It’s that time in (technically) Spring when I already have my garden planning focused on fall crops. Not just the quick crops, I am pondering my root cellar veggies, the ones that will be feeding us in December, January, February, March, and hopefully into April. Now is the best time to create this garden plan, and some fall plants will benefit from being started from seed before the middle of June to have time to fully mature in our short growing season.

I partition my fall garden into the following categories:

Veggies that take all season to produce and are largely harvested all at once in late summer or early fall.
Veggies that take a solid half season to produce and thus need to be started in early Summer.
Veggies that mature quickly and are largely enjoyed fresh, those that are sown directly in the garden in late summer. (A subject for a future blog post.)

Sown in late February, these cabbages are just now starting to really head toward maturity in early June.

This blog post will focus on the middle group, what I am currently preparing to sow this week to ensure a successful fall garden in our growing zone. I will include how many weeks before last frost I aim to sow the veggies I discuss here so that if you live in a warmer zone, you can estimate when to sow for your growing zone. My best guess is 2-3 weeks later for each zone warmer, but that’s just an educated guess.

From my personal experience, there’s nothing worse than confidently sowing cabbages in the heat of mid-July, transplanting the stout seedlings out when it’s still warm and summery a month later in mid-August, only to have them not even form a full head by mid-October. With each passing year as I sow them a little earlier, I’ve realized that for some fall crops, an early June sowing is necessary for these foods to be given the opportunity to fully mature.

Soil blocks are our preferred seed starting method. They reduce the amount of plastic and provide a faster transition into the garden because they don’t get pot bound.

Once we hit late September, if the brassicas haven’t matured enough to start forming a head or curd (cauliflower), there’s little chance they will fully mature before the end of the season. Conversely, if they are more than halfway to maturity, they will continue to mature even as the day length shortens. It’s a fine line between starting too early and too late, so I encourage you to try a few different sowing dates with the same seed and see how they do for you.

Year to year weather fluctuations will also directly affect the speed with which the crops will mature. It’s always best to dig in and use your own experiential knowledge to fine tune your sowing schedule. I’ve started my fall broccoli too early and they’ve all been harvested by middle of September, which I considered a garden fail because they matured too quickly and a time in the garden when we were still flush with the late summer glut.

Long Season Crops

These foods are already in our garden, and include potatoes, onions, garlic, and brussels sprouts. They will be harvested at various times throughout the growing season, though largely later in summer with only enough time for a short crop to follow them as in the case of garlic and onions. All of this food will be tucked away, more or less as-is straight from the garden into our storage areas, for longterm consumption. I love these shelf-stable foods; they are the backbone of our winter diets. And we didn’t really start growing these in earnest until we had our current space. Before that time, we dabbled in onions and carrots, and occasionally grew brussels sprouts, but they were all for immediate consumption.

Potatoes go into the ground here right around the last frost and we leave them in the ground, patiently waiting in the ground for us to get around to harvesting them, which is usually around end of September.

Hopefully, you have some of these already planted in your garden if you’re living in short-season growing zones and have the space to grow these. If you have any extra long growing season, brussels sprouts and potatoes can probably still be added to your garden. Brussels sprouts can probably even still be sowed here in Minnesota for a fall harvest if they are under 100 days to maturity.

Half Season Crops

This is really what I want to focus on today. These are foods that take more time than you think to mature, cool season vegetables that don’t seem like they need to be started until maybe August, but trust me when I tell you now is the time to start some of these. If you live in a slightly warmer zone, you can probably wait until the end of June or beginning of July to sow many of these.

Past experience has taught me that in order for cabbage and celery to develop fully in the fall, I must sow them in early June. It’s before my first ripe tomato and when my cucumbers are mere seedlings. And it is quite frankly the hardest thing to do in June: think about my first fall frost and work backwards to give these plants the best start possible.

I am not sowing them directly in the garden, but rather am using my soil blocker, indoor lights, and all the same resources we relied on so heavily to get a jumpstart on the growing season a few months ago. In case you missed it, you can read my Seed Starting post here.

I find sowing starts indoors during summer gives them a gentler welcome into the world, is easier to monitor moisture levels, and produces strong starts that are more resilient against pest and disease pressure, producing what will hopefully be a smooth transition to the garden in mid-July.

That being said, these plants still need to have the same, gentle hardening off process, slowly acclimating them to natural sunlight which is much stronger than our compact fluorescent shop lights. So a few weeks after germination I will start bringing them outside on our deck which gets partial shade for most of the day. Given our close-to-home mantra this year, our garden tasks are feeling much easier to accomplish as I am home most of the time and can tend to these plants between gardening and parenting tasks.

The fall garden is always here and there, tucked in and made possible by constant openings created as crops mature throughout the growing season.

Another imperative factor as you plan for this fall garden is where will you fit these seedlings into your garden? Do you have room right now, or will you have room soon? I keep a 4x20 foot long bed just for fall cabbages, and plan to tuck the rest of my fall garden in after my peas and then the faster maturing fall garden follows things like onions and garlic. So, think about your dynamic patchwork and how this garden will come to life amid your summer jungle.

Cabbage, Celery, & Cauliflower

The three slowest to mature fall garden friends are these wonderful vegetables. And along with some more heat tolerant lettuce, herbs, and beets, these will all be sown imminently indoors in my 2” soil blocks. To be honest, I am a little behind as I’d intended to sow these the first weekend of June this year based on my garden notes from 2019.

