The Secret Garden

Image Gallery Jeff and Joy taking in a quiet moment before the year's second harvest. Robert Hunt

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Garden & Yard

Too busy with picking to worry about planting?
Jeff Taylor discovers... occasionally tasty, late-season vegetables that are worth the effort.

By late summer, all our work has finally paid off. The baby pumpkins twine around the corn, and soon another season of the garden will come to a close, as we harvest our major bounty of corn, tomatoes, and strawberries, and then kick back all winter. When the first frost hits, we'll have less to do than kids in a small town. Our garden will be bare but well mulched or cover cropped against the return of spring in 1995. Until then, we may put the arduous task of gardening completely out of our minds.

"Oh, we're not done yet," Joy says, ruthlessly thinning some vegetable.

What?

"No, not by a long shot. What about the fall garden?"

Kohlrabi Member of the mustard family and a classic example of a "second-harvest" veggie.

I will not move my troops without onions. — U.S. Grant, Letter to War Department

Again, what? I have a question: "Won't we be a tad busy at harvest time to put in any more corn and tomatoes?" Joy gives her head a fast shake, as if to dislodge something in her ear. "Wow. Climb out of that hammock and turn off your notebook, honey. We've got to talk. You're in the wrong hardiness zone to be thinking that way. Let's do a little late-season dance around here." Dumbly and mutely, I follow her into the house, to review a diagram that she's been working on. I thought it was the plan for next year. It wasn't that at all.

"See, here's where we'll put the kale, the radishes go here, the beets down here, eventually garlic here, the Chinese cabbages over in this corner..."Her finger points, and her eyes gleam insanely.

Didn't we already plant all that stuff? "Yes and no," Joy explains. "Some of them." We talk. Over iced mint tea, I discover a few facts of life about late summer. Apparently, it's about time to plant again.

People in mild climates tend to put their gardens to bed too early, for two reasons: (1) because, like me, they have gardened in places where winter means short autumns and deep frostlines, or (2) because they don't care to eat fresh food all winter if that means a lot of root vegetables, like turnips and beets, or a bumper crop of rabbit food, like kale and Chinese cabbages. But here (hardiness zone 8) and in other parts of the country, some gardenables grow best and biggest when planted in midsummer, just a few months before the first frost.

The good news and the bad news, fellow nongardeners: We'll all have fresh garden produce longer than we thought. Not only that, but by building cloches now, we can extend the tomato harvest, and there are varieties that will provide green tomatoes for chutney. ("Oh, never mind the tomatoes," Joy says.) Furthermore, we will not have the expected glut of ripe vegeta bles, all of which must be canned, eaten, or given away at once. By staggering planting times, the garden can be made productive, if not uniformly bountiful, for much of the year. The good news.

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