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Fall Gardening
161 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, we'll share some tips and tricks for fall gardening, such as crops suitable for fall planting, specific planting dates, and how to protect your crops from frost. No matter your situation you can enjoy the beauty and bounty of fall gardening with some of these tips and tricks.
Home Vegetable Gardening in Kentucky
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Horticulture Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Horticulture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
00:00:17
Speaker
We're back, still sounding froggy. Feeling froggy? I don't know, are you guys feeling froggy? Or is it just sounding froggy? What is froggy? I mean, it is whatever you want to be. Like you want to jump. Like that's right. You feeling froggy? Jump, jump, jump. Who wants it? You're not content on your little lily pad.
Froggy Enthusiasm for Fall Gardening
00:00:37
Speaker
That's right. We are moving. We're jumping into ball gardening today. We're feeling froggy about fall.
00:00:55
Speaker
I mean, do we get out of gas? Is it that time of year? It's hard and strong. Burned bright. Yeah. Burned bright like a diamond. Josh told me one time I'm like a star. Like when I go out, I'm going to just be a black hole and I'm going to suck everybody in. It'll be like this brilliant burst of light and then everything will get pulled in. I remember that when I'm feeling really bad. I'm just like, you know what? Don't be the star. Josh thinks you are. Not even light shall escape me.
00:01:07
Speaker
Oh, keep going.
When to Start Fall Gardening?
00:01:31
Speaker
It is a hot and it is July, but that does not mean that it's not time to start thinking about cooler weather.
00:01:40
Speaker
And with cooler weather, we start thinking about our fall garden. Do we? It is time to be thinking. Actually, it's beyond time to be thinking. It's time to be doing for the fall garden by mid-July, so. Yeah. So, July is kind of like the April of the fall garden, the March-April, you know? Yeah.
00:02:09
Speaker
You're in that mode of like, you should have made plant if you were going to start stuff from seed. You probably should have done that four to six weeks ago. Like if you wanted to have broccoli transplants of your own that you were growing. Now the good news is you can get those other places. This was something when I started
00:02:25
Speaker
back when I worked at the horticulture research farm and when I had started growing stuff before that, just realizing like how when for a commercial operation, for a commercial operation. Yeah, I mean, it's it's like, as soon as you start into picking tomatoes, you need to be thinking about planting your fall garden. Like that's the reality of that. I had a commercial producer call me and he's hanging baskets and he's got a big mum pad.
00:02:51
Speaker
lots of mums, but he grows some vegetables. And so he called me up. He said, so when do we need to be thinking about broccoli? And I was like, well, about two days ago.
Broccoli Timing Challenges
00:03:01
Speaker
And because he was unaccustomed, it's exactly what you're saying, Brett. It catches even growers. I mean, he was not primarily a vegetable grower, even though he does that. He doesn't typically produce his fall transplants. And it really kind of shocked him a little bit. He said, oh, because broccoli is like five to seven weeks, depending on how you start it and get it going.
00:03:19
Speaker
and he's like oh gosh I gotta get going on that and it even caught a commercial grower by surprise that he needed to be doing that because it's something he didn't think about normally. Just to give a quick little rundown we've shouted out ID 128 many many times before we will continue to do so this is a publication on home gardening from the University of Kentucky and within it the
00:03:45
Speaker
I'm just gonna give you the rundown here of the things that say that the date of planting is July through some point in August, okay? Beets, bib lettuce, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, collards, endive, green beans. We're gonna maybe talk about that later and how we might have to do some
00:04:08
Speaker
Jiggery pokery there, kale kohlrabi, leaf lettuce, parsnips, you're too late. I'm sorry, parsnips lovers of the world should have had those in June. Radishes you can plant as late as September. So I'm just, you know, I'm not going to continue down this list, but there are a bunch of them. You can go in and check out Table 13 in ID 128 and get a sense. And some of those are recommended to be planted as transplants. Luckily, a lot of the fall and spring stuff is direct seeded, which is good.
00:04:39
Speaker
Yeah, now between now July and August is when you might be planning out your or executing your successional planting of like, if you want to have some fall salads, planting every two weeks, planting some out some bib lettuce, if you want to have some carrots that you're going to put away, and you're going to eat now and then be put some away, you're going to maybe be planting carrots every two weeks, July through the end of August. And with all of those things, are we
00:05:07
Speaker
You know, in the, in the spring in Kentucky, we talk about like Derby day.
00:05:11
Speaker
or Mother's Day if you're part of the rest of the normal world as this point in our part of the country of like the first day where we're like, there's pretty much not gonna be a frost this day, right? The first frost free date. Are we thinking about that on the
The Art of Fall Gardening Planning
00:05:29
Speaker
back end? Like there's a first frost of the year or scary time? Fall gardening is even more so about the math because we're not as attuned
00:05:40
Speaker
to the planting schedules and we're trying to reverse engineer everything from that October 15th or October 20th date, our first typical frost. So we're trying to reverse engineer everything back from that. It's one thing you've already mentioned that some things are direct seeded, some things are transplant. It's even more difficult if you're going to grow your own transplants because then you have to add five, seven weeks to the time that you want it in the ground.
