I haven't started any yet. I had thought I'd start them on June 1st, and here it is June 2nd and I'm already behind. I've got three long keeper varieties specifically for the fall garden, and then I'll dig through my seeds when I actually get around to starting them and see what I come up with. Often, for fall, I just flip through the seed packets I didn't use in the spring and randomly choose whatever sounds good.

For fall, how much I plant just depends on what time the spring/summer crops finish up and I also look at what is growing and ask myself what was missing from the spring garden. So, for this fall, I'm planning on fresh fall tomato plants, hoping to keep the same pepper plants, and will grow Littleleaf and County Fair cucumbers for fall pickles, a couple of types of romao type bush beans (Capitano and Purpriat), at least one type of pole bean (Flamingo), several succession crops of southern peas that will replace crops that come out in June or July, and I've got seed of Catskill (aka Long Island Improved) Brussels Sprouts for fall. The three long-keeper varieties of tomatoes I have are Reverend Morrow's Long Keeper, Garden Peach and Long Keeper. I'll probably plant 5 to 10 other varieties, mostly from seed, but I'm also likely to take cuttings of a couple of favorite plants that are in the garden now, like Nebraska Wedding and True Black Brandywine, and start those varieties from cuttings. The fall garden will have several varieties of carrots growing in a vole-proof bed now occupied by Irish potatoes. What else? Hmmm. Usually in late September or early October, whenever we finally cool down, I sow seeds of spinach, collards, kale, etc. That's about the last thing I plant in fall, other than eventually getting around to putting garlic in the ground around that same time...or later. Sometimes I sow seeds of bunching onions, but that will largely depend on whether or not we stay wet forever.

Usually, around this time of year, I sit and look at the autumn seed offerings from Territorial Seed and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and make some impulse seed buys for fall. I really like Frank Morton's Wild Garden Seed too, like his fall/winter salad blend.

My winter/spring garden is fairly well-planned and I grow about the same things every year. Then, as cool season plants are harvested and removed, I have a little more fun with summer succession crops, often just planting different varieties of melons and winter squash everywhere that I have a spare square foot. Sometimes I'm still sowing seeds of winter squash even in July. They grow well and give a marvelous late summer and autumn harvest. For the fall garden, I try to plant the things we like to eat fresh, like lots of greens, that we cannot grow in the summer months. With luck, the lettuce and other greens will produce until spring, when of course, they will bolt, but that's okay because we will have enjoyed them all winter. We have tons of space now that we have the back garden too, so really the sky is the limit. I just try not to plant more space than I'm willing to irrigate if the rain fails to fall in July and August.

Ha ha ha ha ha HA (maniacal laughter) I have 2 plants on my counter to give away and all the tomatoes will be gone and y'all are starting NEW ones. I was planning on doing that in a few weeks. But I only have 5 varieties I was going to add for fall. I am SOOO far behind, I am rethinking beds and dare I say it, if I REALLY want more tomatoes. I'm still trying to find room for pepper plants. Wishing beans set fruit in heat and if I should yank the tiny pole beans and plant Penny Rile cowpeas instead. Cukes after onions. Cow peas or late pole beans after garlic... maybe I'll leave the pole beans and and put the cowpeas in the post garlic bed. I've got a bunch of flowers that need ground that's not ready yet. Silly zinnias already have mildew. Is it even worth it to put them in the ground?

I still have 12 Early Girls to plant! They weren't damping after all, but I really, really need a few hours to work in the garden to get them planted (among other things like peppers). I did have time 4 days ago or so to plant three of them. They are having to go "ground level". Those three are doing well so far. Crossing my fingers that Monday is the DAY.

Amy, I still have three entire flats of peppers (largely ornamental, but at least a dozen that will produce edible fruit) and flowers, all raised from seed, that I am hanging on to so I can tuck them into garden spaces here and there as space opens up. I had hoped to get them into the ground earlier this week but weeded instead, knowing I can plant them on Saturday or Sunday when the rain finally goes away and lets us have some sunshine.

