After I got the new tier in place, I rushed to sneak in a fall garden. There is a brief moment when the soil is moist enough to till but not too wet. To call it a window, in addition to using an overworked metaphor, would be a wild exaggeration. No, it's more like the clicking of a camera shutter. Too bad if you blinked and missed it.
The Fabled Fall Garden
The gamble with a fall garden is you plant things that do well in cool fall weather and can even stand a little frost. Here in Missouri, we get a definite break from the heat in October, if we're lucky.
Although it will be too late to harvest beans planted now, I've found they make a good, cheap, ground cover for winter. Last year, I planted an ordinary package of dried beans. They did a fine job holding the soil. They had the good grace to not keep growing in the spring, unlike some oats I could mention.
With gathering dark clouds spurring me on, I tilled up three plots. I had the seeds in ground before you could say Heatstroke. Despite wearing my usual wet-frozen bandanna, the sweat dropped off my face like rain. I believe sweat droplets falling on seeds are their greatest incentive to grow. The seeds actually feel sorry for me and do their best to sprout. After all, sweat is honest; tears may be faked.
The seeds were tucked in in the morning and in the early afternoon, it rained. Did I mention it was a Blue Moon?
It was a lovely, gentle rain that continued overnight. Raindrops on the windows were like a half-forgotten pleasant memory. Two inches showed up in the rain gauge, a respectable total.
Three days later, we had yet another heat advisory. Since the seedlings were too tiny to bolt, they had no choice but to grow out of the hot ground.
Since the end of this bed was still under construction, I blocked the soil with materials at hand. The wide row of turnips are up a week later, and some of the beans and lettuces. In the foreground is the poor cantaloupe that tried so hard to grow all summer.
This plot was the site for some cabbages that were bitter about the drought. However, there were some nice new potatoes and onions. Two enthusiastic chard plants provided greens from last fall's planting. They overwintered and bore me dinners all summer. I made a chard quiche that was fabulous. The big thing on the right is a Romanesco broccoli that I watered all summer. It's rather beautiful but shows no sign of producing the interesting head shown on the Burpee seed packet. Behind that are some sweet potatoes that may or may not bear tubers. The ground was too hard to dig them up earlier. Now that we've had some rains, they have put on new leaves and may yet amount to something. Here, I planted the beans to hold the fort and a few French Breakfast radishes. Never actually to be eaten before noon, they do make a delicious radish sammy.
In this top tier, I did get a fairly good crop of Long Season beets. Some scrawny carrots wound up in the compost. After tilling in more cow manure, I planted two rows of spinach, some kohl rabi, more carrots and the beans. Still growing are some parsnips whose prognosis is not good. We'll see, come spring.
The grasses, Gardener's Enemy Number One, revived with the rains. I hate to admit it, but I was glad to see them greening up.