00:06:09
Speaker
So yeah, that fall gardening is all about math and doing a little bit of garden math and just reversing back from that day in October that you know, there's a good chance that it's going to frost. Yeah, it's a good point. And not everything, you know, we don't have to be afraid of a frost, right, for all the fall crops. We need to be more afraid of a freeze and a hard freeze, you know, that
00:06:35
Speaker
can kill certain things. And even then, some things will persist beyond that. I don't know the hard freeze. I will bring up the time Alexis dressed up as Mr. Freeze for staff meeting. And I was traumatized by that just a little bit. You were traumatized? I look great. You will not put me in the pool. I was not ready for that, though. It's still a form of trauma, even though it's good. I don't think you know what trauma means. Yeah, that sounds like amazing. Maybe it's played on all pre-existing fears.
00:07:04
Speaker
I was blue, I chiseled these cheekbones with blue and I was frosty. Did you take it from... Oh, were you Jack Frost or were you Mr. Freeze? No, I was...
00:07:19
Speaker
No, no, I was from the Christmas movie, um, a year without, uh-huh. I think it was a year without a Santa Claus. The old, one of the old claymation ones where you had like the guy, uh, summer and you had a nightmare before, uh, Thanksgiving. Just combining movie titles. Yeah. 300.
00:07:48
Speaker
It's kind of a mishmash of themes that were in Alexis's character. Hard freeze can bring fear to your heart and a surprise. Well, my co-worker was Summer because she's red-headed and so she was all red and I was white and blue and we sang a song. Now I'm going to have to find it and I'll post it in her stories.
00:08:13
Speaker
Oh, I sang in front of all of my coworkers. What did you sing? Give us a little snippet. I sang the song. Give us the iTunes preview. I will find it and play it. You all continue to talk about Fall Garden. I'm going to post on YouTube so I can link to it in the show notes. I'll report back. Okay.
Choosing the Right Varieties for Fall
00:08:31
Speaker
I think, Ray, we were talking earlier, in addition to the math,
00:08:36
Speaker
There's also a component that you need to think about too, which is that there are varieties that work better. Sorry, they are within like green beans, for instance, or within carrots. Those are two good examples. There are some varieties that work really well for a spring and summer garden. And there's other ones that we might want to think about for fall. Yeah, there really is because the growing conditions are flipped.
00:08:59
Speaker
Instead of going from cooler, shorter days, we're doing just the opposite. And there's been a lot of work done on variety selection for those conditions. And I think it's Tennessee, Tennessee Extension. Our partners down there, down south, have done a lot of work on that. I'll have to look that up. But they have some great charts. I'm fairly certain it's Extension Service in Tennessee.
00:09:27
Speaker
have put some nice charts out that talk about things that work much better when they're summer planted things that will germinate in those harsh conditions not only germinate but they'll do well with the heat because heat's a big issue you know we talk about
00:09:42
Speaker
And I'll back up just a little bit here. As I'm working, particularly like with homeowners, it's a tough sell for me when I get to the point to say, oh, are you going to do a fall garden? They're like, what are you talking about? I'm just making it through summer to meet a boy. It's 100 degrees. I have kids in softball or soccer or whatever. We're running 10 different directions. We're getting ready for school. So this podcast is hort culture.
00:10:08
Speaker
and it's sort of a cultural thing and a timing thing and a family kind of scheduling thing but it seems like everybody's excited and you know with kind of winter ending and spring coming on that's an easy sell I can sell that when the days get warm everyone is ready I think they lay some kind of you know
00:10:30
Speaker
illicit drug in gardening magazines because everybody's eyes dilate and they're ready to go. We're ready to plant and get things in the ground. That is just drugs, apparently. Yeah, apparently something. It is something. Maybe it's garlic. I don't know what it is. Eyes wide, full heart. Yeah. Just wide open, going in the spring, ready to garden. It is not that way for summer when I tell people that. Not that way.
00:10:59
Speaker
I feel, I'm sorry, I was Googling, it was Snowmizer, by the way. Heatmizer, Snowmizer. I'm Mr. Snowmizer, I'm Mr. Winterfun. I think I feel like I need the tune, maybe. Oh, I mean, we're gonna play the tune. We're gonna play us out with the tune, I think, but- I like that. Yeah. Give me something to look forward to. Yeah, I'll have to- Like the fall garden. It gives me something to look forward to. There's like two pictures in existence of me in that costume.
00:11:25
Speaker
Maybe three it's the one i took you didn't know going back to talking about timing is everything with crops i think one thing we have to mention and if you mentioned this i'm sorry.
00:11:41
Speaker
But talking about, we've mentioned this before, that is days to maturity on crops, it'll say on your seed package, right? Days to maturity. Usually when we're going from spring into summer, so when we're going from cool weather into warm weather, we can look at kind of that shorter end of that range. So if it says 50 to 60 days, it'll probably be closer around 50.
00:12:01
Speaker
When we're looking at going from warm to cool, where the maturity time is during the cooler part, also, not only is it cooler, but there's less daylight versus days getting longer, days are getting shorter, which also matters. It takes longer for things to grow. It takes longer for things.
