on Central Texas Gardener on KLRU television.