As the weather cools and the leaves start to turn many gardeners assume the season is coming to an end. Nothing could be further from the truth, fall is one of the best times to garden, with the air cooling off and the thunderstorms coming to an end our weather is much more stable. In fact fall is my favorite time to garden, many of the bugs are done with their cycles for the year, moisture is retained much better in the soil and now you can grow many of the crops you wish you had in the summer when your tomatoes and peppers started fruiting. Fall is a time that merges summer hot crops with fall cold crops and kicks off the season for canning and colorful salads. In this I will lay out the foundation for making raised bed garden swales, what fall crops are, and how to plant them as well as using cover crops to improve the health of your soil.
So we begin our journey with making raised bed garden swales. Wide row beds have many advantages Soil temperature is important for seed germination as well as vigorous plant growth and is one of the big keys to early or late gardening. Root growth is also very important, the larger your plant root system is the more water and nutrients it can gather, this not only will allow your plants to grow bigger faster but it also makes the fruit contain more nutrition for you.
To make raised bed garden swales you start by using a surveyors transit (rent one step 1) to mark out the "contour" of the land, we don't want a straight bed necessarily but instead we want them level with the land. By making raised beds level we not only make raised beds but we stop the flow of water through the garden, this eliminates erosion and captures the water in the beds and it will self water until water is all gone. We begin to make our garden drought resistant and pave the way for a future natural spring down hill. After we have the swales marked out the length we want we will measure from up hill to down hill 3 or 4 ft (depends on how wide you want them) and pin or mark that. This will give you your bed layout and you are ready to dig. You will want at least three shovels wide between beds (1 shovel full on first bed then 2 on the next) and then you begin to pin the next swale. At the end of the swale you want to curve the ends slightly up hill to hold the water in, not too much or the water will pour over the top and not around the ends. We can use this to move water however we want, we can dump it out one end or dump it out both. After you have your swales marked you are ready to dig, we will start on the up hill side of the first bed and take two shovel wide of dirt and place it in the bed. After we are done with the up hill side we will move to the down hill side and take one shovel wide and place it in the bed. After this is completed we will repeat this for all the beds and go over them with a shovel or hoe to smooth them out. once this is done the beds are ready to either be seeded, cover cropped, or mulched. Some seeds we will direct sow in the dirt, other plants and bulbs are better transplanted than seeded. We will now water the soil good and begin to mulch in layers or a term called "lasagna gardening", we start with black and white news paper or brown cardboard, we wet it as we go and lay it down over the sides and top. Now would be a good time to add some compost if you have it, if not we will make our own. Next step is to cover thick with spoiled hay or straw, it is always best to let chickens pick through it to eliminate unwanted seed, if you cant we will just pull them and use them for mulch as we go. Now we water again! We want to vary our layers of "green" (hay, grass, manure, veggie scraps) material" and "brown" (straw, paper, leaves, cardboard) each time we plant a new crop, this will build out soil and its biology. Everyday as we empty our kitchen scraps we will simply just lift the mulch and place them under it for the worms and bacteria or we can put in worm tubs to fill ( I will cover worm tubs later). Keep in mind typically greens are broke down by bacteria and browns are degraded by fungus, a trick you can use for disease control as well (future blog).
Now on to plants!
For simplicity for our beginners crops will be divided into families, we do this for crop rotation, crop rotation is important to minimize plant pests and diseases. Later we will discuss bio intensive gardening and permaculture.
We will split our plants into these families, Gourd (squash, cucumber, melon ), Beet ( beet, spinach, Swiss chard), Cabbage (collard greens, arugula, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, choi, kale, kolrabi, radish, turnip, rutabaga ), Carrot (carrot, cilantro, parsley, parsnip ), Legume (peas, beans,
alfalfa, hairy vetch, clover), Onion (onion, garlic, leek, shallot, scallion), Sunflower (dandelion, endive/escarole, lettuce, mustard, mache ). Now I know someone out there is going to say Farmer Z, mache is in the valerian family and mustard is in the mustard family isn’t it? Yes it is! But for our garden use we will put it in the sunflower family to make things simple. So we have our 7 families now you need to plot them out for a proper rotation, each family needs its own space and should not be mixed unless you are very experienced in and intensive gardening practices. It is up to you how many beds you have or how they are divided, we just want to keep the families together and separated.
July
Planting! We are going to actually start our fall crops in mid July, we want to plant our longest growing crops first 70+ days to harvest. The crops we are going to plant now are Kohlrabi, Rutabaga winter squash, cucumber and corn if you wish (must be 70 days or less to harvest "Alaska" is 55 day). The kohlrabi and rutabaga will go in our Cabbage bed and can be sown directly into the mulch or started indoors. Plant seeds at a rate of one per square foot and keep the soil moist until the seeds have germinated. Our winter squash and cucumber will go in our gourd bed, these crops can also be direct seeded and it is best to use T post and 6 ft fence to allow them to climb, after all they are a vine.