00:12:18
Speaker
So you have to go on those longer days. Those days of maturity are still something good that you should, you know, look at and do the math with, but that's kind of the reason there's that, um, spread there. And so we want to go with those longer days when we're looking at that, but because things mature slowly and because we're going into cooler nights, um, instead of warmer nights, the sugar contents are better for a lot of our crops. So, um, when people tell me they want to grow broccoli or cauliflower,
00:12:46
Speaker
I usually try and convince them to do it in the fall, mostly because there's a lot of summer crops that are exciting to get started. Broccoli and cauliflower are typically not one of them, but if you hold off on those, make space for them in your fall garden. The starches convert to sugars as those nights cool down, and so you have a better tasting product
00:13:08
Speaker
And you also have products like, Brett, you mentioned earlier, you've grown some carrots and certain carrots do better and they store better when they have come from a cooler soil than a warmer soil. It will literally, and on the seed packet, it will literally say this is a good warm season carrot or a fresh eating carrot or whatever you want to call it. And then other ones will say that will be described as a storage carrot. And that's what they're talking about is that you're storing it. I mean, you could theoretically grow it in the summertime and then store it, but in general, you're trying to
00:13:38
Speaker
grow it and put it into the fridge and store it for as little time as possible just for logistics and everything else within a commercial operation. But within your home, like we have done and taken a whole drawer in our fridge and filled it up with really tasty carrots that we stored for a while. Yeah. And yeah, it definitely I think it has something to do with like the nature of the
00:14:00
Speaker
I don't know if it's a cuticle or something on the outside of the taproot, like doesn't, it retains moisture a little bit better. They don't get wobbly and floppy as quickly. Um, that's a technical term. I think that the wobbly and floppy. They retain that tragedy, baby. Um, but, uh, yeah, and I, I think that there's also, I would echo what you're saying about the, the quality differences of certain crops in certain contexts.
00:14:30
Speaker
Um, a hundred percent. And the way that was explained to me, I don't know if this is right or not, is that the part of the reason for like some of that, um,
00:14:38
Speaker
the higher sugar content is it's a response. It's like a freeze prevention response. Yeah. That's what gives them their resistance. So the sugars go into the cells, the parts of the plant from the roots. They go into the leaflets or the, whatever florets and they increase the, uh, the concentration of that. And as we know from our chemistry classes, a higher concentration, like something like salt water freezes at a higher temperature.
00:15:06
Speaker
or sorry, it freezes lower temperature, it can go to a lower temperature before freezing. It prevents the freezing of the water. Basically, a little kale plants like, Oh, I don't want to freeze and I'll just come and rip those leaves off and say thank you. Thank you. It's amazing the quality difference. I mean, it is things if I've, you know,
00:15:25
Speaker
We've done taste tests, and you can look at the results from different taste tests from farmers markets or from wherever, whatever source. And it's just always better and more well received. Those products like broccoli, for instance, if they're under those conditions where it's cooler, and they were harvested under cooler conditions, it's a completely different product. It really helps. Summer collards are for like diehards. You know, you gotta be like a green fan. They bid up.
00:15:54
Speaker
or cook them in bacon fat for six years. In that case, you probably should have just waited until fall because it's been six years at that point. That's all a lot of fat, baby. That's the way to do it. We just pretend that the baby is good for us. Yeah, exactly.
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah, those are cool weather crops. It makes sense that you want them at their peak when they're going to thrive the most versus the opposite of they're just getting started and the soils are cool, which is good for cool weather crops. But then when they are reaching their peak, a lot of the time, at least in Kentucky, we're hitting
00:16:34
Speaker
Sometimes we're getting like 90 degrees in June. According to my temperature blanket that I'm crocheting, we did hit over 90s in May and no, or the first two days of June, we were 90 or above. According to my temperature. According to your temperature blanket? Yes. Yeah, I don't know what that is. Is it telling you the temperature or you just use a certain yarn based on what temperature it was? Wouldn't you like to know?
00:17:00
Speaker
I would, that's, yep. Yeah, it sounds like some secret knowledge. It sounds like it's talking to her maybe, which is why I maybe would talk offline about my concern for you.
00:17:16
Speaker
It's not Alexis's line of spokes. Josh is like the guy who does all the weather reports for the college. He's like, let me just call you later. What's your blanket telling you? Can you pass your magic blanket? You've heard of being a wet blanket.
00:17:31
Speaker
Lexus is a weather blanket. I don't know what that entails. No idea. So cool. Yeah, and you know when we haven't, I don't know if you said this while I was Googling, but it's not on this list. Let me make sure before I say it out loud. Yeah, it's not on this list as part of the fall garden, but is something we plant in the fall is garlic.
Garlic: An Easy Fall Planting Choice
00:17:56
Speaker
Yes. So garlic is in Kentucky. We plant in October for a June, July harvest, depending on the type it is the following year. So garlic is something I love. Garlic is something cool because number one, most people use it in some form or fashion. And number two, it's pretty much easy to grow as long as you have a place where it's going to drain well. And three, it's like if you just sucked at your garden this year, you didn't get it in or nothing was good, you know, whatever.
00:18:25
Speaker
you can always just plant garlic because in October it's fast and easy and then you don't don't have to worry about it until June and you're like oh I have garlic and then you're always gonna use and it stores so it's just like if you do nothing else or if you're trying to build confidence I feel like garlic is a good way to go yeah it's a way to salvage a tough season and fall gardening is just I have different problems with uh
00:18:50
Speaker
you know, putting out things in the fall, like germination is something I list as it's too cool. And in the spring, you know, you worry about the soil being kind of cool and wet. Well, usually it's hot and dry, dry. So yeah, getting I've had to water to get seas to germinate. How about you guys? Yes. Yeah, dry soil. Yeah, seed germination. They need moisture. So it's terrible. Yes. They don't they don't need sunlight to germinate in most cases.
00:19:19
Speaker
And so that is something like there are different techniques that different people propose. I haven't used them personally, so I don't really know, but maybe you all can comment on that, like putting the cardboard over it for a number of a certain amount of time to help retain soil moisture. The problem is if you leave it on for too long, once those plants do need sunlight, they need it, you know, the whole photosynthesis thing.
