The fall garden is a fresh start

We are getting ready for fall.  The greenhouse is filling up with seed trays for the fall garden.  Little sprouts of broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and kohlrabi are popping up.  It can be hard to germinate cool season crops in such warm weather, so after they are seeded that flats spend a couple of days in the walk-in to chill and break their natural dormancy.

Almost half of the beds we need for fall planting are shaped.  The rain hasn’t been enough to get the weeds to sprout, so we are irrigating the empty beds now.  Once we have a good flush of weeds we will cover the beds with black tarps for at least a week to kill the weeds.  This is just one method of a weed control strategy known as “stale bedding”.  The field plan has me planting carrots on August 1st, though it might be a little later if we haven’t finished with the stale bedding.  It’s definitely better to delay the crop for proper weed control.  Especially with carrots.

I am looking forward to fall.  And not just because of the weather.  The fall garden is a fresh start. To a large degree, the summer garden is decided.  There is still some planting to do and plenty of tending, but I lot of just living with it, for better or for worse.  It’s wild out there.  So many tomatoes is various stages of growth and decay.  Weed, pest and disease problems that grew into monsters the moment I looked away.  All the things that kept slipping to the bottom of the to-do list coming back to haunt me.  I wouldn’t mind a chance for a do-over, and planting the fall garden is just that.

Despite the widespread chaos in the field, there are still some good things on the way.  We’ve just started harvesting okra.  Butternut squash should be ready to harvest by the end of the month.  The melon patch is looking lovely.  It’s a little hard to tell what’s going on under all that foliage, but I’m expecting great things.  And there are still plenty of tomatoes to pick, even if I am picking them out of a weedy jungle.