Your Fall Garden Primer: Now’s the Time

Thank you Katie Hamborsky of West Point for the kind words about this column that you wrote in last Friday’s opinion page. Indeed, the heat of the summer has taken a toll on my garden. I get the feeling my family is tired of eating okra and eggplant at this point.

But you’re right, Katie, fall is just around the corner, and gardeners in Fayette County should be getting ready.

Loks of folks started gardening this spring, not only in Fayette County but around the nation, as the COVID-19 crisis started to take a grip on daily life. Back in March, kids were sent home from school and many parents were sent home from work. Long check-out lines and shortages at grocery stores, coupled with fear and anxiety about catching the virus while out in public, spurred many people to take up gardening.

At least there’s one positive side effect of the coronavirus. The timing was great. The

The timing was great. The crisis arrived just in time for the Spring gardening season. While stuck at home, husbands and wives and parents and children got to work breaking ground, planting crops, watching them grow, harvesting together, and perhaps learning a thing or two while bonding with each other and with nature.

This needs to continue.

Plus, this newfound interest in gardening contributes to our community’s food security. Just last week we found out that the AMEN Food Pantry in La Grange had its busiest month ever. Some people are really hurting right now. Maybe local gardeners can help fill some of those needs.

Spring, however, is not really the best gardening season in Central Texas. As many of you have probably noticed, just as your squash start producing, here comes the vine borer invasion. In May, the grasshoppers arrive and eat everything in sight. If you planted lettuce in March, you probably only got a month of production before the heat took it out. Big tomatoes stop producing as spring turns to summer and temperatures reach 100 degrees. Brassica crops like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, collards and brussel sprouts seem like a distant memory from childhood at this point in the year.

Now is not the time to give up on the garden, though.

The vine borers and grasshoppers will soon be gone, along with a lot of other pests. With any luck, we’ll get a few more soaking rains. Temperatures will start heading back down.

Now is a good time to get some planting beds ready for the fall.

I avoid long, narrow rows in my garden. I like beds that are rectangular and four feet wide. I can usually reach everything from the edges.

When I first started gardening in my late teens, I planted long, narrow rows, just like my parents did. When I first moved to this property, I attempted to conquer the soil with a Massey Ferguson tractor, tilling it over and over again with a disc harrow and then forming it into rows. I was so proud of myself in the tractor seat, watching rows come to shape behind a single-bottom plow.

What a waste.

Driving back and forth in a heavy tractor compacted my garden soil before I even got a chance to plant. This was before I started using wood chip mulch. By that summer, my soil was dry and harder than a brick.

Since then, I’ve learned better ways. What follows is my advice for bed preparation. I hope it works for some of you. There is no one “correct” way of doing just about anything in the garden. But I’ve found the most success using the methods described in the guide to the right.