The Fall Garden

1 / 5
For a productive fall garden (and spring and summer garden too), maintain a regular schedule of planting, picking, pulling up, and replacing.
For a productive fall garden (and spring and summer garden too), maintain a regular schedule of planting, picking, pulling up, and replacing.
2 / 5
Even if  the pea vines still carry a combination of fully ripe peas, immature pods, and blossoms, the schedule must be maintained if the fall garden is to be planted on time.
Even if  the pea vines still carry a combination of fully ripe peas, immature pods, and blossoms, the schedule must be maintained if the fall garden is to be planted on time.
3 / 5
Like the summer garden, the fall garden requires seeding, weeding, mulching, and composting.
Like the summer garden, the fall garden requires seeding, weeding, mulching, and composting.
4 / 5
The harvests of midsummer must be planned for and carried out on specific, decided-upon dates.
The harvests of midsummer must be planned for and carried out on specific, decided-upon dates.
5 / 5
 This mature summer garden will—within a four-hour period on a given morning—give way to the planting of autumn's crops.
 This mature summer garden will—within a four-hour period on a given morning—give way to the planting of autumn's crops.

Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books, Inc. from Helen and Scott Nearing’s Continuing the Good Life: Hall a Century of Homesteading. Copyright© 1979 by the authors.


In our part of New England, the general gardening practice is to start planting on Decoration Day, which is late in May. Hardy things are planted first, followed weeks later by the more perishable crops. This sequence carries the garden to midsummer, when planting usually stops. Gardening is considered ended for the year in August, except for harvesting. When this is over, the land is left fallow or cover crops to prevent weeds from accumulating. Major gardening is considered over till the next spring.

Our practice is quite different. It closely approaches the Japanese way of gardening. Their land is so circumscribed that they must economize drastically on space. When they take out a radish, they replant a lettuce or other seed in the vacated spot. When we take out any section of a bed or row, we do almost the same as the Japanese until well into September. We plant in the spring, we plant in the summer, we plant in the fall. As planting space is opened up by harvesting early summer greens and roots, we immediately put in a fall garden of crops that can be planted late and will mature before or during light freezing.

Fall days with us are sunny and crisp, closely approximating the days of early spring in temperature. So we plant in the late summer and early fall the same type of vegetable that flourished in the spring and that again will have time to ripen in the fall: radish, lettuce, chard, mustard, spinach, collards, and early cabbage for greens. Even carrots when planted late will mature in the fall into little “finger” delicacies. All of the items we have mentioned thus far are frost-hardy. Most of them will live and thrive with night temperatures as low as 18 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of the seeds will lie dormant and fail to germinate. Some will break ground and be frozen out. But many will sprout and grow. The results of fall planting have been well worth the effort, time, and our small expense for the experimental seeds.

  • Published on Sep 1, 1979
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