Early September Garden To-Do List
It’s still summer. Yes, we got a refreshing dose of cool mornings this month, but this week’s temps in the high nineties brought us back to the reality of September in the South. It can still be hot.
The good news: We’ve still got weeks and weeks to enjoy tomatoes and peppers and okra. And if your tomatoes are a bit behind (like me!), this is a very good thing.
The challenge: Stay vigilant with your watering routine. Keep an eye on the weather, keep checking on your plants and soil moisture, especially in containers. And especially if you are transplanting or direct sowing fall crops over the next couple of weeks. Tiny plants cannot dry out or they won’t make it.
Which brings us to:
Planting: Definitely get any larger cool season plants like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage planted in the first half of this month. These plants, along with carrots, take a couple of months to mature, so they need enough time to grow before we got to the Persephone Period (when days have less than 10 hours of sunlight). By the middle of the month, lettuce, spinach, arugula, radishes, cilantro,and beets should be planted. We can do another succession of those small greens at the end of the month. Other fun fall veggie options: napa cabbage, kohlrabi, mustard and collard greens, turnips, boy choy, romanesco, and more. So yummy! Let’s go!
Fall is also a good time to plant strawberries, blueberries, trees, and most any other perennial plant. They will start getting established in the cooler weather, then be ready to take off growing as soon as it warms up next spring.
Cool season annual flowers will do the same thing if planted over the new few weeks. These include snapdragons, pincushion flower, rudbeckia, poppies, foxglove, stock, campanula, calendula, and more. Cool Flowers is the go-to resource for the details on how to grow these beauties, aka “hardy annuals.”
Don’t forget to prep your soil before fall planting.
Or if you don’t want to grow a fall garden, consider planting a cover crop like crimson clover or vetch to cover the soil through winter and help build nutrients for next year.
Harvest: Tomatoes, peppers, beans, eggplant, and okra are still rocking. If you planted a second round of zucchini and cucumber, they should be ready this month too. Winter squash like pumpkins and butternut (which were actually planted back in May or June, so confusing!) are ready to harvest when the rind is hard enough that you can’t pierce it with your fingernail.
Pruning
We have seen some wild and wooly tomato plants over the past couple of weeks. If yours are crowding out pathways or shading other plants, it might be time to show them who’s boss and really hack them back. Just because they want to grow every direction, doesn’t mean you have to let them.
Ahhhhhh….
For a major prune job, start by pruning out any yellow or brown leaves and any broken branches. From there, tie up strong healthy branches that are already heading in the direction you want (toward your trellis). Remove any others that are blocking sun from reaching other precious plants. Remove leaves that are growing below the fruit to allow more light and air to reach your shorter plants nearby. It can be painful to remove that much healthy plant material, especially when you see green tomatoes going into the compost pile. But it feels great to blithely walk your pathways and not have to fight through a jungle of vines to reach your ripening harvest!
Pests: As you start to see your plants slow down and peter out over the next couple of months, you should also be noticing less and less of those insect pests. Continue to keep your eyes peeled for Hornworms, Striped Cucumber Beetles, Squash Bugs, and Flea Beetles and pick them off when you see them. As you plant kale, cabbage, and broccoli into the garden, the cabbage moths are probably going to immediately pounce on them and lay eggs. Just like you did in spring, inspect the under sides of leaves for eggs and caterpillars, pick them off, and spray plants with BT once a week.
Support: Eggplant and pepper plants can get really loaded sown with fruit, causing stems and branches to break. Harvest often and support them with a stake and twine.
Feed: If peppers and tomato plants are still going strong, give them one more application of TomatoTone to help them stay productive until frost.
Diseases: You may be seeing fungal or bacterial disease hit your tomatoes. Just keep pruning off any damaged leaves and hope for the best. Some years, it’s not a question of “if,” but “when” our plants will be taken down. Powdery mildew (a fungus that causes white or gray spots) might be showing up on leaves of squash or even zinnias and cosmos. At this point in the year, just remove affected leaves and know the plants are probably not going to grow much longer, but you may be able to keep them going long enough to harvest fruit or blooms (which usually aren’t damaged by the fungus).
Planning and Shopping: When you are out buying your fall veggies, you can also pick up bulbs of garlic and onions, as well as tulips, daffodils, and allium, though we don’t plant these until late October or early November. They often sell out early though, so shop now if you want to enjoy these foods and flowers next spring.