Corn, we want to put the corn in the legume bed, the legume bed will serve 4 purposes, #1 a cover crop bed to add aeration to the soil as well as organic matter. #2 this is where we will grow our peas. #3 our cover crop is living mulch, shading the soil so it can stay moist and also acts as a weed barrier robbing light from the weed seeds and choking them out. #4 legumes collect nitrogen from the air and store it on their roots; this feeds the nitrogen hungry corn and is a perfect companion plant. So we start the legume bed by spreading red clover seed over the bed , then we plant our corn, one per square foot. Later we will plant peas next to the corn stalks. If less than one inch of rain falls each week you will need to hand water your beds, it is best to water at a depth of one to two inches to promote deep root growth.
August
Mid August is the time to start the major planting, we will start with some of the root crops. Carrot and parsnip should be planted in the carrot bed, the carrots will be ready in late fall and the parsnips should be over wintered and harvested in early spring. The cold weather during the winter makes the parsnips sweeter. Plant onion bulbs in wet straw mulch in the onion bed, plant as many bulbs as you can(about 9 per sq ft), in about 30 days
green onion are ready to harvest and in the later part of fall full size onion will be ready for harvest. Garlic, leek and shallot should also be planted in mulch and over wintered for a spring harvest. Beet bed, beets and turnips can be planted all at once or planted in weekly intervals for a continual harvest. Plan the beet harvest so that all of the beets are harvested before first frost, cold snaps tend to make beets bolt. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage (red is best for winter storage) go in the cabbage bed and should all be started in soil blocks or pots, I prefer and use soil blocks for many reasons and I will get into that in late winter. After your starts have sprouted and have grown several inches transplant them into the thick mulch and give a good watering with fish emulsion tea or compost tea. Direct sow radish seed in one week intervals until the first part of October, radish are a 30 day crop and can stand a light frost. Now is also the time to start your kale, chard and collard greens, kale is a leafy green similar in taste to cabbage and chard is similar to spinach in taste. We also want to plant our peas now, we will plant 2 pea seeds at the base of every corn stalk, and the peas use the corn as a trellis and also release nitrogen for the corn to feed on.
Late August
Now we start the remaining crops, these crops can be direct sown and all are fairly fast growers. In our carrot bed we will plant our cilantro and parsley, both of these prefer cooler weather. In our cabbage bed we will now plant arugula and choy, there are many varieties of choy and Chinese cabbage and are all equally yummy, bak choi and pak choy are two great picks. Arugula loves cold weather and can withstand a pretty good frost. In our beet bed we will now plant spinach, again, there are many different varieties of spinach, bloomsdale is my top pick. In our sunflower bed we start our Italian dandelion, endive/escarole, lettuce, mustard and mache, all of these are very cold tolerant and a few of them can withstand most mid and southern Missouri winters.
September
Keep sowing your succession seeds for a continual harvest, many of your plants will be ready for harvest in mid to late September, most lettuce are 45 day crops. When you harvest your greens cut them above the dirt several inches, by doing this they will just grow back for several more harvest. Also your beet, radish and turnip leaves are edible, radish have a peppery flavor to them and beet and turnip are yummy in a stir fry or salad. Make sure you don't cut all of the leaves off, keep some of the smaller ones to keep the root alive.
October/November
These are the months for many harvests, your beets should be done and after a frost your turnip will taste the best and your rutabaga and kohlrabi will too! Your carrots should be a good size and your cabbage ready as
well.
MULCH,MULCH, MULCH!
This is a word I want to pound in your head; mulch protects the soil from so many things as well as gives it health. Now that our beds are established we will never till them again, tilling actually harms and compacts the soil, crop rotation and the use of cover crops will keep your soil in tip top shape. All cover crops should be mowed or cut down in the spring and either composted or left to lay on the beds. Before next spring I will cover more in depth the subject of using cover crops and permaculture, once you get this full circle bed system going it creates it's own eco system in the dirt and on top. It takes care of itself using plants to replenish soil nutrients of all types as well as attracting beneficial bugs to kill destructive bugs. Many of the plants also put off scents that these bad bugs don’t like and they just move on to you neighbors "seven dust, miracle grow row garden". Your garden becomes sustainable and produces a much higher yield and food that is extremely dense in nutrition. Keep this in mind, sickness is caused from a imbalance in personal nutrition, you are what you eat!
NOTE these planting schedules are for a mid Missouri climate adjust accordingly please
Email questions to manitoudesigns@yahoo.com
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