It's Never Too Late to Start to a Vegetable Garden!

How did it get to be mid-June already? Father’s Day is just days away - many people, gardeners in particular may be feeling where did the summer go? Time flies by our busy lives as we juggle taking care of family, work and ourselves - making us feel like we never have enough time. The good news is, summer has not even officially started yet, so we can all take a collective deep breath.

Over the years of installing gardens, one of the most repeated reasons we heard why people hadn’t started the garden was that they felt they ran out of time. “Before I knew it was the end of June or July 4th.“ We would hear over and over again. “Why bother at that point, by the time I get anything going, summer will be over.” I find more and more how instant gratification is permeates so many aspects of our society‘s lives. We want things done yesterday, once we’ve decided to actually make the decision to do something.

Gardening can’t be rushed, you may be able to nudge Mother Nature along little, but that’s all you will really be able to get away with with her. Many people find the months of May and June rush by and the blow off any thoughts of starting a garden in July or August because to them what’s the point? They miss the growing season didn’t they? It would be too late to start a garden, would it?

No! It’s never too late to put in a garden bed and depending upon what zone you’re in, you may be able to start a garden 12 months throughout the year, while others may have to wait for snow so far. 

If you goal is vegetable gardening yes there are certain plants that can be seeded throughout the year. If you’re just starting your garden and it’s July or August , we suggest you begin with planting some herbs in the bed first. Herbs starts can be found your round at a local nursery or farmers market. Flowers too, such as marigolds are geraniums will give you a raise bed instant color which will spread out and last into the fall. But what about the vegetables? By this time they’re usually are no more starts to be found at the farmers market or nurseries so you will have to start from seed. 

There are plenty of delicious fresh vegetables which can be seeded in July and August delivering to you a delicious fresh harvest in September and October. By midsummer, the sun is strong and it will heat the soil in your new raise garden bed quickly. Raised bed gardens warm up faster than in ground garden beds and depending upon the material used can be a few degrees warmer too.

There are a multitude of quick growing vegetables that enjoy summer heat. We look for slow-bolting and heat tolerant seed varieties that work better in the hot summer. When starting a garden “late” in the season, we look for quick-growers that will give us a harvest before the growing season is through.  These vegetables don’t take too long to reach full maturity and most of the specific ones listed, we have used successfully in our clients’ gardens, as well as our own.[The links I include are for your convenience, I do not get any profits from any of the sales from the seeds, but I do recommend these companies]. Some vegetables are generally known to be quick growers such as radishes and lettuce. Many times we will use this quick growers when we do succession plantings in our garden. These quick growers generally  take less than a month to reach full maturity on average. Cherry bell radishes ( 22 days) or French breakfast radishes (25 to 30 days) or Viola radishes (24 days) - all can be enjoyed in a salad that’s all homegrown in a little over a month from the time a garden is started. 

A few years ago we added a second garden bed for a client - it was around mid-summer when the decision was finalized, so when we planted the new garden bed we planted a fall garden, meaning that everything would be harvested in late September- early October. We seeded summer squash, turnips, lettuce, beans, carrots. Summer squash loves hot summer soil and we picked a variety that matured in around 60 days, yielding multiple, bountiful fall harvests. Certain varieties can take even less time such Yellowfin and Sunburst squash which mature in 50 and 55 days, respectively. Or look for a super quick grower like Fortune squash which which matures in as little as 39 days! Tokyo Cross turnips mature in a quick 35 to 60 days and Golden Ball Turnips 45 to 65 days. 

Seeding the new raised bed 

Beans love the summer heat and there are plenty of varieties they can be enjoyed into the fall months like Speedy beans (50 days) or Wyatt beans (54 days). Other varieties include Calima, Mascotte and Golden Butter Wax.

Beets are also quick growers and there are plenty of variety that are heat tolerant. Early Wonder Tall Top beets mature in 45 days and are adaptable to all seasons. Touchstone Gold only take 53 days and Pablo beets 45 days. Bulls Blood and Golden beets also only take 50 days to mature.

Kale is another quick grower which should be sown in July to enjoy your fall crop. Nero di Toscana for instance matures in 50 days as does Redbor kale. 

It’s also not too late to enjoy carrots. There are a variety of carrots which one seeded in late July to early August can be enjoyed by the end of fall, early winter. Mini Adelaide carrot take 50 days, Mokum carrots take only 56 days, , CandySnax 65 days, Napa 63 days and Yaya carrots only 60 days.

There are even some cucumber varieties which can be started in late July which will allow you a harvest by summer’s end such as Chicago Pickling, 55 days to maturity but can be harvested smaller. Or Double Yield cucumbers 55 days or Excelsior and Straight 8 at 50 days.

