Our small fall garden is coming right along so far. Matt didn’t believe me, but I said I was going to cut back on planting this fall and I did 🙂

We planted four areas with mustard, turnips, kale, and creasy greens. Every thing is up and growing except for the creasy greens. Hopefully a little cool weather will bring them on.

Pap never planted a fall garden, but once I discovered I could grow a few cold tolerant vegetables in fall just like I do in spring of the year I was hooked on planting in the fall.

Here on the north side of the mountain we don’t have full sun in the summer. Once fall begins to creep up on us there is less sun every day until it starts going back the other way next spring.

Because of that the few things we grow in the fall do better if planted in the front gardens where the most sun hits year round. Many folks ask us about planting in our greenhouse during the winter, but the sun doesn’t hit the greenhouse at all once fall arrives until the sun changes it’s path next spring.

Back in the day when Matt built it we never thought of using it for anything other than starting plants in early spring, but even if we had with our limited space there really isn’t any other good place to put it.

We’ve thought about building one down at the big garden where we do get full sun, but that would take up space from our corn. Planting under row covers would likely work very well down there.

The cold tolerant things we plant for fall will usually continue to grow throughout the winter, although at a much slower pace. If we have several days of really cold weather the plants suffer and sometimes die. A row cover would prevent that.

Growing a fall garden is easier because it is much smaller and the pestilence pressure is almost zero. The garden doesn’t provide near the amount of food a summer garden does, but it is really nice to have fresh greens and a few turnips during the cold months of winter.

Tipper

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