In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Season

If you are counting, we are on our third planting in the Kitchen Garden of 2013...yes, it's time for the Fall Garden! Technically, I guess you'd call it our second "cool season" garden of the year, as the plantings will sound suspiciously like our Spring Garden. When the weather begins to turn cooler, especially the nighttime temps, it's time to say goodbye to the warm season veggies like tomatoes, peppers, squash, and okra for the year, and welcome back "the greens and things." 

Ready for the roll call?

We have (English) peas planted in the Block Garden (shown above), climbing up the fence that Mr. T added after the raccoon(s) destroyed the corn. Inside the fence, we have red cabbage...a second planting of those since the cutworms got the first ones. In the Box Garden, we have 4 varieties of lettuce (Romaine, Bibb, Black-seeded Simpson, and Red Sails); two more kinds of cabbage (Bonnie Hybrid and Early Jersey Wakefield); collards; broccoli; beets; spinach; carrots; onions; and (new for us) Romanesco cauliflower (also known as broccoli or cabbage, depending on which country you grow them). And in the Row Garden where the bean fence was this summer, we've got two rows of turnip greens...yep, I only grow for the greens, since I don't like turnips; Mr. T likes neither.

We are already enjoying the lettuce and a leaf or two of spinach...which, along with the last of the Sun Gold tomatoes and sweet bell peppers, make for some yummy salads this time of the year. Soon, I hope to add some of those tasty green peas.

The Fall Garden presents a few challenges not found with the Spring Garden, even though we are basically growing the same veggies. For one, we have to monitor the moisture level in the soil more closely than in March...the warm, dry days at the end of Summer/beginning of Fall can mean too-dry soil for tender seedlings. That's how I came to have to replant both my beets and my spinach. The seeds germinated, but they didn't receive enough rain in those all-important first 7 days...and I didn't provide supplemental water; before I knew it, the seedlings withered...lost all except one single spinach plant.

The second...and more problematic challenge has to be da Bugs. In the Spring, it's too early for the pest population to have built up their numbers and control is a bit easier. But as Summer turns to Fall, da Bugs are going strong. Until the first frost, we will continue to do battle. 

My main nemesis is the above-mentioned cutworm...which loves all things in the brassica family: newly-added transplants of cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, collards, etc. In addition to chopping through that first planting of red cabbage, you can see (below) that the newly-planted Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage also provided a tasty meal. If that's not enough to contend with, the first plantings of broccoli are quite lacy after an evening with a cabbageworm...despite being covered with a row cover. What's a chemically-cautious gardener to do?

Row covers are my first line of defense...and will be necessary for protection when temps drop below freezing. And, I've sprayed with neem oil and also dusted everything with Dipel Dust [a biological control with the main ingredient being Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a microbial pesticide]...which is why it looks like it snowed in that photo above. Next step: crossing my fingers. 

And wishing for an early frost, I suppose.