It’s important to remember to think about the days needed to germinate as well which can range from 5 to 12 days on the average. This adds time to the overall time before your harvest comes in.

Fall garden favorites include a return to some of the cold crops of spring. The days maybe getting shorter and the nights cooler but that doesn’t mean an end to the growing season necessarily. There is plenty of arugula, lettuce, spinach and Swiss chard do you continue to enjoy in the fall if you didn’t have a chance to start your raised bed garden until late summer.

Fall, of coarse, is the only time to plant garlic bulbs which will overwinter and produce healthy harvests the following summer. We love cooking with garlic, onions and shallots so we always include these in our garden. These ingredients can add up if you use them a lot at the grocery store so growing them in our own garden is much more economical in the long run. Adding these bulbs couldn’t be any easier to plant too and it always makes us feel good to know that something is going on underneath all that snow in the winter time. There is also a wide variety of overwintering vegetables which can be seeded in the fall which will produce an early spring harvest; these include peas onions shallots and spinach. Spring onion seeds that are sown in August will be ready to harvest in early spring,  White Lisbon is a winter hardy variety that we have with had success with in the past. 

Autumn is also a good time to start an asparagus bed but choose autumn planting varieties like Pacific Purple. You can add another variety in the springtime to the raised bed.

Extend the season with a cold cover

cabbage and pak choi

Finally there are a few more veggies that can be started late in the season but require a little protection like a cold frame or cold cover. With a little protection you can enjoy winter salads, carrots , cabbages and pak choi through out the entire winter, particularly if you are lucky enough to have a greenhouse!

Life gets busy and there is no perfect time sometimes to do things, we just do them when we can get to them. So if you find you’re interested in growing your own food and you think it’s too late - know that it’s not.  Remember even starting late in the season you will be able to enjoy healthy harvests and will be ready to go come the following spring.

Tower Garden

If you want to push things along a little and don’t want to spend time setting up a raised bed gardens but you’re interested in growing your own food you can start a Tower Garden. Tower Gardens grow food three times faster and produces 30% greater yields on average than traditional methods. 

Dreams of Fresh Vegetables

Happy New Year! The New year always brings with it the thoughts of fresh starts and new beginnings, dreams of fresh vegetables...

It’s January 26th and we just had our first snowstorm of the 2016 season over the weekend The National Weather Service had been touting it a ‘historic’ storm making me skeptical that we would even get any snow.  As it turns out, we had about 16 inches dumped in our backyard and NYC broke historic records but Snowstorm Jonas only ranked #2 in that area overall.  Officials were worried about the potential for flooding as Saturday was also a full moon event and thankfully the winds switched from coming from the northeast to north alleviating much of the well-founded concerns. They predicted the worse of the storm would by in the Washington, DC area, which certain did get hit but the storm cruised up the coast and targeted New York City before heading out to sea.  Queens hit the hardest had upwards of 30”+.  As it turns out Snowstorm Jonas took 30 lives from start to finish, putting states as far south as Georgia and Tennessee on state of emergency. As of last night news, many people in the outer boroughs of New York were still trapped in because of snow-clogged streets.

Marley checking out the garden

Everything looks okay here

Looks like it could use more hay

The aftermath of #snowstormjonas

A thick blanket of snow

The day before the storm I took a walk in our backyard to survey everything before the fresh white blanket would cover everything.  I put some hay down on a few beds and containers I had neglected earlier this winter or looked a little thin, particularly for what was heading out way. I enjoyed the quiet before the storm and started to think about last year’s garden as it pertains to this year’s garden.  Remembering the beds filled with vines of cucumbers, squashes and cherry tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers and heirloom tomatoes. Right now it’s a blank canvas.

Since Christmas there as been an influx of seed catalogs being delivered to our mailbox. I love sitting with a stack of these catalogs on dreary winter days and dream about the delicious and beautiful possibilities we can have in our garden.  It’s difficult not to want to fill up the garden with delectable varieties of heirloom tomatoes. My eyes widen as I glance through the beautiful and enticing photos, wanting to plant more and more every year.  We had a client this year who bought so many plants for her garden that we had to make the garden grow space bigger with grow bags since she didn’t have enough room in the raised beds.  This year I purposely didn’t open any catalogs up until I drew out my detailed plan for year’s garden first.  We use crop rotation as a method of organic gardening. Crop rotations lessen the chances of soil borne diseases from building up.  We always amend our soil before growing but planting things in the same place year in and year out leads to trouble.  Things may continue to grow but not as prolifically and may even die off once they have started depending upon how severe the soil situation has gotten.  Same place year in year out leads to nothing but trouble and more work for the home gardener, which can be easily avoided by implementing a simple crop rotation. 

