Leave Space for Fall Crops

As summer gets into full swing in the garden and spring crops are being harvested and pulled out, it’s important to remember not to fill all of the space right away.  

When you are ripping our spring crops like spinach, arugula, or radishes that come out early, it makes sense to then plant your summer vegetables in those spots. When it comes to later maturing spring crops like peas, cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes, onions, or others, it makes more sense to not fill that space with summer stuff. For one thing, it’s pretty late to be planting most summer crops. More importantly, though, if you want to have fall crops, you will need somewhere to plant them starting in August. If you fill all of your space with tomatoes and green beans, where will they go? Will you rip tomatoes out just as they start producing to make way for carrots? I definitely wouldn’t want to do that.  

What we recommend is to harvest those later ripening spring crops and then thoroughly weed those areas. Then you can cover that space with mulch, like straw, leaves, weeds, grass clippings, or whatever organic matter you have available to suppress weeds. You could also plant a fast-maturing cover crop like buckwheat to fill the space, suppress weeds, and provide some flowers for beneficial insects in your garden.  (We have packets of buckwheat available in our online store.)

When August comes around and you want to plant your next round of all those delicious cool-season crops like cabbage, carrots, beets, broccoli, lettuce, and radishes, you will have some areas ready and waiting to be planted. All you will need to do if you mulched the area is move the mulch aside and plant. If you grew buckwheat, all you need to do is cut the buckwheat at ground level and plant. Then you can lay the cut tops of buckwheat on the soil as mulch or add it to your compost.

So this summer, as you remove your spring crops, don’t forget about fall!