Fall vegetable gardening is harvest time and time to plant vegetables for winter

With fall vegetable gardening your garden should be in full swing and you should be living off all your vegetables. As well as having a stall at the local farmers market to sell the surplus or to trade for

things you don’t have. If you have been following the standard procedure you would have been planting a few new seeds or plants every weekend, and now you are reaping the rewards of all your efforts. And looking back that would not be too much effort.

Now you will start looking at vegetables that are frost tolerant so they can survive into the winter.

That means you’ll be looking at planting broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, onions, peas, potatoes, spinach not NZ spinach and turnips as these vegetables can live in the cold. Other plants you can plant in fall or autumn are beets, carrots, chard, mustard and radishes. It is getting too late to plant vegetables that have trouble with frost unless you have a greenhouse or some way to cover the garden. So you should have finished planting snap beans, NZ spinach, squash, sweet corn, tomato, eggplant, peppers, sweet potato, cucumber, watermelon and zucchini as well as most beans.

If you still have some old sweet corn stalks standing then you can plant climbing vines like peas.

It is getting a bit late for beans but you can try a few. Look for areas in your garden that are frost free like under trees or near the fence and plant in these areas. You can also start planting your favorite vegetable in pots so you can bring them inside when it gets cold. So don’t worry about running out of vegetables in winter just keep up your fall vegetable gardening.

Check out our Vegetable Gardening page and see what you think, but now is the time to stop thinking and just throw a few seeds around the house to see what happens.