Gardening Isn’t Just for Summer

In the past I’ve had a greenhouse.  But to be perfectly honest, I always found it a lot of work and I never enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed gardening the rest of the year.  Right now we just have our outside garden beds and we garden in the Spring, Summer, and Fall.

Gardening season for us begins around my birthday (March 17th).  That is an easy anchor for me to remember that it is time to get the cold weather seeds in the ground.

emery planting garden seeds_blog_9

These may include any of the following (we change it up slightly from year to year depending on our mood): peas, lettuce, spinach, kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, arugula, swiss chard, turnip, parsley, italian parsley, onions, garlic, potatoes.

emery planting garden seeds_blog_10

This takes up about half of our bed space.  Around Mother’s Day (my next anchor), I plan to get my first warm weather plants in the ground.  These include: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zuccini, sunflowers, basil, eggplant, green beans, sweet potatoes.

Once the weather starts to get hot, the cold weather stuff needs to be finished off.  So we harvest what is left of them.

Emery is harvesting the peas (which will be shelled and frozen), and tossing the plants to the chickens.

3 seasons garden_blog_1

The lettuce plants become bitter when the weather gets hot so they get pulled up and fed to the rabbits and chickens.

gardening isnt just for summer_blog

Once we have cleaned out the cold weather stuff, we plant more hot weather plants in their place.  This primarily includes watermelon and cantaloupe, but also includes green beans and any other random plants we decide we need more of.

my vegetable garden_blog_38

We also make use of trellises and tall plants to help us with the fall garden.  We plant another round of lettuce and kale and peas in the garden in the shade of the sunflowers and trellises.

sunflowers shade_blog

These plants will do better being protected from the late sun.

my vegetable garden_blog_35

The main point about the garden is that we start seeding in March and keep on planting until about August or September.  We are always adding new seeds.  Particularly with plants like green beans.  As a family, we prefer bush beans over pole beans, so we plant several rows of bush beans every two weeks all summer long.  This insures that we have a steady supply throughout the summer.

We also harvest all year long.  The asparagus is the first plant up in March or April and we keep on eating until well past the first frost.  Depending on your location (how far north you are), you can eat well out of your garden (without a greenhouse) for much of the three seasons.

Eliot Coleman’s book, Four-Season Harvest*, is one of my all time favorite gardening books and will give you a wealth of information and inspire you as to how long a growing season you can actually achieve.

PJ

 

 

*Amazon Affiliate Link

More Posts In This Series:(Previous Post) Rotating Your Vegetables in the GardenHow To Build a Cattle Panel Trellis (Next Post)

Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.

6 thoughts on “Gardening Isn’t Just for Summer

  1. I love the idea of anchor dates! My birthday is also in March so it would definitely be easy to remember. I’m just learning about the cold weather cropsfor my SFG so these pays have definitely been helpful. Thanks! 🙂

  2. LOVE this anchor dates plan… I’d never really thought about that! Thanks for sharing!

    • I don’t know about you, but if I say something like, “I’ll do that in 2 weeks”, next thing I know 4 weeks have gone by! Yikes! Anchor dates save me. LOL PJ

  3. It’s so great to garden 3 different times!! I didn’t know that watermelon and cantaloupe were “hot weather” plants. I may try planting then to see what happens! Unfortunately worms got to our zucchini plant this year. But all of our tomatoes are doing great!

    • I’ve been gardening my whole life and I always try to learn or try something new each year. Go for it! 🙂
      PJ

Comments are closed.