00:19:41
Speaker
Well, and you know, if you're planting beans in a commercial scenario, you know, go a quarter inch deeper, something like a snap bean, and it does make a huge difference. You can tell where you went just a little bit deeper. I'm not talking about way deeper. A quarter inch is not very much, but you'll see that it'll germinate three to five days earlier in some cases because it gets down where it's cooler and has more access to moisture and it keeps that seed from drying out. You don't want the seed coat to dry out.
00:20:07
Speaker
Uh, because that's a pretty harsh environment. It makes a huge difference that quarter inch. Another thing, a lot of these fall crops that we're talking about are really small seeds other than like peas and beans, right? Um, these are small. Yeah, exactly. These are going to be really small, hard to pick up with your fingers kind of thing. So one thing, and what that means is that they dry out even faster, right? And that means that they're, you have to sow them shallow or else they'll never be able to make it up through the soil. I don't have enough energy in there. Right. Exactly.
00:20:37
Speaker
So one thing that my dad always did growing up and it was fun. I don't know about like you guys, but you know, things that like you learned as a kid and then you find out like maybe the scientific reason why that works. I just, I always thought that was cool, but one thing my dad did growing a garden.
00:20:53
Speaker
was he would put his seeds between, and granted, this is small, small scale. He would put his seeds between wet paper towel on a plate for a couple, a day or two days. And so what he was doing as now the person with degrees in this is he's imbibing them with water. So that essentially signals that seed that they should start growing because they're full of water. And so he may wait until that radical comes out, which is what, you know, that little root, first root that comes out.
00:21:22
Speaker
It's a plant, but you don't necessarily have to. Once they're kind of swollen, you can see that they're full of water, planting out your carrot seeds, lettuce seeds, if you've had any trouble, and that will really speed up that process of them actually producing leaves that are then photosynthesizing. You still need to keep high moisture because they're eebie-beebies, but it really can speed up that process. It's not great on a big scale, but I've done this with seeds too that
00:21:50
Speaker
I'm not super confident in, so either I've had the seed for a while and I don't want to plant out seeds that aren't good and get weeds coming up in their places, or ones that I'm not confident in as far as I've not grown them before. So I did that this year with some
00:22:08
Speaker
mimosa putica, which is the little ferny looking plant that is, it's called touch me not. And when you touch it, the leaves all fold in and sensitive fern is another name for it. So I've never grown it before. Had no idea really what I was doing. Couldn't find any great resources for germinating them from seeds. So I did the little paper towel thing, like my dad did. And I let them, the radical come out and then I potted them up in little cell trays and I was like,
00:22:36
Speaker
Look at my dad teaching me things. I didn't learn that in college. My dad taught me that one. I want to know how to control weeds in the summer garden. Somebody tell me that. I'll have trouble with weeds too, along with germination. You tried wrapping them in wet paper towels? I tried singing to them and that usually kills them. Blowtorch. I was going to react to something you were saying earlier about the
00:23:05
Speaker
the traditional
Growing in Shoulder Seasons
00:23:06
Speaker
home gardener, people were thinking about gardens in general, like not at the surface level, but just at a more traditional garden is that summer garden. And that by the time the fall rolls around, they're kind of done. It's really interesting to see with both the development of the high tunnel phenomenon and the spread of high tunnels, but also just beyond that, people who are thinking about market channels slightly differently are trying to meet a market need in a different way.
00:23:33
Speaker
that we actually have some operations in Kentucky that focus almost exclusively on their shoulder seasons. They might grow stuff throughout the whole year, but they're not having a huge crop of tomatoes. They're not waiting to have a huge crop of tomatoes.
00:23:48
Speaker
what that allows them to do, and as someone who used to work in high tunnels, I can tell you that from May 15th, well, that's not exactly, maybe June 1st through August, September, late September, it is not a place that you really wanna be. No, it's not. Outside, you don't necessarily wanna be there for some of that.
00:24:15
Speaker
And I think that that it's just a different way of thinking about it. And I personally when we when I got away from that was wasn't growing things anymore and was working in extension, we almost we grew some tomatoes and peppers and stuff like that. But we mostly grew carrots and beets and leafy greens on the shoulder seasons, in part because I'd hated spending that much time out in the summer garden.
00:24:40
Speaker
And by the time July rolled around to plant the fall, I was like, okay, I can go through this hellscape for a brief period of time. And it was just a different way of thinking about it. And it's not necessarily, again, typical or whatever, but it has been an interesting
00:24:55
Speaker
component because if you're interested in selling to like institutions or schools or whatever, many of them are not at peak demand or even in session at all during the summer months. And so if you want to meet that market demand and or, I mean, in general, local food centers around local produce and plant-based products center around that seasonal window of summer. But as we've seen in season extension and value-added products
00:25:26
Speaker
Well, so we had a little bit of a technical bump there, but true to extension form, I'm just going to keep on rolling with the thought that I was having, which is that I've seen people try and I experienced it to some degree myself.
00:25:41
Speaker
they try to kind of go all the way full throttle on the shoulder, have a high tunnel, early shoulder season, early summer crops, grow summer crops, grow early fall, put stuff in for fall, take the summer crops late and they just go and gangbusters year round. And that can really quickly wear you down to a nub. And so those producers that I talked about, I think the ones who have gone to
00:26:06
Speaker
focusing on the shoulder seasons, focusing on the leafy greens for marketing reasons, also have done that just because there's a realization of like a traditional seasonal outdoor production system can't grow all the way through, at least intensively, all the way through the year. And there is this break period. The way that Alexis talks about it is that she sleeps with the trees or when the trees sleep, she sleeps too.