The ornamental peppers really are always intended for June planting and I often use them to fill in beds where peppers or potatoes had been grown/harvested from. What happens is that local stores get a lot of ornamental pepper plants in the stores in June and July and I always want to buy them when I see them, so these last few years, I have started seeds of my own ornamental peppers late (about a month after I started my tomato/pepper seeds) so they are ready to go into the ground, as space becomes available, at about the same time that the ornamental pepper plants begin to arrive in the local stores. I can raise a whole flat of ornamental peppers for the amount I'd spend to buy just a couple of them at a store in June or July.

The flowers are largely leftovers I haven't been able to get in the ground, but now that the rain is causing every disease known to mankind to hit my remaining lettuce plants, I've been pulling the lettuce plants and feeding them to the spoiled chickens this week, and that is opening up a lot of space to plant those flowers and ornamental peppers.

While diseases are showing up on everything in my garden that has sat there wet nonstop for the last three weeks, the one thing that has no disease at all is the zinnias. A river of water was running through my zinnia bed yesterday afternoon and probably still it as it gets hit by the runoff from higher ground next door to us that sits to their south. Yesterday's and today's rain may change that. When they get mildew I just yank them out and compost them, and push more zinnia seeds into the ground to replace them. It seems like once mildew hits zinnia plants, there's no way to really save them, and if you keep them, they just produce lots of mildew spores that can travel around and infect everything else.

Because I succession plant constantly, it is getting harder and harder to see that point where the spring/summer garden planting ends, and the summer/autumn planting begins, but the real distinguishing event probably is when I take out some of the existing tomato plants in order to plant new ones for fall, and that usually is at the very end of June or in early July.

As usual, most of the back garden isn't even planted yet because it has been too wet for most of May. Only the corn, a few fruit trees, and a few herbs (mainly garlic and comfrey) and flowers are growing back there. Sometimes I feel like I never get it planted on time, but I'm usually so preoccupied with the front garden that I just never make it to the back garden until the front garden is fully planted, and by then it is late April or May and raining every day if it isn't a drought year. I am really proud that I got the corn planted back there in late March because the back garden always seems to be behind and it is again this year, except for the corn. Now that we have had such tremendous rainfall, I probably cannot step foot in it for another week because that sandy/silty soil is like quicksand when wet. The minute it is dry enough that I can walk in there, though, I'll be sowing seeds back there like a maniac. I suspect that the back garden always will get treated like it is a second-class citizen until we get vole-proof raised beds back there. It is hard to get excited about planting it when I know the voles can pop up any day and eat the roots of everything. I have special plans for the voles this year and am going to plant a lot of castor bean seeds along the fence line, hoping that will discourage them.

I was normal when we moved here and planted in spring, and then very late in summer I'd plant a few things for fall. As the years went on and I learned the rhythm and cycle of the garden plants and knew when new space would become available, I began growing more and more flats of plants that I could tuck into openings as they occurred. One May, looking at far too many flats of home-grown seedlings still waiting for space to open up in the garden, Tim mentioned that he'd noticed over the last couple of years that I never stopped planting any more. He was right, and it made me realize what a plant hoarder I had become. I like having plants-in-waiting, though, because if there is a bare spot, I have to fill it. If I don't, Mother Nature will just take it upon herself to colonize the bare spot with weeds, so I'd rather have what I choose to plant growing there than what she chooses to plant.

Hazel, I hope that Monday is the day and that you're able to get those plants into the ground. They ought to have plenty of time to flower and set fruit before the late June heat that impedes pollination/fertilization sets in, and they'll be producing ripe fruit for you in July and August which often is when earlier plantings are starting to tire out.

I know a lot of people here around me who sort of plant their gardens all at once in April and that's that....when stuff finishes up producing they just leave the plants there to dry out and become insect-infested and don't do any new plantings until maybe it is time in August or September to plant a few things for winter. I just cannot do that. I am constantly taking out stuff that has become nonproductive and replacing it with a fresh new crop of something. I like to keep every square foot planted with something that is pretty or useful in some way. I like having a hoard/stash of plants and seeds that I can put in the ground as soon as open ground becomes available.

