Hope for the Fall and Winter Garden

This spring’s garden is for all intents and purposes non-existent. So disappointing. More importantly, if we were depending on it to eat, we would be starving right now.  Every couple of days I’m able to harvest enough flower stalks off the overwintered kale to make part of one meal but that and a few bits of lettuce here and there are all that are ready right now. Next to nothing in terms of calories.  So comes the realization that I just plain suck at this.

But I’m not giving up.  Monday’s high is supposed to be 90F, so I’ll bring all my unplanted seedlings into the house to protect them from the heat.  All my kohlrabi seedling are flowering, so I’ve given up on them, but there are still kale, mustard, and onion seedlings that I’m counting on. All my nightshade seedlings are doing well under artificial light in the garage, and the cucumber seeds I planted this week are just starting to peek above the soil surface; the melons are not up yet.  

So with my spring garden a near complete total bust and my summer garden still in the seedling stage, I’m looking forward at what I need to do for a fall and winter garden.  You can’t call me a quitter, that’s for sure.  I’ve learned a couple bits of useful advice from the Territorial Seed fall garden catalog, one of which was that a few day’s delay in getting fall garden seed in the ground on time can translate into two to three weeks delayed harvest. I didn’t know that.  The other thing that I did know was that to have food coming out of the garden during the fall and winter, you need to have everything at maturity in roughly October (in my area, anyway), because it will all stop growing, but what I didn’t know was that it stops growing when there gets to be only ten hours of daylight. So that got me thinking: could I find a chart that would tell me what day that is, exactly?  Turns out there is, and you can use one of two forms for anywhere in the world.  I didn’t have much luck with Form B, probably because I didn’t understand what it wanted exactly, but you may have better luck.  But Form A, which is for the US, worked great!  You can use it for calculating both hours of daylight and hours of darkness, but for my purposes, hours of daylight is what I needed.  It turns out that mid-October (like on the 14th), I should actually have eleven hours of daylight, but this only calculates for the sun being over the horizon; it doesn’t calculate the time plants are in the relative dark due to fences or hillsides being in the way, both of which I have.  So I’ll leave mid-October as the time I have to have stuff mature for the fall and winter.

The catalog also indicated that to calculate the days to maturity (DTM) for fall and winter plants, you need to add two to three weeks to the DTM to account for the reducing light the plants will receive as the days wane.  

The Duration of Daylight/Darkness Table can be found here.  

I hope it’s useful for you!