00:26:35
Speaker
Sleep with the trees sounds like a hippie mob threat. Sleep with the trees tonight. It's a very Kentucky thing. I do feel like personally targeted though by your comments Brett because I am, well, I have been, I am becoming better at the person who is gay.
00:26:55
Speaker
But once again, I'm going to bring it back to cut flowers because we talked about the fall garden. Gardens can also be flowers. And so, if you're growing flowers, you should also be thinking, in fact, in my schedule for July is, you know, all the different things I'm going to faux, faux, so, sorry. Faux sew. Faux sew. She's a song for real. She's not going to faux sew them. She's going to sew them for real.
00:27:22
Speaker
I'm going to start for fall harvest. And then I have later in August will be the things that I'm going to put in that will overwinter as those cool flowers. It's flower month, so we have to make sure we hit on flowers. But for those of you who do that and yeah, those shoulder seasons and there's a lot of cut flower growers, even though we tend to think of a lot of these.
00:27:44
Speaker
flower crops, same with gardens. When you think about a garden, you don't think about rutabagas, you're thinking about tomatoes, right? It's kind of the same thing with flowers, but a lot of people have cut back because people are on vacation. There's not as much, people are growing their own stuff and so there's not as much demand in the summer
00:28:03
Speaker
as there are in those shoulder seasons, but we're still farming year round, you know, like garden, you know, you're thinking about it, you're doing something for it year round. And as far as technique and technology, that that core season is always going to be there if you decide you want it. But in order to do the off season stuff, particularly some of the things that we need additional technologies to overwinter,
00:28:30
Speaker
that's something you have to like really be strategic about going after. And so I think that's another part of it too, is like if these people who are focusing on the shoulder seasons and yes, they're growing some stuff throughout the summer, if it suddenly was like people only want stuff in the summer, that pivot is not as difficult because nature isn't fighting you. It's, that's the, your latitude is not fighting you in that same way.
Ordering Perennials and Trees for Fall
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah, I had a question, I guess, relate to flowers, it would also relate to other edible stuff as well. And this is not necessarily a fall garden question, but it is, okay, we're thinking about in July, we're thinking about, you know, September, October, November.
00:29:16
Speaker
Do we also need to start thinking or at least planning about planting things like perennials? If you want to put in fruit trees, if you want to put in shrubs or brambles or blueberries, we may need to order plants. When's the timeline that we typically think about doing that stuff?
00:29:35
Speaker
For flowers, we say you should be ordering when this stuff is blooming. If your tulips are blooming in April, you should be ordering your tulips for next April, in this April, is a good rule of thumb. That's flexible, but that's when you should be on your plate to do within the next week. Those bulbs are then going to go in the ground.
00:30:00
Speaker
When? Yeah. So if it's tulips, those bulbs are going in anytime, anytime before the ground freezes October through, depending on what we get, maybe we should have a whole episode on tulips. Um, but depending on a lot of things, you know, you can plan all the way through December or even January if they're pre-cooled and your, your, uh, your ground's not frozen yet, uh, which is the case in Kentucky the past couple of years. We've not seen.
00:30:31
Speaker
We've had really cold temps, but we've not had sustained low temps, which is what a lot of our plants need for good bloom or tall stems and those kinds of things, but back to perennials in Kentucky. In a lot of states where you're going to have hot summers, let's put it that way, Tennessee is going to be similar to us, some of these border states you can
00:30:56
Speaker
take with a grain of salt, but we say actually fall is a time to plant your perennials, especially your trees, anything that's like a woodier, larger thing. Fall is the best time to plant those because you are going with nature in that way. That plant is going dormant and so essentially it's going dormant mostly above ground. The roots are still going to do their thing and they're slow and they're sleepy, but they're still working.
00:31:24
Speaker
And so we want to do that when we want them to be establishing themselves when there's not a ton of pull from above ground plant parts and a lot of stress there. They're also going to go and start waking up in a time of year when we get more rain. So we get a lot of rain in the springtime and into the early summer.
00:31:46
Speaker
traditionally, historically, so they're getting a lot more rain in their first kind of wake up in their new spot. And so that's why we say
00:31:54
Speaker
at perennials. Now the colder areas, so Arbor Day was created in, was it Idaho or Iowa? A northern day, a Dakota maybe? I don't know, somewhere where it gets cold and it stays cold for a long time. And so Arbor Day was formed in one of those northern states. And so they recommend planting in the spring. That's why Arbor Day is in the spring because that's when they plant their trees because they have such a longer cold period.
00:32:21
Speaker
where the warmer you are, usually we're trying to be in the fall. Nebraska City, Nebraska. It was the first American Arbor Day, 1872. The first actual Arbor Day was in a Spanish village in 1594. Spanish, just get it. It just rolled off the tongue. Did you guys know the Spanish name for Tulip is Dua Lipa?
00:32:47
Speaker
I wouldn't say that I knew that. Sorry, I got the wrong tab open. I was trying to figure out how to do her how she does her makeup and you know how you know how it is like a tulip maybe. Who knows cross reference to lip do a leap.
00:33:16
Speaker
It sounds like some of the bulbs, the garlic, when we used to do annual, like grow strawberries as annuals, we would typically plant them in September.
00:33:31
Speaker
that there are some things that you actually do plant in the fall. It's maybe not for a fall garden for a fall harvest, but it is a activity in the garden during fall. Fall is a very active time in the garden. If you look at it, I like that, Bray, you kind of zoomed out for a minute. Yeah, fall's super active as far as other things that you're doing besides just putting in the successional crops or these fall planted crops.
