Seasonal Considerations
One of the most important things you can do in your garden is plan. Relying on the seasons to guide your garden planning efforts is extremely useful. Each season brings substantial changes to your garden. There are tasks that must be done, preparations to be made, and limits based on weather and temperature patterns. Accepting the various seasons’ constraints allows you to get the most leverage out of them.
Each season brings important tasks to plan and execute. Some of them are critical to the “here and now” of the garden; others help set your garden up for success later in the year. Since the four seasons are an endless cycle, there is no perfect or imperfect place to start reviewing the planning process.
Winter
Winter is the perfect time to plan since in most places there’s not much going on in the garden. It’s also a great time to buy seeds and tools, and spend some time maintaining tools you already have. You may want to consider clearing out beds, or doing some amendments over the long winters as well.
Spring
Spring is arguably the most popular and enjoyable time in the garden. You will want to identify a general date as to when your local area experiences its last frost of the year. Use this link to identify your local patterns. Some of the plants that will be planted in the spring are frost tolerant. This is specific for each species, however, it is common that the Brassica Family (cabbage, broccoli, kale) will tolerate some frost. To get a jump start on the spring season you will want to prepare flats or cups with soil, indoors, a few weeks prior to the last frost date. With last frost information you can start planning the timeline for your spring garden. More info on spring planting can be found here.
Summer
You’ll begin harvesting the majority of your fruits and vegetables during the summer, so you need to plan accordingly. Be ready to pick and store your crops as they become ripe, and have a good plan to make the most of them; you probably can’t eat all of those tomatoes yourself! Look into neighborhood swaps to expand what’s on your table and share some of the wealth you’ve generated. Prepare for canning, fermenting or other preservation techniques to store your bounty for the future.
Plan to put in some serious efforts keeping your garden under control during the summer months. You’ll have to weed your garden beds to keep unwanted plants from crowding out your fruits and vegetables. You’ll want to clear away any rotted or damaged fruits and vegetables from your gardens as well to keep the pests away. Keep your vegetables and fruit plants from being unruly as well. Stake plants like tomatoes to keep them from falling over onto other plants. Additionally, help climbing plants, like beans and peas, with support structures, so they develop correctly.
You want your garden to be productive for as long as possible. One way to increase its productivity is to sow late season crops you can harvest in the fall. Crops such as lettuce and beets can be sown again in July, and harvested right around first frost.
Fall
There are a handful of vegetables that are planted in the fall and harvested the following summer. Garlic is a prime example of these vegetables. If you want to have a great garlic harvest next summer, fall is the time to put the hard work in. Make sure you have sufficient seed garlic on hand, and a good, well-turned bed to plant them in.
Additionally, here are some other crops you should consider planting when the weather turns cooler:
Garlic
Cabbage
Beets (and beet greens)
Kale
Leaf lettuce
The first frost will kill most of your garden, save for the most cold-hardy plants. If you want plants to continue producing into the cold weather, you’ll need to use cold frames or greenhouses. Cold frames will buy you several more weeks of productivity on most vegetables, and even longer on winter-hardy ones.
If you grow heirloom fruits and vegetables, you can save the seeds from this season’s crop to plant next year. This will save you money, and it will help you ensure that you are planting only the most healthy, vigorous plants in your garden. Be sure to label them!
If you want to keep your garden productive for the long term, planting cover crops in the fall can definitely help. Fall is the optimal time to plant cover crops like clover, ryegrass, or snow pea in your otherwise fallow garden rows. These crops will help loosen compacted soil, add organic material and prevent erosion in your garden, so it will be even better next season. Plan for planting these cover crops a month or so before the first frost, and let them get your soil in shape for next year’s harvest.
There are several terrific fall cover crops. Here are a few you should consider for your garden:
Clover
Winter peas
Fava beans
Bell beans
Oats
Barley
Winter rye
Buckwheat
Oilseed radish
Mustard
Want to learn more about organic gardening?
Check out our full gardening guide.
