what to do in your yard this fall for an epic spring
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If you're looking at your yard this weekend, thinking there's SO MUCH you gotta do but you've feeling overwhelmed with where to start, I feel you. And I got you. (More on that below.) Fall can sometimes feel busier than spring because we're rushing to tidy up and hunker down before winter. And if you're like me, you're probably still doing a bit of planting too. I just transplanted my last round of fall vegetables and still need to sow cover crop seeds in a few beds. I got my garlic delivery last week and that will go in the ground later this month. My general rule of thumb is... if the ground isn't frozen yet, there's still time! 😅 Besides planting, I'm also cutting back some of my perennials and adding a layer of compost to prepare them for the colder weather ahead. There's a school of thought that you shouldn't clean up plants in fall/winter and just leave them be, since the seed heads help feed the birds and all the plant debris provides cover for overwintering insects and other wildlife. And I agree with that, but at the same time, I take a hybrid approach: I cut back half my garden (often using the old stems and foliage as mulch for the bed, as I do with my asparagus) and leave the other half to decompose in place over winter (which I do with my rhubarb). That way, I'm not inundated with a massive cleanup in spring. Seasonal tipsHoly green tomatoesThis is what my kitchen counter looked like a few days ago right before the frost warning: I'm pretty salty because that was only ONE night of freezing temps, yet the highs are going to be in the mid-80s for the next week! WHAT. 🤦🏻♀️ But that's okay. Those green tomatoes will ripen nicely indoors (they're currently stored in cardboard flats in the guest room, where it's much cooler than the rest of the house) and with a little luck, we'll still have fresh garden tomatoes in November. One of the plants I pulled before the frost was my bell pepper, but not for the fruit—I wanted the leaves! Yep, pepper leaves are edible and one of my favorite ways to use them is in a Filipino soup called tinola. Traditional tinola uses chile pepper leaves, which gives it just a tiny kick (kind of like arugula). You can find the recipe on page 50 of The No-Waste Vegetable Cookbook. (It's also in The CSA Cookbook, if you've got my original book.) Half my pepper plants didn't do so well this summer because of our extreme heat, so I love that other parts of them are edible—it makes all that effort feel worth it. 😄 P.S. Not sure where to start with cleaning up your garden? Use this fall garden checklist to do what you need to do to have an epic spring. P.P.S. What do you do with your plants at the end of the season? Are you Team "Clean everything up" or Team "Leave it all alone"? 🙋🏻♀️ Let me show you why fall is the best time to work on your soil. When you start the process now, it gives you several months to let things decompose in place and stimulate all the good microbes by the time you're ready to plant again. Get a jump start on proper soil-building this fall and learn my "lazy techniques" to create healthy, active, nutrient-rich soil by spring—with much less work than doing it all in spring! Join Lazy Gardening Academy. |
Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."