00:33:57
Speaker
It's, whether it's a tree shrub or whatever, a garden cleanup. Yeah, fall's a super active time in the lawn and garden, commercially and at home, yeah. One of the bonsai practitioners who has a pretty heavy focus in horticulture that I listened to and learned from talks about how, in his mind, and the way that he conceptualizes things, fall is actually the first season, the start season botanically.
00:34:26
Speaker
because if you think about a tree, or I mean, sorry, not a tree, a seed, a seed's food source that it uses to germinate is mostly created and stored in the fall, like the seed formation before, you know, ahead of this drops. And the same way Alexis was talking about a lot of that root growth and some of that vascular tissue growth and the transition away. I mean, that is it.
Fall as the Botanical Year Start
00:34:50
Speaker
That's the plant storing things up, putting things away. It's like the prep
00:34:55
Speaker
you know it's like packing before your vacation.
00:34:57
Speaker
You're packing before your vacation is the most important part. You get there and you have all the stuff that you need and it's a great, beautiful vacation slash tree. Well, that starts with your planning period. So that's just an interesting way of kind of reframing the thought that like spring is the first or May is the first part of the season. It's actually, I mean, it's all continuous, right? It all feeds back in itself, but he talks about that. Yeah, he's a clever lad. I feel like in farming, even if you're doing summer stuff, you're thinking about
00:35:27
Speaker
what seeds you're going to buy, you're thinking about crop playing, you're thinking about your rotation, and a lot of that is done in fall and into winter. To think of that as the start of the year, you said packing before the vacation, I think of it almost like a week. That's your Sunday where you're planning what you're doing for the rest of the week and then spring is Monday and you're setting yourself up and getting through
00:35:53
Speaker
But I love that, fully agree, at least in our area of the country, our latitude, that makes so much sense in my brain. Yeah, and I think just coming out of winter, lots of showy flowers, new leaves, it's easy to fall in love with spring, the importance of fall. We're talking about planning for a fall harvest with the garden, but like you said, Ray, very active time of year for us and for perennial plants and
00:36:23
Speaker
And also just like for seed saving, for instance, like you're you're going through that process and seed saving is an important a huge part of the culture of horticulture and has been historically over time. And I think that's another element of
00:36:39
Speaker
You know, you're preparing and thinking about the end of the season as a time when you may be ordering seeds, but you also may be saving them. And if you don't do that, you know, there's the old saying about when you start to live beyond your means that you're eating your seed corn, same exact product. Like we don't put aside enough stuff to grow this for next year.
00:37:01
Speaker
this, you know, this late summer fall period, we're not going to have this again. And that starts this, I think, longer term thinking about the relationship with the garden, the relationship with plants. That's like this huge part of our cultural experience of growing gardens and growing plants. I just wonder how much of our rhythms as particularly homeowners, how much of our rhythms when we think about fall gardening is determined
00:37:29
Speaker
by the commercial availability of transplants, which are not as available in the summer. I don't see a lot of where I'm at. I know I can go hunt them down, but I don't see as many plants, broccoli plants, for instance, sold at a time for fall planting as I do summer. And interestingly enough, I don't see a lot of trees for sale in the fall at local box stores, not as many as I see in the springtime, where I typically say are suboptimal.
00:37:58
Speaker
That's not the optimal time. It's the second best time. But I wonder how much of our rhythms are determined by like retail management and availability. I think a lot about that and how things come about for gardeners. Now, commercially, you're absolutely right. 100%. I mean, commercial people know that if they don't get the latest pumpkin seed and order that early fall, they're not getting it. If they wait until spring, they're not going to get those choice varieties that may be new and in high demand.
00:38:26
Speaker
But homeowners are at the mercy sometimes of just retail availability. I see that a lot. Yeah, I think I mean, you're talking about the retail environment, and this is taking a step outside of just the horticulture, but it like, you think about like the cycles of pushing like,
00:38:41
Speaker
decorations and like vibe, that it's like, oh my gosh, it is June 27th and I'm already seeing Halloween decorations.
Retail and Consumer Influence on Gardening
00:38:49
Speaker
This way is kind of like shifting and creating this idea that there's like, there's fall and there's summer. And we are moving out of summer and into fall as opposed to like embracing the transitional period. Like the trees don't go from green to yellow on October 1st. They do on my Instagram account. Exactly.
00:39:12
Speaker
The pumpkin spice latte and the pumpkin spice and raised lattes does triple on October 1st. It does. It rams out. It's already at a disturbing high level. It rams out. Pumpkin spice. I get this orange shoe. More of an orange shoe to my face. Because of all the pumpkin spice lattes. That's the cycle. But I think that that idea of like commercial
00:39:39
Speaker
image and vibe creation has this way of shifting our, our, the way we experience our world. And it's not even like it's still hot out and you want me to buy fall leaf decorations or whatever. And it's, I don't know. And then not to rail on that or anything. I understand that they're doing their own thing in their own way, but it is the, it creates this strange, cause even when people go to an agritourism operation and they're going out to pick these pumpkins,
00:40:05
Speaker
Well, you know, pumpkins are a fall thing, so they must have been planted like in September, October. Right. And it's like, you're thinking and you have to think that way for if you're doing commercial, you kind of have to think that way because like consumers are are conditioned to feel that way. But that's part of the reason I think sometimes why it feels so strange to think about do it, plan ahead toward these periods of time.
