Time to plant? Late Summer and Fall seedlings...
Is it time to be thinking of planting again??
It's mid-summer and the garden is in full swing! Tomatoes, peppers, herbs, eggplant and so much more - our counter tops of piled high with great produce and every day we have more and more.
We are pulling and stewing and freezing tomatoes every couple days
Our squash plants died out a couple weeks ago, maybe a month. They tend to grow fast and produce quickly - then the square beetles invade, the plants get too large, and some of the leaves get fungus. The squash beetles are the worst. They show up in June. So again, we plant early and harvest, then plant again (we did this 3 weeks ago) so we have a late summer crop. Around this time we also put in a couple more tomatoes and peppers. As the early plantings wind up their cycle and begin to grow top heavy the new ones are just kicking in - about a month from now. Using this method we tend to get tomatoes until late in the fall - as late as Thanksgiving one year (depends on when the first frost or two hit and how low the temps go).
Fall is also the season for greens, beets, carrots, mustard and all the cooler season veggies. Even though the summer crop is in full swing, now is the time to start planning for and gearing up for fall. Planting seeds to start seedlings to be transplanted, pulling some plants to make room and also feed the soil - the long summer and bounty of goods will have depleted the soil of much of it's nitrogen, minerals and all the stuff that make the plants grow.
100 Gardens will be hitting the NoDa Farmers Market the first weekend of August. They sold seedlings in the spring and will be selling seedlings for the fall (check the flyers below). If you plant early enough, even though is pretty hot still, you should get great stuff early to mid fall. If you wait until September, which we've often done - just can't bring outselves to pull still-producing plants from the summer - the frost may come too soon and your greens and other plantings will go dormant. This isn't to say they'll die, they won't, but they will grow very slowly or none at all during cold spells and the plants will produce next year when it warms up. If you want fall produce, plant in August!
