Now is the Time to Plant Cool Season Crops

 

  

Late August is the ideal time for planting greens and root crops. Warm days encourage good growth, while generally cooler nights bring out the flavor of your fall crops. There is a wide variety of vegetables you can grow now, including beets, kale, chard, radishes, spinach, and broccoli. Fall crops are available as starts or you can plant from seed. The warm soils of late summer will encourage seeds to germinate quickly. Planting vegetable starts will result in faster harvest times for crops such as Lettuce, Cabbage, Kale, Collards and Broccoli. For a succession of crops well into late fall, plant some starts and seeds next to each other. Cool season vegetable starts can be found in our Annuals House.   

 

If you choose to plant from seed, look at the days to maturity information or days to harvest on the package label. This is roughly the amount of time from planting seeds to picking your crops. The shorter the days to maturity, the faster you’re harvesting. Radishes for example, mature in about 25 days, so if you plant them now, you’ll be picking radishes in less than four weeks.    

For best success with your second season planting, begin by cleaning up any lingering weeds or vegetation at the planting site, then dig two inches of compost into the site. Earth Essentials Sheep, Peat and Compost is a good choice. It’s produced locally and it works to improve and replenish your soil. For an additional nutrient boost, incorporate earth worm castings into the planting site.  

Summer vegetable crops will have depleted most of the nutrition in your soil, so adding a low concentration granular organic fertilizer at this time will keep your cool weather crops going strong. Work the fertilizer into the soil after you've finished amending the planting site.   

Once you've amended the soil and added fertilizer, it's time to transplant your vegetable starts. The best time to transplant leafy greens is in the early morning or on a cloudy day. This will help reduce transplant shock. Water the area thoroughly, remove the starts from the cell packs and plant them in the ground at the same depth they were in the starter container.

If you're planting from seed, follow package directions for seed planting depth and spacing and make sure you take time to mark each row as you plant. Don't have room in the garden? Are your potted petunias and other flowering annuals starting to look tired? Replace them with some Asian greens such as Mizuna or Bok Choy. Asian greens add unusual shapes, textures, and spicy flavors to salads.

For a longer fall harvest, plant seeds or starts every two weeks and keep a frost cloth handy for those fall nights when cooler temperatures might threaten your crop. This will help extend your "greens" garden well into late fall. There's nothing like a dinner salad picked from your own garden.  It's fresh and you know exactly what's in it.