Planning the Fall & Winter Garden

If you were to be a fly on the wall in my home in the early hours of any given weekend morning, you would probably find my kitchen table looking something like this…

That is because I love, love, love to plan.  I have lists and diagrams and ideas and hopes and failures all written in that little grey binder.  I have plastic containers full of seeds and struggle regularly with where to put them all in the actual dirt on our small plot of land.

This is the first full year we are attempting a 4 season garden.  Last year was an experiment and we did pretty well, all things considered.  Last November we threw some beets, onions and garlic in one of the beds and threw some kale and cauliflower in another bed and then topped them with plastic for the winter.  We checked on them every few weeks and watered them when they got a little dry.  Miraculously, it didn’t all die.  As the months dragged on, we added in some spinach and actually harvested several pounds of yumminess over several months.

We learned that winter gardening is a much slower process and requires lots of patience, but that there’s nothing quite like picking fresh spinach from your garden when there’s snow on the ground!

Alright, fast forward to now.  It’s July and hotter than (excuse my language) hell out there.  We have gotten very little rain, the sun feels like it’s trying to bake us into the ground and yet I’m thinking about cold weather veggies.  Who knew!?

Well, right now, most of the beds are full to the brim with summer veggies, so most of what I’m doing consists of sitting at my kitchen table with pencil in hand, plan, plan, planning.  However, the bed we used for onions and garlic last year is sitting mostly bare since the harvesting of said veggies.  I have a couple of rows of bush beans up front, but the back was bare until recently when I threw in 2 rows of broccoli and a bunch of Buckwheat as a cover crop until the scorching heat subsides a bit.

Here is my current list of veggies to plant (from seed, direct sowed) mid August – early November, both in raised beds and directly in the ground.  Mind you, these plans are still tentative, I have many weekends ahead of me to tweak location and items, but this is a good start:

Broccoli (DiCiccio)
Radishes (Cherry Belle)
Carrots (Cosmic Purple, Carnival Blend & Parisienne)
Kale (Red Winter and Red Russian)
Beets (Early Wonder…I’m searching for golden beet seeds, but have had zero luck so far)
Turnips (Purple Top White Globe)
Spinach (Lavewa and Bloomsdale)
Snap Peas (Dwarf Grey and Super Sugar Snap)
Swiss Chard (Fordhook Giant)
Garlic (hard neck and soft neck varieties, from heads we’ve either grown or gotten through our CSA)

Broccoli sprouts!!!

What are you planning for your fall and winter gardens?