I am worried about grade level plants in my flooded garden, but we did put one new raised bed at the low end of the garden this spring and I hope to build a couple more over the winter. Just a couple more years and every bit of the front garden finally will be all raised beds, and then we can move on and start building raised beds in the back. It has been a very slow process over the years, but bit by bit we are getting more raised beds built. Except for the earliest years when we built a couple of new raised beds each year, we've probably added an average of one new raised bed per year. Most of them are 30-40' long, so even building one is a lot of work, especially now that we have to line them all with hardware cloth to keep out the voles, which is something we've only done the last 3 or 4 years. I cannot imagine we'll ever even get the back garden completed with raised beds before we get too old to keep building beds, but we'll try. Raised beds are the only reason my entire garden didn't die last year like all the grade-level gardens around us did. I can grow anything at grade level in a normal or drought year, but in the wet years, my grade level plants struggle to survive, largely because of runoff from higher ground to our south.

Dawn

James, I've been plotting my fall garden, too. I've got some more squash/zucchini seedlings started, and some cucumbers all ready to go out. I'm trying to keep some of those started, as replacements for diseased plants, and all the squash(es) grow well for me in the late summer/fall. I need to get my melon plants in the ground, as soon as it stops raining. I started 6 tomato seedlings, but I realized I started the wrong kind. I'd found a packet of "super boy" and apparently they take too long. I may go and buy a pack of "early girl" or something if I can find them. I noticed Lowe's has already pulled their seed packets. I bought some Kale seeds the other day at Stillwater Milling, and I may do some beans, collards, chard, and lettuce. Hmmm...maybe try some broccoli. A lot of my fall garden will depend on when the tomatoes need to be pulled, because I just have a "backyard" garden. I spent much of yesterday weeding/weed-whacking the garden. It really needs to dry out a little.

Mary

I'm going to start Black Moon tomato seeds today. I think that's it for more tomatoes, as I have a large (for me) planting of Sioux, Baker Family Heirloom and Heidi tomatoes.

I have Tuxhorns Yellow and Red plants up about 6' and ready to transplant. I grow Tuxhorns Yellow and Red as a fall crop. I produces large yellow beefsteaks with red streaks and marbling. The plants do great in heat. But the fruit rot when it's real hot. I grow this one in part because I "discovered it" in 1985 and it has never gained popularity, and in part because it makes the best fried green tomatoes of any tomato I've ever tried.

I still need to plant a few more squash and my cowpeas. I plan on a fall crop of Cherokee Striped Cornhill Pole beans, Tarahumara Dark Purple and Barksdale. I may yet plant Fowler Bush Beans and will certainly plant some Mecatlán Black half runners, which is a native bean from Veracruz, which we were given in 2000.

Earlier I mentioned that Territorial Seed Company has a catalog of fall and winter varieties that I enjoy receiving every year. Coincidentally, I got an email this morning telling me that their Fall and Winter 2016 Catalog now is available, both online or as a paper copy. You can click on the link below to see their six pages of highlighted crops for fall and winter harvest, or you can click on the "Request A Catalog" link to request that they mail you their fall catalog. I haven't looked at all the online pages of veggies yet, but I did notice that there's a lot of purple varieties for fall and I love the idea of having a purple fall garden.

Here's the link:

Territorial Seed: New Fall and Winter Items

I planted 4 kinds of Brussels sprouts last fall, 2 were purple. I had given up on some plants grown in buckets. They had been neglected. When we went to empty the bucket, here were dozens of little purple sprouts. At the end of May. They were either Rubine or Falstaff. I actually got enough sprouts this year for maybe 2 meals. Very few were as large as what you buy. My plants never get very tall. Maybe I'm not feeding them enough. I'm working on better soil. Do any of you have suggestions for better production? They are a big footprint for the tiny harvest I'm getting.

Well, I managed to post before I finished. A purple fall garden sounds fun and you have inspired me to do one that can be seen from the front. My Arkansas purple kale was pretty enough last winter to be considerd ornamental. I think I bought purple cauliflower seeds. Need some puple collards. Do they have those? Purple broccoli? I have purple cabbage seeds...

I have to look into how to do this. I have never started plants for a fall garden and I may want to this year

There's a variety of collard greens called Old Timey Blue. SSE has the seeds. The veins are a shade that might be considered purple or reddish blue or something.

