Preparing For Fall
With September creeping around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about preparing your gardens for the Fall. In the Northland, our summers are precious and dreadfully short, and any talk of our long, cold seasons are strictly taboo in the heat of summer. However, whether we like it or not, our first frost date is approximately October 2nd (so says Farmer’s Almanac, anyway) and it’s essential to have our gardens braced for the winter chill.
Clean out your garden bed. The Superior Community Gardens has some compost bins ready for your old plant matter. Check the signs attached to each bin to know where to put your plants. It’s important to note that any plants infected with diseases, such as powdery mildew, should not be added to the compost. We have a special bag set aside for infected plant matter so that the fungus-among-us doesn’t spread to other gardens.
If you keep a garden at home, you can add plant matter to your own compost bin, or check out the city of Superior’s Fall Leaf Pick Up starting November 1st (although I encourage all residents to please Leave the Leaves as leaf matter supports our pollinators!).
This is also a great time to clear any lingering weeds. This ensures that your garden bed won’t start off the next season already crowded by weeds – and maybe buy you some time to prepare for battle.
Plan out next year’s garden. With your summer garden still fresh on your mind, examine what veggies worked and which ones withered. This year, my tomatoes and cucumbers are thriving, but my bell pepper plants are stunted (and two of them were eaten by wild animals). I’m taking this opportunity to strategize next year’s garden.
This year, I had fun planting strange varieties of tomatoes. A local greenhouse offered a black tomato variety, as well as some fun multi-colored varieties that are exciting to watch grow. Even though some varieties haven’t proven to be major producers, I’ve found myself looking forward to visiting the garden and seeing the strange color concoctions. Plus, black tomatoes look both cool and creepy chopped up in a garden salad…and I even want to eat a salad loaded with interesting veggies. Next year, ‘weird tomatoes’ are on the list.
It’s also good to consider crop rotation. In your SCGA bed, you can grow a variety of new veggies, add lots of compost, and try placing new plants on the opposite side of your garden. I always encourage adding some fresh compost, so that one’s really a given. Planting members of the same veggie family in the same location takes a particular toll on your soil. Strong, healthy veggies require strong, healthy soil, so it’s important to plan your future garden accordingly.
Volunteer at the garden. There are plenty of tasks SCGA needs help with at the end of the year. Please check out the Volunteer Task List to see what we could use a hand with!
While I know it’s difficult to think of the winter ahead, there are still plenty of things to do in the garden. If you’re anything like me, you’ll spend the entire winter dreaming about plants, mentally rearranging the garden dozens of times, and hoping that the aphids will get lost on their way to my garden beds the next spring (who keeps giving them directions?!).
Happy gardening!