Planning the Fall Garden

With one or two garden beds, or even a large multi-bed garden, a little bit of planning can lead to bountiful harvests of veggies you prefer to eat. This is a guide to help gardeners decide what to grow and how much of it to grow.

Planning

1. Make a list of the fall veggies you prefer to eat. The choices are many: Kale, mustards, Brussels sprouts, collards, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, radish, turnips, kohlrabi, rutabaga, arugula, beets, Swiss chard, spinach, carrots, cutting celery, parsnips, cilantro, dill, parsley, fennel, onions, leeks, garlic, sugar peas, snow peas, lettuce, endive, chervil, chicory, chives, cress, French sorrel, and more.
2. Choose the ones you like to eat and the ones that will give the most production using the least amount of space in the garden. For instance:
   1. Kale – An adult kale plant takes up about 12 to 16 square inches in the bed. You can harvest the outside leaves, and new leaves will grow for seven months.
   2. Cauliflower – One cauliflower plant will take up almost twice the space of a kale plant and produce only one head. Even though you can also eat the leaves, compared to kale, the production is minuscule.
   3. Radish – One radish takes up only 1 square inch of garden space and is ready in 30 days. Something else can then be planted, or more radishes. This is a very productive crop.
   4. Mustards, collards, parsley, sugar peas, Swiss chard, lettuce, and endive are like kale in that they can be picked for many months.
   5. Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kohlrabi, rutabaga, beets, carrots, parsnips, onions, leeks, garlic are like cauliflower in that there is a long wait until harvest, and there is only one fruit harvest. These are not nearly as productive as those plants that can be harvested regularly over a long period of time.
   6. Turnips are like radishes in that they grow to maturity quickly and then something else or more turnips can be planted in that space. These are less productive than the kale type plants and more productive than the one-fruit harvest plants.
3. Once you know what you want to plant, figure out how much garden space you will allow for each crop, and decide where in the bed(s) to plant each.
   1. Try to avoid planting a member of a vegetable family in the same space that it was planted last year or the year before. The reason is that diseases and pests are mainly unique to families of vegetables, and those bad-boys will be waiting for the same family that was planted before.  For instance, don’t plant kale where broccoli or cabbage was planted before. They are in the same family.
   2. Rotating planting of families may be difficult if there is only one garden bed, therefore it’s important to keep the soil healthy by
      1. Adding compost
      2. Getting rid of diseased leaves and plants immediately upon seeing the problem.
         1. Removing plants when their prime growing and producing season is over, before there are infestations of pests and diseases. For example, members of the brassica family (kale, collards, etc.) get black rot if left in the garden into June, and attract bugs that can remain in the garden into the next growing season and ruin the next crops. Remove them and plant something that appreciates the temperature of the season.

Families

1. Carrot – carrots, parsnips, fennel, parsley, cilantro, celery
2. Beet – beets, Swiss chard, spinach
3. Brassica – cabbage, broccoli, kale, turnips, collards, radishes, Brussels sprouts, rutabaga, kohlrabi, arugula, cauliflower, bok choy
4. Onion – bulb onions, multiplying onions, garlic, leeks
5. Legumes (for fall) – sugar snap peas, snow peas
6. Lettuce – lettuce, endive, radicchio, escarole, artichoke

Tricks

These apply not only to the fall season but to spring & summer as well.

1. Some members of the brassica family take a long time to grow to maturity. Plant other quick production members of that family along the perimeter, beside them. For instance, grow radishes and thirty-day turnips around cauliflower plants. They will be harvested before the cauliflower gets big enough to need the space. Arugula is another crop that can be planted around brassica family plants.
2. Use square foot method of planting. For instance:
   1. If you plant one radish seed every 1 or 2 square inches, you can harvest a lot of radishes in 1 square foot.
   2. If you plant one Hakurei turnip seed every 3 square inches, you can harvest 16 plants in 1 square foot.
3. Grow everything on a trellis that you can. Vertical space increases production greatly.
   1. Cage tomatoes, peppers and eggplant plants
   2. Trellis cucumbers, sugar and snow peas, cantaloupe, bitter melon, long beans, pole beans (think about growing pole beans instead of bush beans)
   3. Put trellises on edges of beds so that other crops can be planted in the rest of the bed. For instance, in mid-October, place a sugar pea trellis 6” from the edge of the bed, and plant the lettuce family (lettuce, endive, radicchio) in the remaining space.