Mid-September Garden To-Do List
Leaves are falling from the tulip poplars and hackberry trees while zinnias and dahlias are blooming bright pink and yellow. Mornings are crisp and cool, but afternoons still heat up to temps in the 80s. We’re living in the Autumnal Transition, a middle ground that feels like both summer and fall at the same time. Some might call it “Iced Pumpkin Spice Latte Season.”
In the garden, we have summer crops still pumping out fruit, while the cool season veggies are getting established in their shadows. Over the next few weeks, the goal is to embrace this transition mindset by planting fall veggies in open spaces, even tiny ones, while gradually and continually removing summer crops as they stop producing. This allows your cool season crops to get their roots established in the cool shade of summer crops, and then to have more light once the temps become hospitable for them. The transition won’t be complete until we get our first frost, finally killing tomatoes and peppers and leaving behind only the lettuce, broccoli, carrots, and other fall plants to finally take up as much space as they need.
With that in mind, let’s get into the details of the chores for the next couple of weeks…
Pruning/Removing:
If basil is getting wild and full of flowers, cut them back by half and they may give you one more flush of fresh green leaves. If you’ve had enough basil (check out Lisa's WAGON-FULL in the photo), cut plants at the soil level and let roots decompose underground.
Just because tomatoes, peppers, okra, and eggplant will live until the frost, it doesn’t mean you have to keep them. It’s your garden. If a plant doesn't look or taste good anymore, it’s totally fine to remove it.
It’s getting to be a bit too late to do a significant prune on perennial herbs like oregano, thyme, sage, and rosemary. You can do a little shaping or harvesting here and there, but wait until spring to really prune these back to a tidy shape.
Keep cutting and harvesting and deadheading flowers like zinnias, celosia, cosmos, marigolds, and dahlias.
Don’t forget to pull weeds while you’re cleaning up and making room.
And as spaces open up, add an inch or two of compost.
Planting: If you want broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage, plant them ASAP. Carrots, lettuce, spinach, arugula, radishes, cilantro, turnips, bok choy, mustard greens, dill, parsley, and scallions can all be planted in the next two weeks. For early spring color, add seeds now of snapdragons, pincushion flower, poppies, stock, and calendula.
Use a pinch of fertilizer like BioTone or Blood Meal in the hole when you transplant seedlings. Your soil is likely depleted after feeding big plants like tomatoes all summer.
The weather can be hot and dry this month, so be extra sure seedlings and seeds stay watered. A late afternoon drink on days over 80 will be appreciated.
Pests: We have already seen cabbage moths poking around brassicas like broccoli and cabbage. Diligently pick off eggs or spray weekly with BT to kill caterpillars. If tender seedlings get heat stressed, aphids will quickly sense their weakness and attach new growth. Spray these off with water or an insecticidal soap, which is a very diluted all-natural soap.
Keep picking off tomato hornworms, leaf-footed bugs, and squash bugs when you see them.
If squirrels are snacking on your tomatoes, pick your fruits when they have just started to turn red. They will continue to ripen on your counter at room temperature, but you’ll beat the squirrels to the harvest.
Feed: Other than fresh compost and a bit of fertilizer on your new veggies, none of the summer crops or perennials need fertilizer at this point.
Shopping: If you haven’t already, order garlic. Check your stock of frost covers, hoops, and staples and purchase more now if you need it so you will be ready for cold weather.
Journal: While it’s fresh in your mind, make lots of notes about what was good and bad about the summer growing season.