Old Timey Blue Collard Greens

Then, there's the tree (perennial) collard greens from Bountiful Gardens. I've always thought that they look purplish. They can only be raised from cuttings.

Tree Collards

Many collard greens have the word 'blue' in their name it can refer to either blue-green leaves or to veins that might look blue-red-purple. SESE has Alabama Blue, though it is sold out right now. New seed is expected by planting time in late sumer:

Alabama Blue Collards

There are quite a few purple broccoli varieties including one called summer purple and one that is an overwintering purple. My favorite one, though, is available from Territorial Seed and is spectacularly gorgeous. It is called, appropriately enough:

Peacock Purple

Rubine is a reddish-purple B.S. plant. First, grow them in the ground in heavily amended soil to get great yields. Space them however far apart the seed packet says. I think I planted mine 3' apart the last time I grew them and worried that wasn't far apart enough. When they are happy, they spread out and get huge. Plant in summer for a fall harvest and, if you want lots of sprouts, when they are getting big and you think they are about to start producing sprouts, feed them a Bloom Booster plant food to get them to set lots of sprouts. If B.S. are happy with the weather, they produce like mad, but not if grown in buckets. They need space in the ground. Down here, fall brussels sprouts can start producing around December (maybe November if they were planted early enough and if the weather is pleasant) and continue until they start to bolt in late winter or early spring.

For Kale, Frank Morton at Wild Garden Seeds has a new one this year, and it is very similar to one I grew from his Wild Garden Kale seed mix a couple of years ago. I think it has blue in its name instead of purple, but I feel like blue or purple color is in the eyes of the beholder.

Blue Kale at Wild Garden Seeds

I could go on all night. I love, love, love the color purple and have grown all kinds of purple veggies including purple snap peas, both pole and bush purple snap beans, purple tomatoes, purple peppers, purple Irish potatoes, purple sweet potatoes, purple carrots, several different purple broccoli varieties and several kinds of purple greens, purple cauliflower, purple cabbage, purple ornamental kale, purple asparagus ,and purple bunching onions. There's purple radishes and purple sweet corn (which we obviously could grow for fall harvest, but not winter) but I've never grown either of them. I have lots of purple flowers in my garden too. I even grow artichokes, mostly for the purple blooms. It drives folks crazy that I don't havest the chokes to eat as chokes, but I like them more for the flowers. Nothing else you grow in your garden, in terms of flowers, can outshine artichokes in bloom. They look like something from Jurassic Park with those huge leaves and gigantic blooms.

I think it would be fun one year to do a garden with as many purple varieties as possible. Wouldn't that be gorgeous? Mix in flowers with purple blooms and purple herbs and it could be spectacular. Wow, if I don't do this for fall, I will do it for spring. I get bored doing the same old thing all the time, and this would be different. Or, I could start it with a purple fall garden and add to it and build upon it next spring.

One of my favorite purple Irish potatoes is this one, which has purple skin but white flesh. Really, as the photo shows, the skin really is pink and purple, leading me to think about a pink and purple garden, not just a purple garden.

Purple Viking Potato

Oh, I could go on all night. And, if we add fruit to the mix, there's even one or two purple strawberry varieties, although I have to admit that to me, the purple varieties look sort of like overripe red ones, though that's not what they are.

I figured Bulls Blood beets (though beets don't like me). There is a Scarlet Kale, pictures look purple to me, but red would be nice, too. The Scarlet Kale is supposed to be cold tollerant. Red Giant Mustard looks purple and Dragon's Tongue, which I already wanted just for looks, even though I'm not terribly fond of mustards. Kitizawa has MANY purple and red varieties of leaf veggies, from mustard to tatsoi to pak choi Purple Magic to

Tsugaru Scarlet, Hybrid turnip which appears to have purple stems.

Seeds of change says Osaka Purple mustard repels aphids. Osaka Purple
Kitazawa carries it, too.

It's the first week of June and I'm looking forward to fall! I just needed an excuse to buy more seeds.

Like that Peacock Purple broccoli. I saw the tree collards when I was searching earlier. I have a number of the things mentioned already. I just have to figure out how to make room for a brussels sprout footprint like you're talking about.