00:40:33
Speaker
where it's going to be cooler out while it's still hot is because that as a consumer, we're just sort of served that when it's available. And which is not maybe all that good of a thing for us overall in our connection to see. Do not look behind the curtain. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's all you plan it out there though. I said for all you people who just like really love to plan, maybe like a spreadsheet, really like a calendar. Alexis is talking about her journaling, I'm sure.
00:41:00
Speaker
I mean, lots of dates in there. I mean, personally, the depth of summer is a great time to fantasize about fall. Yeah. That's how I get through summers when it's really hot out. So yeah, you know, it should thinking about it, it should be a positive thing. But do you fantasize about fall gardening?
00:41:21
Speaker
late fall gardening. I fantasize about putting some bulbs in like towards the end. Nice and cool out. And just another quick reference is if you are thinking about doing cover cropping, there are A, if you wanted to get a cover crop in before you planted your garlic or something like that, you still have a window to get in something short like a buckwheat or something like that. And if you want to do a fall cover crop like over the winter,
00:41:49
Speaker
If you want to do a fall planted cover crop over the winter, usually a lot of those are going in in that September through November window, depending on what it is. The ryes tend to be able to be planted later. The wheats need a little bit earlier, but that's just another component to think about. If you wanted to get a little cover crop in on top of your garden, that later fall window is a time to be able to do that.
00:42:13
Speaker
I want to go back to Ray mentioning availability. Again, that can be hard. I've heard some people say, I really want to do a fall garden, but I didn't get my seed started or whatever that is. When you're listening to this, you may be feeling a little bit late. For most people, we're all happened to be around Central Kentucky. If you're in Northern Kentucky or further East Kentucky where you're
00:42:41
Speaker
You've got some mountains around you, which is going to affect your temperatures. You know, you guys may be a week or two behind us, but central and southern, you know, you can get away with, and like Brett said earlier, a lot of these plants can be direct seeded. So you're not late. So anytime kind of July to up to like August 1st, some of that other stuff, you can go all the way to mid-August.
00:43:05
Speaker
that you can do if you can get a hold of the seeds which you can still order online. That's the beauty of internet but I know that like I was just at our southern states and they still had a lot of fall seeds in there and so you can go in and get those.
00:43:20
Speaker
for the ones that you want to do more as a transplant. Broccoli, you can direct seed, but it can often be better as a transplant. You still have time if you can do some season extension. That time that you're going to take up creating that transplant that that's going to go into the ground, you can make up that time if you can cover them somehow. Floating row cover, which is essentially just, there's a couple of names for it for
00:43:49
Speaker
basically the same thing that sort of like a cheese cloth type of consistency you'll see it listed as agribon which is kind of just a brand name that a lot of people use remake cover is i usually call it remade some people call it tobacco cloth i think technically ray please.
00:44:08
Speaker
Please chime in here. Actual tobacco cloth maybe is a little bit different or it's a heavier weight or something like that, but it's the same. It's very specific for that crop. Yeah. But it's a version of that with its own properties. Exactly. So it's something that's sort of like a more of like a cheese cloth, like is a good way to think about it where it will let moisture and air through, but it is still like a woven cloth type thing. So you can use those and you can use these little hoops that you can make yourself or you
00:44:35
Speaker
anything to keep that fabric up off the plants, but you're creating a little microclimate there. And so when we get to those periods where, you know, if it's after October 15th, if these things are going to be ready and we maybe have a frost coming in, usually that time, at least in our area of the state, it's a frost, it's not a freeze. So we just need to protect it a little bit and that, believe it or not, the two to four degrees that that frost cloth, that remake can give you,
00:45:04
Speaker
can be the difference between you having a crop and not having a crop. It seems crazy to think about it.
Extending Seasons with Temperature Management
00:45:11
Speaker
Josh, we've talked about this before, and this is something you've created. You've done it for high tunnels and it was like temperatures for crops, but the temperature range is the temperature. It is what it is. Just high tunnels will give you more time.
00:45:29
Speaker
But the temperature that crop can withstand is the same no matter where it's located. It's the high tunnel planting date calendar. Right. Yeah. Where we have the minimum temperature listed where there's plant damage, but then there's, it's, that's separate from the temperature where it actually grows, right? Or the optimal range. So you can protect your plant from a frost or damage.
00:45:49
Speaker
And I mean, that's what I have noticed with kind of the high tunnel thing is that it's not so much like you're having to constantly protect your plant from, you know, very cold temperatures. It's just like these little sudden short duration events. And if you can get them through that, then you have weeks of, you know, good growing conditions, protecting them from that. One part of it too is wind.
00:46:13
Speaker
because the wind affects the plants so much more. And so that, and it can do damage both through direct cold damage, but it can also dry the plants out because when it's cold out, the relative humidity usually seems, it usually is pretty low and it can actually blow across the bottom of those leaves if it's completely unabated and the row cover or the high tunnel, just that little bit of deflection. Again, it makes a huge difference if you've ever
00:46:42
Speaker
been walking down a cold street getting blasted in the face by cold winds. And then you just step out behind a building or step behind a car or something. And it's like, oh, I feel suddenly so much better. Well, your plants feel that way too.
