As the main growing season winds down and fall gardens are being planted across much of the country, you might think it would be time for me to post on fall gardening.
Fall gardens are well-worth doing, but instead of jumping on that train I’m going to focus on what you can do right now that will make your spring gardens better than they’ve ever been.
Gardeners, like most people, tend to think of their gardening in terms of one season. When you step back, however, and see how building up your plots and planning ahead will benefit your gardening for years to come, a whole new window opens.
Having a long time horizon benefits you in more ways than just making money and investing wisely. In homesteading, it may mean you
Compost Everything: Th...
Best Price: $6.00
Buy New $11.99
(as of 08:25 UTC - Details)
plant fruit trees rather than just corn… or buy chicks rather than buying eggs from the grocery store. Planning ahead in your annual gardens also leads to much better results in the long run.
How can you plan ahead for a successful spring garden? Let’s take a look.
Mulch Like Mad
I discovered the power of fall mulching back when I lived in Tennessee and was dealing with rocky clay in my gardens. I had bought a bale of straw for some purpose, then ended up not using it so it sat at one end of my garden. The strings had popped on it so the bale ended up a big sopping pile of rotten straw over the course of our rainy winter. In the spring I started raking it up and noticed something amazing: the ground beneath was richer and softer than the surrounding soil – and it was absolutely loaded with earthworms. They were everywhere.
The next year I put cardboard over all the weedy patches I wished to convert into good soil, then loaded on lots of shredded mulch from the power company, raked up straw from the garden center, fall leaves, kitchen scraps and whatever I could find. I sheet-mulched the tar out of my garden area… and the next year, I grew gardens that were better than any I’d done before. No more bare soil for me (except when I was growing long rows of field crops – that’s a different ballgame). Once I saw the power of rotting organic matter to loosen and enrich the ground beneath over the course of the winter, I started using fall and the break of winter to passively build better gardens for the spring. (NOTE: If you’re interested in composting and sheet mulching, you should check out my survival guide for feeding your gardens in a crash. It’s titled Compost Everything: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting and I can guarantee you it’s got info you’ve never encountered before. I wrote it for cheapskates and survivalists who aren’t afraid to think outside of the bin.)
Make More Compost
Though I had enough leaves and mulch in my yard to cover my beds, I also gathered all the leaves the neighbors were throwing out and piled them up in an area behind my house where they could spend the next year rotting down. Additionally, I gathered coffee grounds from a local espresso joint and mixed them with the leaves to increase the rate of decay. Coffee grounds are high in nitrogen and leaves are high in carbon. Mix them and you get some quick compost activity.
Another source of material from the compost was the dumpster behind a local grocery store. I took boxes of expired produce from there and also tossed them on the leaves. The compost got so hot it would cook right on through the winter, even when there was snow on the ground.
Dig More Bed
The fall is a great time of year to be outside and it’s a great time for manual labor. I usually spend multiple afternoons taking advantage of the weather by double-digging new garden beds for next year. Sometimes I plant them with fall crops, sometimes I plant them with green manure (more on that in my book as well) plants such as rye and fava beans, and sometimes I would mulch them. The ground will stay soft and well-dug so long as you don’t step on the beds. This means you’ll have one less task when the spring rolls around, plus double-dug beds usually do a lot better than tilled beds. Double digging can loosen soil to a depth of 2′, whereas a tiller usually doesn’t go any deeper than 6″. When roots can go deeper, crops will do better. Bonus: when everything collapses and gas disappears, you’ll still be able to double dig… even though your tiller will be worthless.
Save Seeds
Fall is also a great time to save seeds, provided you’ve planned ahead by letting at least a percentage of your crops go to seed. I raise my own seeds for some crops (beans, sorghum, mustard, amaranth, pumpkins) and just buy them for other crops with hard-to-save seed (I’m looking at you, cabbage). In a crisis, seed-saving will be vital so it’s good to start practicing now (if you sign up for my newsletter at www.thesurvivalgardener.com, you can get a free copy of my little survival crop comic book which contains info on saving seeds. It also contains drawings of a demented camel).
When you harvest seeds, make sure they’re good and dry, then pack them in mason jars sealed tightly and stored in the fridge. Don’t open those jars right away when you pull them out in the spring. Instead, let them sit on the counter until they hit room temperature, otherwise the resulting condensation may cause problems for the ones you put back into the fridge after taking out your spring seeds.
Fall and winter are also good times to buy seeds from catalogs for planting in the spring. There’s nothing like sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea and dreaming of the sun-warmed melons and juicy tomatoes you’re going to grow next year.
Conclusion
Feeding the soil, opening up the ground and getting your seeds ready now will mean there’s a lot less to do in the spring when most gardeners are flying into a mad panic trying to get lots of tasks done all at once. There’s nothing better than letting Nature do the work for you over the winter… allowing you to reap the benefits in the spring… and often for years to come. Good rich soil and great gardens don’t happen overnight. Start your spring gardens now and you’ll be way ahead of the curve.