I know what you mean, Stockergal! I've been reading and pinning on Pinterest, then thought, "WHEN??!!" I figure I'll be looking at weed infested beds a week after school starts! (LOL, who am I kidding? The August heat will be killing me!)

I found some Early Girl seeds today at WalMart, and I'm gonna start a few for fall. I didn't grow any for the spring/summer garden. While I was out and about, I bought some seeds at Stillwater Milling. Their seeds are really cheap, and they give you enough to plant for the whole neighborhood. I picked up seeds for turnips, beets, Salad Bowl Red lettuce, Calabrese Broccoli, Beefsteak Tomato, Longstanding Bloomsdale spinach, Buttercrunch lettuce, Lucullus Swiss Chard, Early prolific straightneck squash, Long Island brussel sprouts, Bachelor buttons, Black beauty zucchini, Black seeded simpson lettuce, and Georgia southern collards. Each package is a full ounce or more, and are only $1 each. The Beefsteak seeds were a little more (like $3), but there must be at least 5000 seeds in the pack! I gotta stay away from seed/feed stores!

Amy, I often grow shorter, earlier plants in between brussels sprouts and collards plants and pull them out as they mature....the type depends on whether it is spring or fall, but you can use leaf lettuce, spinach, etc. Or even small cool-season flowers like violas and pansies. You can leave the flowers as a flowering (with edible flowers!) living mulch but I gradually harvest all the leaf lettuce and spinach before the b.s. or cauliflower plants get too large and start invading their space. The shorter kinds of nasturtiums work well for this too.

I love all the purple veggies and have the seeds of a ton of them already. I just never really thought about sort of making purple a focus and planting them all together as much as possible, but you can bet I am thinking about it now. Some places have mixed kale where you can get 4 or 5 or 6 kale varieties in one seed packet and usually several of those have reddish or purplish coloring. Mustards can be used to add lots of color. I like Osaka Purple, but I think the prettiest mustard plants I've ever grown were Ruby Streaks and Golden Streaks with the color of each one playing off the other.

stockergal and sandplum, It is too easy to dream of a fall garden in the midst of cool, wet early June weather, but a lot of summers, by the time July rolls around, the heat (in the garden and in the kitchen canning) is killing me and I lose my enthuiasm for a fall garden. What kills the enthusiasm even more quickly is snakes! If the garden is too snake-infested, I largely stay out of it for a few weeks, venturing in only to harvest. Still, even if I don't do a whole fall garden, I try to single out at least one raised bed (the long ones are about 40' long by 4' wide) and replant it with stuff for fall. I start with fall tomato plants in latest June or earliest July and expand from there. Much also depends on space available. Sometimes a lot of hot season crops are still producing well and I won't yank them out to replace them with fall plants. I just work around them as I can.

The nice thing about planting the fall garden is that I can slip out there early in the morning, plant, and water. Since Tim's alarm clock wakes me up at 4 a.m., I'm always up before the sun, have my indoor stuff done and can run out to the garden at first light, which often is the coolest part of a summer day here. Then, for a few weeks, all you really have to do is weed and water as the seeds spout and grow or the transplants settle in and grow. That makes it more bearable to me....just trying to get them going in the heat is hard enough some years.

In the fall the weeds can be challenging, but a lot of mulch used early when the plants are very small can help with that. Sometimes I plant the fall garden really late and then cross my fingers and just hope it all works out. Or, if the thought of a fall garden in the ground is too daunting, you could plant a few favorite things in large containers. That pretty much eliminates the weeding issue, and often the snake issue as well, especially if I drape bird netting over the newly planted containers to keep the snakes out. We accidentally trap a lot of snakes in bird netting every year, but I don't mind. I'd rather find a copperhead in bird netting, as I did less than 3 hours ago, than find it striking at me in a garden pathway or something. It is shocking how many venomous snakes we catch in bird netting in the garden. If I'm going to find them in the garden, that's the best way to find them as long as I'm not holding the bird netting in my hand at the time.

