In short, time to clear the decks to start things for a fall garden.

Even here, in Zone 3 to 4 (on the USDA map, it shows us as 5b; I hedge my bets and call it a 3 to a 4 given the topography), I’ve got a good 10-12 weeks before I give up the ghost on gardening. And with some judicious use of row covers and hardy crops, I can extend things past October as well. There is nothing like eating veggies from your garden on Thanksgiving Day.

Small digression: I just found this neato Interactive zip code-based USDA zone map here: zip code USDA map

Back to the matter at hand: Fall garden. The trick with a fall garden is to remember what you were growing in the early spring and repeat. Hot weather items like tomatoes and peppers are not something you can start in July and get anything out of by October – between the temperatures falling and the amount of sunlight falling, you are basically out of luck. But in terms of things like greens or cabbage family veggies, you are very much good to go:
Lettuces of all sorts
Mache
Kale
Mustard
Chinese cabbages/bok choy/ etc.
Peas
Chard
Just make sure that the bed is well watered when you sow the seeds and that you keep it well watered until the seeds sprout. And choose items with low ‘days to harvest’ dates.

In addition, you can still take a stab right now with items that need nice warm soil and with a bit of luck will be bearing as the end of the season arrives, such as beans.

If you have herbs growing in the garden and the plants are just going nuts, now is a great time to take cuttings and pot them up to bring them into the house for a window sill garden for the fall. Items like rosemary are sort of woody but if you use the new growth at the top and water it well, it should root for you. Additionally, items such as basil or mints are from the same family as coleus, which you can even root in a glass of water. What I’ll do with the basil above is to take a good 2-3″ cutting, dust it with a bit of rooting hormone and stick in some sterile medium in a nice shady place. Once it’s rooted, I’ll repot them up to take into my sun room for the fall and winter.

So, if you have an area in your garden that is past its best, needs to be weeded and cleared out or frankly just looks tired, here’s the drill for a fall garden:

Weed the garden thoroughly.

Using a garden fork, spade it over completely.

If you can get your hands on some compost, cover the area with several inches and spade that in as well.

Water thoroughly. And by that, I mean water it so that if you dug a hole several inches deep, the soil would be moist there. This will take a good bit of watering, trust me; this is not a ‘stand there with a drink in one hand and the hose in the other and when the drink is done, you are done.” If you have an oscillating sprinkler, set it on low in the evening, and leave it going for several hours.

Set your seeds in rows as thickly as you can – you will transplant them once they are up and have the second set of leaves.

If you are having hot, dry weather, tent the area loosely with newspapers or row cover or an old sheer curtain or something like that – this will keep the moisture close to the soil and will help prevent the soil from drying out. If the soil dries out, you will not get very good germination, if you get any at all. Sowing seeds at this time of the year is a little bit dicey – you really need to keep watering on a regular basis every evening or two unless you are getting regular rains (which no one is getting right now, so just take the time to do it – sit on the porch and watch the hummingbirds at the flowers and enjoy).

Seeds: If you ran through all your seeds this spring already, get thee to the local home/garden center, feed store, farm store or whatever and look for seeds. If you don’t see the display, ask the manager if it’s been put away and if there are any seeds left. You should be able to get some of this year’s seeds. They might not be at their best – they’ve been sitting out on the display since February or March – but if you keep the bed watered well, you should get some germination.

At the same time – and do this before you forget – you’ll thank me in the spring – go online to your usual sources. Whether it’s Parks or Burpee or Pine Tree Garden Seeds or whoever it is you usually use, check the site and see if they still have seeds available and order a whole list of lettuces, kales, cabbage family plants, Chinese cabbages, etc. Anything they list for early spring or fall planting. Order that NOW – and when it arrives, put the whole shebang, closed up, in a ziplock™ bag or a closed jar in your fridge. Now you have seeds to start with in the early spring. You will feel gloriously superior for being prepared.