Sown in mid and late June, this Mardi cauliflower had **just** enough time to fully mature, and was remarkably cold hardy, surviving several chilly nights before harvest.

It does seem early, but most of the varieties recommended for fall harvest and storage and main season or storage varieties are recommended to sow in late Spring. Incidentally, all of these varieties need a lot of time in the garden to mature. And that does mean setting them out in the heat of summer, because as you know if you live in a cool zone, the heat can turn off as quickly as it turns on, and your fall garden must be well on its way before we start the rapid descent toward Autumn.

Sowed in mid-June and harvested November 13, 2019, this is a Passat green cabbage.

All the most delicious, root cellar-friendly cabbages we love growing need a good 3 months in the ground (as 4 week old transplants) to fully mature. That’s about 100 days. Think of all the cabbages I sowed at the same time as those super early Tiara cabbages, who I harvested in late May, all going into the ground on the same day in the end of March under row cover. Most of them won’t be ready until end of June or early July. That’s a full 3 months of growing, and the last 6 weeks were during some really ideal conditions and even some good heat.

I think of the fall garden as the reverse of that time frame. We start them during the height of summer and day length, and for their first six weeks outdoors (as four week old seedlings) they soak up the final heat of summer, and then the weather moderates to more similar conditions to our spring weather.

Savoy, Integro, and Tendersweet as an early summer harvest. We grow these twice a year for a near-constant supply of cabbage for slaws and krauts and stir fries.

My favorite fall garden varieties are:

Cabbage:
- Red cabbage: Integro (85 days) and Kalibos (74 days)
- Savoy: Famosa (75 days)
- Green cabbage: Capture (75 days), Tendersweet (71 days), and Passat (90 days)
- Cauliflower:
  - Mardi (62 days)
  - Vitaverde (71 days)
  - Romanesco (73 days)
  - Celery:
    - Tango (80 days)

Can you see the theme here? Most of these things need almost a full 3 months in the garden to fully mature. Days to maturity typically means the time from when you transplant a seedling into the field to when it matures. These are merely guidelines, as you and I know that rarely do plants mature at the exact days to maturity.

I will sow a mixed tray of cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and head lettuce - plus herbs (cilantro, dill, and basil) - for ease of management. I will keep these under lights for the first few weeks until true leaves emerge on all seedlings, and then will start to harden them off in late June or early July. They will be sown indoors about 14-16 weeks before our first fall frost and transplanted into the garden in mid-July, which is approximately 10 weeks before my last frost.

This is not the only fall planting I will sow indoors this month.

Belstar broccoli sowed June 22, 2019 endured a little early November dusting of snow and ice. It was a near-perfect planting all maturing around the same time and sweetened by a few light frosts.

I will sow another tray of brassicas in another week or two during the second half of June. This will include things like my Tiara cabbage, which are faster to mature at 63 days - and, in complete disclosure, an experiment this year, as well as Belstar broccoli (66 days), which, as mentioned above, has been known to fully mature too quickly here if I sow it too soon, though I know this is one of the hardest ones to time right.

An October 2018 fall harvest included some quick maturing salad turnips seen here that were direct sown in early August.

Additionally, at that time, I will probably also sow my last heat tolerant head lettuce succession and even more herbs to ensure we have a steady stream of cilantro and basil all summer and well into fall. Beets will also be sown again in late June for a fall harvest, though I seem to have better luck with spring and summer beets than fall beets. And I am sure I won’t be able to resist a few more cauliflower, just to keep pushing my season and keep experimenting and learning. Some lessons take several failures to learn completely.

Taking Cover

The other thing we do in fall, as needed, is add row cover to our fall plantings if multiple hard frosts are predicted. Similar to how we approach our spring garden, you can read more about our methods in my succession planting post called Take Cover

The Direct-Sown Fall Garden

Another fantastic fall garden crop is the carrot. Carrots can be sown any week from now through the middle of July here in Minnesota, maturing in the fall, at which time after a few fall frosts they will be ready for harvest whenever you need them in the kitchen. There are varieties specifically for storage so enjoy perusing seed catalogs and choose your varieties carefully. We currently enjoy growing Bolero, Danvers, and Nelson for our storage carrots, though I find availability of certain hybrid carrot varieties changes every few years.

We grow dozens of pounds of carrots each fall, tucking them carefully into our root cellar for winter consumption, and I just sowed my first main season carrot bed and will sow carrots a few more times in the coming month to ensure we have as full as basket of fall carrots as possible.

Carrots for months! We grew enough carrots to feed us well from November through about mid-April in addition to all the carrots we enjoyed fresh from July until November.

It’s one of those foods I don’t think we will ever grow enough of, but I guarantee we will keep trying until we do.

The Quick Fall Garden

There are other fall garden veggies that mature much faster and thus don’t need to be sown until July such as bok choy, kohlrabi, broccoli raab, mustard greens, and such. Additionally, there are many other direct-sown fall garden suspects like arugula, spinach, radishes, and others which will be the subject of a future blog post as their timing and succession planting is not for another month or more, so the good news is we have a little time before we have to find space in the garden for these goodies.

I hope if you’ve made it this far, you now have a pretty good understanding of how we make the most of the fall season in our garden, and can see that it involves most of the summer months to successfully come to fruition. The garden has a way of keeping us humble and perennial students, and I hope this article helped you formulate a plan for your own fall garden.