GARDEN & YARD - MOTHER'S FALL GUIDE TO PLANTING THE GARDEN, LAWN, AND ORCHARD

Enlarge Image Image Gallery WALTER CHANDOHA

GARDEN & YARD

Get a six-month jump on spring gardening chores.

Unless you’re a demon composter, the fall chores of raking leaves; grubbing out garden trash; gleaning mummies from the fruit trees; and dragging tomato stakes, cucumber trellis, and all to the barn can be downright depressing. It’s a requiem for the joyous season of life and growth, and a harbinger of the winter to come with leaden overcast, chill rain, sleet—and in the north country where I come from—snow. Lots of snow. Month after month of snow. I like to brighten the fall clean-up blues with a good dose of spring-of-the-year cheer by planting and seeding now for next year's garden bounty and lawn and flower beauty.

The Garden

First—beginning as soon as the last crops are harvested—comes the vegetable garden.

I want to avoid disease buildup by not planting the same vegetables to a plot for two years running, or more often than every third year. For example, never following cabbage with broccoli or any other brassica, which would encourage a buildup of the club-root plant pathogen in the soil. Before I begin raking, composting, and tilling, I sketch a plan from memory (still fresh but likely to fade by next spring) of what varieties went where during the year's largely unplanned succession planting. During the year, we follow one crop with another to enjoy up to three harvests from each part of the garden—say, early radishes followed by bush beans followed by late chard or early lettuce. I hold the tomatoes up off the soil on stakes so that I can plant late (winter-keeping) beets or carrots under them.

With the memory of last year's crops refreshed, and keeping in mind that I'll soon be planting for next year, I can almost work up a little enthusiasm for cleaning up the garden trash, pulling the stakes still supporting dry bean and tomato vines (then burning them to kill off wilt spores and mosaic viruses—adding the ash to the compost), tilling in wilted plant residue, shredding and composting the old corn stalks and any picked-clean Brussels sprouts stems.