Also – check sources for garlic bulbs and onion plants for growing. If you want to start garlic this fall, you will want to order early enough to catch the harvest (which is starting NOW) to have your bulbs ready to take apart to plant after your first frost. If they also have onion plants for planting in the fall (usually bunching onions work for this), get some of these and get them started this fall too – then you will have two good early starts for next year and you will have scallions to use and eat early in the spring.

Actually, look at the picture above: I took that yesterday, Christmas Eve day in my garden here in Upstate New York. Those are brussels sprouts, frozen but still cookable and edible. On Dec. 24th!! So, if you get started with more garden stuff this week, you can, even in the coldest places (well, maybe not Alaska…) have something out in your garden that you can harvest a year from now and use to feed your family (ahem..disclaimer: you will have something out in your garden that you can harvest…except if the bunnies and deer get to it. RIP: the kale that was also standing in the snow last week, sniff).

For those who missed, here is a hint – you can still do this because fresh compost does not freeze. As a matter of fact, if you go visit your landfill/composting facility, you may find that the big black mountain standing there is sending off a plume of steam. Composting creates a whole lot of heat. So, if you want to do the deed NOW (and loosen up that waistband from the holiday cookies!!! You will get a two-fer out of it!!), follow the instructions in our last episode. You may have to break through the outer frozen crust to the warm compost underneath – think of it as a giant vat of crème brulee, ok? Tomorrow’s Garden:Today! Part 1

For everyone else, who were good little Munchkins and now can look out, smugly, at the side yard with the mounded rows of compost on top of cardboard, the rest of the lesson is for YOU, mes petites choux (which is French for “little cabbages,” which, by the way, is not a bad thing to grow).

Today’s lesson revolves around the issue of: What should you do now? It’s December. It’s cold. It’s thoroughly uninspiring out there. You’ve never done this before. What can you do now to move the process forward? Well, it means that you need to make some decisions about (cue the scary music) What You Are Going To Grow.

Check list for deciding:

1) What does your family like to eat in terms of veggies?
2) What other veggies are in the same family that they haven’t tried yet but that you’d like to try out.
3) Is this garden strictly for fresh eating or do you want to do some freezing, drying or canning too? Or is it strictly for stocking up?
4) Where do you live?

So, in terms of the check list and using the Chez Siberia family as the example:
1) Broccoli
2) Cabbage, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi and kale
3) Both – we blanch and freeze broccoli, leave the brussels sprouts and the kale out in the garden and the kohlrabi keeps in the bin in the fridge.
4) Ah – this is important. Read this if nothing else. The USDA produces a Climate Zone Map which, in a general sort of way, tells you what zone you are in depending on where you live.

USDA Zone Map

It tells you basically how many frost-free growing days you have. If I look at that map, it tells me that I’ve got a couple of weeks in May and all the way into October to grow – wow – that’s 136 days. That’s amazing.

Except…it’s not true. We can have funky weather even into June and we have had killer frosts as early as Sept. 17th. So, I usually knock one zone off it and figure that I’ve got 3 weeks in June for sure, July, August, and through the end of September (and I cross my fingers behind my back and am always prepared with some plastic or The Big Blue Tarp if the weather folks predict frost).

This number of days is a very important tool for you because no matter what you like, there are types of plants and seeds that take so long from planting the seed to producing mature, ripened fruit or tubers under the ground or whatever, that you won’t get anything if you just put out seed and wait. So you need to cheat.

Cheating in the garden means that for certain plants, you jump start them in the garden by either buying plants at your local greenhouse or you get seeds and start them under lights, on a warm window sill or go whole hog and get a warming pad, lights, etc. and produce all your own plants.