Mary, I can stay out of brick-and-mortar stores pretty easily, but when it rains all day, I am prone to shop online. This week, I made a firm vow to stay off the seed company websites so I wouldn't order a lot of seeds, and I kept that vow. Instead, I went to canning supply websites and bought canning supplies. It is easier than going from store to store looking for some of the more obscure items.

Dawn

Well, I'm getting all excited again. Haven't had much gardening besides onions! It's like it's only just beginning here since I missed the warm weather in March. The rest has been cool, cloudy and wet. I should have done broccoli! Next spring, I'll be sure to start some brassies, because ya never know!

It's so silly, but I was so proud of myself or succession sowing! I planted some okra and bush beans in and near the onion bed. As I was pulling the last of the onions, today, I noticed the little okra and bean sprouts were just the right size to need the light. The onions did a great job protecting them.

I know many of you grow annual or perennial flowers, but I really don't anymore. The front of my house gets all the sun (south and west) and I'd have to be out there watering constantly in the summer. What I'd like to do is maybe inter-crop some flowers into the fall garden (assuming I haven't thrown in the towel by late July). I love to look at pictures of cottage gardens and I wish I had that artistic streak to know just what looks pretty where. Do you all have any ideas of flowers that would work well for the fall? The flowers would only get about 6 hours of direct sun. I could start the seeds indoors under lights.

Mary

Bon, Congrats on the success with your succession sowing. Isn't it great to see the next little crop stepping up to take its place to grow and produce as the earlier crops is harvested? I love that sort of continuity.

Now that the big upper level low and its rainy spell has moved on, I'm sure we'll start feeling the impact of hot weather, but it has been so nice for so long that I can hardly believe it. We haven't hit the 90s in weeks now that I can recall.

Mary, Most of my summer flowers carry on deeply into fall and I let them so they can reseed. Most years we are in drought in July and August, so my garden plays the game of Garden Survivor then, and even with heavy irrigation, some times some plants just don't survive. Whatever makes it through heat, drought, and grasshoppers gets to bloom in the fall. For me, that's usually all kinds of Zinnias, Laura Bush (heat-tolerant) petunias, cleome, French Hollyhocks (Malva sylvestris), moss rose, marigolds (if the spider mites don't get them), lantana (not raised from seed, obviously), gomphrena (especially the variety "Strawberry Fields"), celosias, amaranths, four o'clocks (they won't die, and you can't kill them, though the summer of 2011 set them back severely), cannas, angelonia (I buy these annuals because I have found that raising them from seed is incredibly slow---they start out very small like begonias from seed and stay that way seemingly forever), dianthus (mine grow year-round and bloom on and off in cycles as long as I deadhead them occasionally). All these grow and bloom in full to part sun. I also usually have balsam, though it needs part shade in my garden to make it through drought spells, and nicotiana, which I've had in full sun to part sun, and it tolerates both but is happier if in shade in late afternoon. I also like to grow Texas Hummingbird Sage (I believe I got my original seed from either Seeds of Change or Wildseed Farm) and Salvia farinacea from seed. Oh, and purple coneflowers.

Usually we stay awfully warm down here until around October, so the summertime, warm-season flowers last forever. Some years I have grown pansies, violas and snapdragons from seed sown in summer for fall color, and some years I have done the same with all kinds of ornamental cabbage and ornamental kale, but I generally cannot put that sort of thing in the ground until the weather cools off a lot, like maybe October or even November.

For summer plantings, I sprout seeds indoors and move them outdoors the very minute a tiny green sprouts breaks through the soil surface. I figure they are going to have to deal with the weather as it is anyhow, so they might as well get used to it from the start. I have found they tolerate the summer and autumn heat better if they have grown up in it than if they have had cushy indoors lives and then have to adjust to heat and drought.

Dawn

What's best for my garden, to plant a winter cover crop in September that will be tilled in to ammend my garden soil ...... or to plant a fall garden ?

It depends on what is your priority? Is is more important to get a fall harvest (and then you can rototill the residue under to decompose in the soil) or to plant a winter cover crop? Or, why not do both? Plant a winter cover crop in half the garden and a fall garden in the other half? Then, next summer, do the same thing but switch the halves. In any given year, I do whatever seems more important to me at the time.