I printed out a copy of last year’s garden to remind myself of things – it’s difficult keeping 20+ clients gardens straight and I tend to forget about my own record keeping at times. There is a fabulous garden planner online called Mother Earth News Vegetable Garden Planner - we highly recommend it! 

We love growing things that we can preserve and can– allowing us to enjoy our harvests well after the season has passed.  Last year we made a lot soups, as well as our traditional sauces.  Some of the new things we tried were huge hits with the family and will be added to this year’s roster of things to grow.  I highly recommend growing something new and different each season – even if you think you are not fond of something try growing it first before you make up your mind completely.  I say this because for most of my adult life I thought I hated summer squash that is until I grew it myself.  Perhaps its because I was a city-kid and didn’t always get the freshest of vegetables or perhaps the variety of squash available to me in the mass market of grocery stores offered a bland variety which traveled well and looked good but had little flavor. I tend to think it is more the latter since studies show that the produce we purchase at the grocery store has traveled on average 1500 miles before reaching our hands!

Some of the repeated favorites that had a second or third go round in our garden included growing our own potatoes.  After a few years of growing potatoes and last year doing it both in grow sacks and in the raised bed – I will always grow our potatoes in grow sacks – we harvested many more in the sacks than we did in the garden. Plus it was a royal pain in the ass to harvest the potatoes from the raised beds – having to carefully hand dig them up so as not to harm the potato.  The grow bags I simply dump the bags out over our sifter we made for sifting compost and collect the used soil to spread somewhere else for reuse.  Again the flavors from the different varieties are unmatched by anything available in the grocery store – plus growing potatoes has got to be one of the easiest vegetables to grow, particularly in grow bags where you can eliminate some of the pest problems that can plague in ground grown potatoes.  We also grew corn last year – our third year growing corn. Last year’s harvest was pretty good but I think this summer I will go back to the Three Sisters bed and couple corn up with beans and squashes.  The 3 Sisters is an ancient Indian organic farming method that employs the usage of companion plants to benefit one another. The beads provide nitrogen for the squash and corn while the corn provides support for the beans to grow and the squash protects the soil from weeds and protects the crops from critters with their thorny vines.

Last summer we tried a whole bunch of new things including spaghetti squash and sweet potatoes. Loved, loved, Loved – the sweet potatoes! Yes we grew our own sweet potatoes – two different varieties New Jersey Yellow and Okinawan Purple. Many people confuse sweet potatoes with yams and I will address the differences and confusion in another blog post very soon. We also grew Brussels sprouts – these delicious treats took a while to mature but it was well worth the wait.  I even cut down the last of the stalks right before the storm and harvest a number of baby sized Brussels sprouts; what they lack in size, I am sure they will make up in flavor.  I have definitely noticed that the flavor in homegrown food is so much tastier than anything bought at the store.  When I first started growing carrots and these little things came out of the ground as opposed to a 6 inch long carrot – it didn’t make much of a difference when it came to taste – it was like concentrated carrot!

New things this season I would like to include would be melon – although we’ve grown watermelon before, the sugar box small ones in containers in the past quite successfully – I would like to try growing a cantaloupe.  Varieties like a Golden Jenny catch my eye; described by the Rare Seeds catalog as “an outstanding golden meated version …short vines go wild with succulent sweet 2 lbs beauties… Early and productive.” Who wouldn’t want to grow those?! Or another variety called “Collective Farm Woman” described as an heirloom from the Ukraine that the “melons ripens to a yellowish gold and the white flesh has a very high sugar content. Ripens early even in Russia and tolerates comparatively cool summers.” We had cool summers for the last two seasons, so this perks my interest.  I get lost in descriptions of some of the possibilities – words like succulent, sweet and prolific pull me in.  I love the stories associated with some of the varieties and the names like Drunken Woman Frizzy Headed Lettuce, Paul Robeson and Mortgage Lifter catch my eye as I peruse the pages of food porn.  Learning the history behind the fruits and vegetables adds to my enjoyment of planning out the gardens.

One thing I plan on including in the garden this summer is a sunflower garden. I love to include sunflowers since they add a certain majestic beauty to the garden. I’m looking to include many varieties with colors ranging from the pale yellows of a Giant Primrose to the bold reds seen in a Red Sun.  Along with the sunflowers we’ll include pole beans that will happily run up the strong stalks and help them stand tall throughout the season. 

Flowers are an important part of the garden and including edible flowers such as sunflowers, nasturtiums, pansies and many other varieties can do double duty in the garden providing nectar for pollinating bees and color to the garden as well as delicious treats to add to your own meals. 

There are 6 weeks until spring officially starts, I know they will whizz by in the blink of an eye despite being cold and snowy.  Time waits for no one and it’s the perfect time to dream and plan.

"A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms. - Zen Shin