Now we need to be honest with ourselves (because at Aunt Toby’s, we are all about the self-reflection and honesty). I can tell you because I’ve been gardening for…well, we won’t go into that, but it’s a whole mess of years, trust me. I can tell you that raising your own plants for the garden is like getting a new puppy in the house – you’ve got to keep track of where they are all the time, clean up after them, train those babies and make sure all their needs are covered. If you do not, they will die, or they will be leggy (which is almost as bad) or some other issue. So, if you want, this first year, just throw in the towel right now and be prepared to go to a greenhouse and get the plants. Find a co-worker or friend who gardens and ask them, “Which is the best local greenhouse for garden veggie plants?” Not the cheapest place. Not the closest place. Not the place that has huge numbers of flats sitting out in the sun on hot asphalt (I’m talking to you guys, Big Box Stores), but the place that plants them at the right time, takes care of them, has knowledgeable people there that you can ask questions of, etc.

When you grow your own, the sky is the limit – you can grow those French tomatoes and Peruvian potatoes and all that. But even with a good local greenhouse, they are going to make some pretty strict decisions about what they are going to carry and sell. They will have a) plants that a lot of people ask for both by type (like tomato) and name (Big Boy, Early Girl, etc.), and b) plants that will have a high level of success in your area. So, starting with those your first year is a great way to start. Do that for 2-3 years and you will get a feel for how things work in your garden and you can start talking to other gardeners in your area as to what THEY grow, what works for them, etc.

On the other hand, if you want to know how to choose seeds, here are a couple of examples of tomatoes to give you an idea of how to make the choice:
Czech Bush……….70 days from transplant
Gold Medal………..90 days from transplant

“From transplant” means that you start the seed, grow it up into a little plant that is about 6” tall, all leafed out and stick it in the ground. 70 or 90 days from that moment is when you can first expect to get ripe tomatoes out of it. And you need the ground to be nice and warm also.

So, that means that if you plant it mid-way through May, the earliest you will be able to get tomatoes to eat is probably going to be the end of July – and that is if everything is perfect – so it will more likely be into August for Czech Bush and into September for Gold Medal. If you live in a place like southern PA, MD, VA etc., Gold Medal would work for you – north of those areas, I’d go with Czech Bush because you want to make sure you actually GET tomatoes.

There are other plants that a) don’t take a long time to go from seed to harvest and b) don’t require really warm soil – lettuces and some things from the cabbage family come to mind. There are others that you will still want to grow from seed because they don’t transplant well, but they still want “warm feet” – things like beans, squash, cucumbers, and corn. So, you can plan to plant your lettuce seeds, esp. if you plan to cover the bed with some sort of row cover or plastic or whatever, weeks before you can put in the beans, etc. and those tomato plants.

And finally, HOW do you find seeds? Well, you can go to your local garden center, but they usually don’t put their fresh (that is, the 2009 season) seed out until it’s close to gardening time for your area. And if you want to try your hand at starting tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc., you are going to need those seed long before that, so you need to go to the internet. Search on terms like: garden seeds, vegetable seeds for colder areas, vegetable seeds for contests (that is, if you want to try to grow the biggest pumpkin or whatever). There are regional seed companies all over the US and into Canada and you can find pretty much whatever you want. You can find seed houses that do nothing but tomatoes and peppers; short season seed houses; seed houses that concentrate on French veggies or Italian or Mexican or Asian. You can always search on “xxx seed” where “xxx” is the veggie of your choice. If nothing else, you can sign up to get “the gardener’s wish book” – seed catalogs. There is nothing like sitting there with the wind and the snow howling outside, looking at luscious photographs of vegetables and flowers. Gets millions of people through the winter, those things do.

So, your assignment is:
1) If you have not done the compost and cardboard bit, follow the instructions in the posting I linked to above and go for it.
2) If you are ready to think about seeds, go to the internet, search for some seed houses that will have what you are looking for in terms of veggies and have them send you their catalogs.
3) Go to the link for the Frost-free map and find out how long your growing season is, so that when those catalogs come in, you can start to plan.
4) Rummage around and find a couple of pieces of ¼” grid graph paper so that you’ll be ready for the next assignment, which will be “how to plan out your garden.”

