What’s new in the garden?
Tuesday, September 22 is the first day of fall, but that’s not the end of gardening season. Here’s what you could be planting in your garden.
Fall is a great time to plant short-season leafy vegetables. Plant now and harvest before the first winter freeze.
Lettuce: We love our garden lettuce. You simply can’t get the same quality in the store as you can when it’s picked fresh from your garden. We have a lot of varieties we like to plant.
EZ Serve (Burpee) - head lettuce with leaves that take a simple rinse and are ready to eat; 65 days to maturity.
Red Sails (Park Seed) - leaf lettuce with red/maroon shading toward the top of the leaf; ready to harvest in 45 days.
Green Ice (Burpee) - leaf lettuce with clusters of large, ruffled leaves; ready to pick in 45 days.
Black Seeded Simpson (Burpee) - another leafy green lettuce; 45 days to maturity.
Spinach: This is terrific all the time, giving us a good dose of iron when eat it. Our favorite spinach is Palco from Park Seed. We always use seed tape when available for these tiny seed plants, and we use seed tape here. This spinach is dark green and delicious with a 38-day maturity cycle.
Kale: Blue Vates Organic (True Leaf Market) is a 15” kale variety that produces finely curled, blue-green leaves; 60 days to maturity. Make fun of kale all you want, but it holds a wealth of nutritional value. It’s rich in antioxidants, is an excellent source of vitamin C, and is one of the most nutrient-dense foods you can grow.
Winter over your root vegetables and you’ll get even more flavor.
We take one of our raised garden beds and plant it with root vegetables we won’t harvest until late winter or early spring. All you need to do is cover the bed with leaves or straw and let nature do the rest. It’s always fun to uncover vegetables as the snow is melting away.
Carrots: Romance (Park Seed) and Nantes Half Long (Burpee) — both varieties have green tops that grow thick, straight, and tall, making these carrots easy to harvest. The Nantes variety grows a bit longer than Romance, but both produce sweet carrots.
Beets: Our favorite beets are Detroit Dark Red from Burpee. These are 3” round beets at harvest and they have a deep, dark red interior that is extra sweet when wintered.
Turnips: Silky Sweet Hybrid turnips (Burpee) produce 2-1/2” to 3” round turnips. They are surprisingly sweet for a turnip and are delicious raw. Again, wintering them over makes them even sweeter.
What are you planting in your fall garden? We’d love to hear from you.
Visit our Garden Gallery to see how things are growing.
“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”—Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer
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Do you have gardening questions? Ask our experts in the comments section below. They’d love to share their knowledge with you!
