Nicole Johnsey Burke covers 21 vegetables to plant in September for fall and winter harvests. Leafy greens like spinach and kale are ready in 45 to 75 days and tolerate frost. Root crops and alliums like garlic go in now and overwinter for next year's harvest.
It's September, so it's too late to.
Put anything into the garden, right?
No.
There is so much you can plant this month and I'm going to show you everything we're putting into our garden, our clients gardens, so that you can do the exact same no matter where you're growing.
If you've read my book Leaves, Roots and Fruit, you know, I love to divide plants this way because it really helps simplify the process of picking what to plant and also gives you a warning in advance of how hard this plant will be to grow, how long it will need to be in the garden. So let's kick it off with leaves first. Leaves are going to be so easy to grow in September. And most leafy plants we can harvest from within 45 days of planting up to 60, 75 days after you plant those. And this first set can all be planted from seed put directly in the garden. So spinach, arugula, any kind of romaine, lettuce or spring mix, all those lettuces can be direct seeded into the garden in September. You'll be able to harvest little small leaves from these plants within about 45 days. And you'll get to harvest from these again and again for 60, 65, 70, 75 days. Most of these plants will make it through the cold and frost, but they won't last if it gets really, really cold for a long time in the low 20s or even the upper 20s. So you want to plant these now and get some good harvest and then you can cover these up. And if there is a chance of frost to help the plants last longer, more leaves that you can grow this season would be Swiss chard and kale. These are biennial plants, so they're actually going to last a little bit longer than those lettuces. They've got what we call savoy leaves, bumpy leaves, and that gives them a little bit more tolerance of cold weather and frost and ice and makes them super great plants to plant right now because. Because you'll get to enjoy them for a very, very long time. All right, so all those lettuces, plus cilantro, dill, parsley, kale and Swiss chard. And then of course, there are chives. Chives are such a good steady herb. I don't think there's a season besides, like deathly cold, when chives don't thrive. So chives can go into the garden pretty much anytime, but especially now, they'll do great. Let's move on to the root crops. We have first the root crops. You can start from seed and that's going to be carrots, beets and radishes. These can all be directly seeded in the garden in order to get a harvest before it gets too cold. So especially your radishes. If you plant those now, you'll be able to harvest within 45 to 60 days. Beets are going to take longer, and so will carrots, but you can still get a harvest from 75 days on. Give them proper spacing to begin with so you don't have to thin them and slow down their growing process in the middle and give these more sun. Then you do your leafy plants. More root crops that you can grow are in the amaryllis family. You've got garlic and onions. So garlic is perfect. In fact, the time to plant garlic is either this month or next if you're in the northern hemisphere. And garlic needs to be planted by cloves, and those cloves are going to take a long time. So you might get some garlic greens before we get to the end of the year. But for most of us, that garlic's just going to sit dormant until it starts to sprout in early spring and then give us a summer harvest next year. Onions are the same. If you're in a warmer place, you might be able to get onions before the end.
