Autmn Gardening

It's that time again, time to plant your cold-weather crops for the fall season and start thinking about bringing in the planters from outside in the hopes of an all-year crop, or at least extending the harvest.

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Outdoors, plant your greens leafy vegetables again, and don't forget your quick-growing root crops like radishes. If protected from frosts with a floating row cover or other such thermal happiness, they can be convinced to produce throughout the winter.

We're seeding winter wheatberries in our yard this fall to see if we can produce a crop over the winter season, or at least keep a little green in the area. It will be worth a try, and if it doesn't work as well as we'd like, at least the soil will reap some pleasant benefits from the planting. *smile*

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All containers can be brought in, and if placed in a sunny window or supplemented with a timed grow-light (if in a shady spot), can grow and produce fresh food happily well into planting season next spring. Just do yourself a favor, and make sure your planters all have saucers under them, or someone may just end up watering the floor too. Those saucers really are important!

If you don't have room to bring it all inside, that's okay!

Most plants, grow and produce really well in micro-hydroponics, which take up a lot less room than planters, and require about the same amount of work.

Some plants, like tomatoes, root really easily if a cutting is simply dropped in a cup of water for about a week. They'll root even faster if you use willow water, which is full of natural rooting hormones. If you want to save your tomatoes indoors this winter, but don't have room for the containers, or if they're firmly in the ground, and still happily producing, just snip off a limb or three and set them to root. In about a week, you will have a good root system developing, and you can plant them inside however you wish, for a year-round harvest of deliciousity!

We'll be building a microponics system inside sometime in the next few weeks. Plans are to forgo the usual route of chemical fertilizers commonly used in hydro systems, and try out a few methods of natural fertilization, but with the same type of system. We'll see how it works out. The project would be underway now, except that we are so broke that we have to wait for a gift card I earned online to come in so we can buy the supplies. That's the only reason we're waiting, as I'm raring to get started. I'll be sure to post photos and instructions for building your own as soon as we get it done.