This summer has been going by so incredibly fast. It’s hard to believe, but it’s actually time for us to start thinking about those “end of season” tasks. If you want to know those critical steps we take to finish out our garden in style, you’ll want to tune into our posts over the next few days. Heck, this whole month should be interesting!
One of those tasks are getting any late season crops we want to grow out sowed or transplanted into the gardens. You might remember our “embarrassing” bed that we hadn’t weeded from a few days ago. Well, that’s definitely in flight now as this bed will become the home for our end of season crops. We’re working on getting the old detritus cleared out and will transition this bed to our late season garden.
There’s surprisingly quite a few crops that we can grow into the late season. The qualities that we’re looking for are generally sub-60 day maturity times and those that they’re relatively cold tolerant. Remember, our average first frost is just 30 days from now. But, those cold tolerant veggies can sustain some frosts just fine and in some ways, the late season is an ideal time to start growing them.
Crops that make excellent candidates for late season growing are spinach, mustards, leaf lettuce, bok choy, radish, daikon and even some baby kale. If you want to gamble a bit, you can try things like chard, snap/snow peas, fast growing (40-60 day) beets and green onions. With these, it’s possible hard frosts could wipe out your crop. There’s simply no way to know how the late season is going to roll, but at this point, any 60 day crops are simply a gamble.
In the subarctic, we really have to focus on growing out those crops with the shortest maturity times for our late season enjoyment. We don’t have a lazy, meandering introduction into fall and subsequently winter to enjoy. We’ll go from summer to winter in a matter of weeks. Whether that transition happens in early or late September is anyone’s guess, but it will happen with certainty.
The good news is that we won’t be getting the major pressures of impending warm temperatures once those crops mature. So, if you’ve struggled with a crop (like say, daikon), doing it in the late season might just be your key to success. We’ve seen it go both ways. Where our summer is a bit on the cooler side and supports those crops, but also seasons where we get early hard frosts and our garden is over before we know it.
This time of year is probably one of our busiest. While we have many moments that we’d consider quite busy, August is where it all comes together. Between those food preservation pressures and trying to finish out all of our summer projects, we’re definitely starting to think about the end game. We don’t want it to be over, either, but figured it’d be helpful to share our current mindset!
Stay tuned, many more subjects to come! If preservation is your jam, we should have quite a few things going down in August and early September! We’ll do our best to take you all along for the ride!