00:46:55
Speaker
And I will say like the season, you can get the row cover stuff in, like we will, uh, we have some, you know, bulbs and things that will come out early by sometimes because things are unpredictable or whatever. And we don't have a good way of protecting them. And we will go out with like tarps and throw them over those things. If we feel like we're going to have a frost, it's going to damage it. And this is in spring. Um, but like, uh, you, you don't have to necessarily go whole, whole hog, especially if you're trying, if you like plant it,
00:47:25
Speaker
kind of concert plants of kind of conservatively. And it just so happens that there's going to be a cold patch and you're not just planning on that happening. That's another just another thing that we just we put them on at night, take them off so that the sun can warm them up and they can do their thing during the day. But
00:47:41
Speaker
And there's a big difference in some of the covers we're talking about. Some of the ones like the floating covers, they're kind of naturally self-ventilated because of the nature of the covering, which is, there's a big difference in a low tunnel, which is ones that you have to be very careful about the temperature buildup. That's like a plastic covering. Yes, there's a big difference in those and you use them differently. Do any of you guys have any experience with like the slitted low covers or the,
00:48:09
Speaker
the ones that are self-enlating. Has anyone used any of those? There's lots of options out there now, particularly for commercial growers. But yeah, those are two different things and that's important to know. I think for homeowners, floating row covers is something you should key in on.
00:48:25
Speaker
It's more appropriate. It's more low-key. It's easier to manage, I think, in a lot of cases, and it's a little bit more forgiving if you get the mid-weight covers that don't trap as much heat. It just all depends on what you want them to do, but I think they're easier for most homeowners to manage. If you are shopping for them, pay attention because there's ones that are so thin that they're just to keep insects out.
00:48:50
Speaker
And there's some that are a little heavier that will give you a little bit of frost protection. And then there's ones that are like frost blankets where it's like. Double covers. It's very thick. You're using it when it's negative degrees. Yeah. Right. You can use them as a blanket. Yes. Literally. I think that kind of mid-weight and those of you, I mean, all of you guys have used this before, but the one that like I seem to
00:49:13
Speaker
like and the one that's always out of stock is the AG30. They do it and the 30 just seems to be like a good mid-weight where it's going to give you that two to four degrees of protection, wind protection. You can leave it on, it's going to ventilate enough, but if it does get warm, if you're using it in addition to a plastic covering or something, it will hold on to a lot of heat.
00:49:42
Speaker
In general, you're not going to kill your plants if you leave it on on a warm day or something. It lets enough light through, especially in the winter time that you're going to get. That's the other thing, if you get a really heavy blanket, you may not kill the plants from heat, but if you leave it on, you're not going to get any light. Plants is a photosynthesize. There's also that aspect, which is why a lot of people like plastic if they can control that ventilation, if they're venting that somehow they like plastic because it's the
00:50:12
Speaker
as much light can get through as possible as far as coverings go. Technology out there to extend the growing season. I know commercial producers just love that. We've mentioned it on the show before in the past. Kentucky is one of those states that we've just seen a lot of growth in this area. High tunnels, low tunnels, protected ag season extension techniques. We've just seen an explosion of this over the last several years.
00:50:42
Speaker
If you've got questions or want to hear an episode of just the difference, there's a lot of different ways to do season extension on a small.
Kentucky's Advances in Protected Agriculture
00:50:55
Speaker
A lot of things that are small scale can be large scale if you just make it larger. Then there's some things that are really more
00:51:02
Speaker
that's a large scale thing or that's a small scale thing. So just kind of everything in between. Maybe we should do an episode on just kind of the pros and cons of each one so that people who are trying to decide what scale they want to do or what's right for them, you know, can have a little bit of that. Maybe we should do something like that. That sounds fun. Oh, yeah. We've got some great resources for that. I'll tell you what, I think that might be a good place to wrap this one. Is that okay?
00:51:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I was just going to say. Great minds. So I think the couple of the take homes probably is that if you are wanting to have a fall harvested garden of the coal crops and root crops and stuff like that, now is the time to be putting those things in the ground and now through August. So now being when this comes out in July 16th through August and then
00:51:59
Speaker
If you're thinking further into the fall, some activities and planting things that you might be doing would be, yes, all of your fall cleanup of all that summer stuff, but also putting in things like bulbs. You may be looking ahead and checking recommendations for when you want to be planting things like trees and perennials and that kind of stuff.
00:52:15
Speaker
And if you want to be ordering, earlier is usually better as far as getting, getting seeds, getting ahold of that stuff. A lot of the things that you can do for a fall garden can be direct seeded. Some of them do need to be transplants or do will do better as transplants. And there's going to be challenges associated with a fall garden in the same way that there's challenges associated with a spring garden.
00:52:35
Speaker
But there is a lot of activity during this upcoming fall time. And one of my favorite times of year is when the fall stuff starts coming in and the summer stuff is still coming in. So you can have like a nice kale salad with some chopped peppers on top. I mean, come on. Can't beat that. Any other takeaways you all wanted to add as a key points? I think you got it.
00:52:59
Speaker
Awesome.
Podcast Closing and Future Episodes
00:53:00
Speaker
Too late for parsnips. Too late for parsnips. Like your parsnips lovers. The pee lovers, the people who love the pee crops. Whoa. That should be the name of the episode. Too late for parsnips. Too late for parsnips. He gets the people going. Won't kick it over to you Alexis to take us out of here.
00:53:20
Speaker
All right, well, don't forget to follow us on Instagram, hort at hort culture podcast. You can also send us an email. You can find our email in the show notes. If you've got questions, you want to hear a specific podcast, definitely let us know. It is July, so we're going to keep talking about cut flowers in the upcoming episodes for Kentucky cut flower month. So follow along with that.
00:53:44
Speaker
the Kentucky Horticulture Council Center for Crop Diversification on social medias, if you're into that.