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)

Well, bucky, today’s first lesson is for you.

Any one with a piece of paper, a pencil, a phone directory and access to a phone can do this. Or, access to teh internets (which you have already proven you have because you are reading this). For those of us who crave human interaction, pick up the phone directory and check the front or back colored pages for “your government”; they are usually categorized into federal, state, and local and under local, into county, township (or whatever sub-county thingy you live in), city and village.

Find the numbers for: Town Office and the County Landfill (or, if you can’t find that, just the county offices and start there with the lovely receptionist). Call those numbers and ask these questions:

Question 1: Do you have a composting facility? If the answer is yes, go to question 2.

Question 2: What are you composting there? If they give you a long list that includes “sludge from the sewage treatment plant” go to Question 2A.

Question 2A: Do you keep the yard waste separate from the sludge? If the answer to that is “yes,” it’s time to pop a cork on whatever drinkable you have. You are “home free.” Go to question 3.

Question 3: What are the days of operation and hours that I can get in?

Question 4: How much compost can I take away per trip?

Now, if the county/town has a web site with a page on their composting facility/landfill etc., you may be able to find the same info on that, but I’m all for getting to know my local government, so I like calling because…it IS your tax dollars at work.

OK…so you know you can get composted yard waste at either your township or your county landfill (or, in my case, BOTH, but I’m lucky that way) and you know you can go this Saturday and they will either let you have as much as you can haul away or whatever amount they will let you have. My township is on the “whatever you can haul” end; my county landfill is on the however many garbage cans you can fit in your personal vehicle end (to prevent the local landscapers from coming and taking dumptruck loads).

How much of this are you going to need? Well, how big a garden do you want? Here’s Aunt Toby’s first and most important rule of gardening: Never build a garden bigger than what you can take care of in one trip out. Ripping up huge amounts of lawn so that you can preserve a year’s worth of tomatoes sounds terrific and Laura Ingalls Wilder and all that…but I can guarantee you that you will end up with…weeds. Better to start small…very small, and add. So, what do you think you can handle?

One bed. 3 feet by 10 feet. That is a good size and you can actually grow a whole lot in that. You are going to need enough compost to cover that piece of territory by 6-8 inches. You may need to make more than one trip to the composting facility, but that is how deep you want it.

How do you do this? You are going to need big cardboard boxes. It doesn’t matter what kind of stuff has been delivered in them (though I would avoid detergent or chemicals of any sort). Driving down a street that has bars on it in the early morning is a good source (liquor boxes are good and thick); grocery stores are good – toilet paper boxes are huge and cover lots of territory, too. Bust out the bottoms and tops and flatten them out. You need enough flattened boxes to cover 3 feet wide by 10 feet long, two flattened boxes deep. You will also want to overlap the boxes as you go, so throw a couple extra boxes in there for good measure.

So, what are you going to do with cardboard boxes and compost? You are going to build a garden sandwich: cardboard on the bottom, compost on the top. No digging. No digging. No digging. Just find a place that gets a lot of sun near your house. Mark out a 3×10′ oblong, lay out the cardboard and empty the compost out of the garbage cans/bags/whatever-full-of-compost on top. Do this now – in October…you can even put it off until early November if you have to, but now is best, because….Homework: Done.

Your garden bed is now ready for the winter. From a “get started” standpoint for the spring growing season, you are done!! Now, didn’t that feel good.

Homework assignment: check out used book stores (brick and mortar or online) and find a copy of Crockett’s Victory Garden. Yes, there are more modern books; yes, it’s out of print. But, it’s got great color photos (I’m all about great color photos of veggies), it’s based on a calendar (so you know, oh, it’s January, so I should be doing this NOW, which helps the process NOT get away from you), and Jim Crockett built a garden in what was left of WGBH’s parking lot. If he can grow all that stuff on THAT, think what you can do in your yard???

(originally published at ,a href=”http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/952″>Oxdown Gazette)