From the garden
Fall is often an under-used gardening season, because this is a busy time in summer gardens.
The fall crops planted now are cool season crops since plants mature in the autumn as temperatures moderate and cool. Warm, sunny days and cooler nights of autumn are optimal garden conditions for cool season crops. Crops planted now can be grown well into November.
The list of cool season crops is long. Following are some kinds and varieties for fall planting.
Baby Brassica greens
• There are many kinds, each with several varietal options in reds or greens. Most are ready for harvest in as few as 21 days after sowing: beet tops, Bok Choi, arugula, chard, chicory, collards, kale, Komatsuma, Malabar spinach, mizuna, mustard, Pac Choi, sorrel, spinach, Tatsoi, watercress. These Brassica greens can grow to maturity, harvested as large plants.
Late season salad crops
• Non-heading loose-leaf varieties are classed into the two groups Grand Rapids and Oakleaf, both with many varietal options. The Grand Rapids group produces broad, crinkled, frilly leaves like the reliable variety ‘Black Seeded Simpson’. Oakleaf varieties ‘Red and Green Saladbowl’ have delicate, red or green deeply lobed, flat tender leaves.
• Heading varieties. Loose-leaf heading types are Bibb, Butterhead, and Romaine. Bibb lettuces like ‘Little Gem’ varieties are small and rosetted; Butterhead varieties ‘Milagro’, green, and ‘Marciano’, red; Romaine, varieties ‘Salvius’ green and ‘Thurinus’ bronze-red.
Root crops
• Beets. ‘Red Ace’ is hard to beat for a reliable red; chioggia types have rings of white and red, ‘Touchstone Gold’ has golden flesh.
• Carrots. Orange varieties like ‘Candy’, deep rooted broad shouldered, and ‘Romance’, deep blunt roots; mixed roots of yellow, white, purple, orange ‘Glow Six Moonrise Mix.’
• Parsnip. A forgotten crop, deliciously sweet when harvested after the first frost. ‘Albion’ for long, white, tapered root for fall harvest.
• Radish. Choice of small white, pink, red, or purple globes. ‘Easter Egg’ has all four colors. Large, deep rooted Daikon or Korean types for fresh salads or kimchi, varieties available in white, red, purple, and black.
• Turnip. Standard ‘Purple Top White Globe’ and ‘Hirosaki Red’, a red salad type.
End of summer warm season fast-maturing crops can be resown now for a fall harvest:
• Green beans
• Cucumber
• Summer squash Ellen Peffley Harp, a retired professor of horticulture at Texas Tech University, writes about gardening for several Texas newspapers.
