Cool Season Kitchen Gardening: A Series

Filed under: In The Garden, Tagged as: in the garden

The end of August and the beginning of September is a time of planning and planting in the ktichen garden. In the northern hemisphere, summer is giving way to autumn and winter will soon follow. In the southern henisphere, winter is giving way to spring.

Wherever you live--except in the tropics--this is a time for planting cool-weather plants. If your transition is from winter to spring and the garden is nearly empty (in Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile and South Africa) then now is the time to sow or soon sow cool-weather spring crops in the cold frame or directly into the garden. If you live in the northern hemisphere (North America, Europe, Russia, China and temperate Asia), where the garden is still full of summer crops, the transition from warm-weather crops to cool-weather autumn and winter crops is a feat of spacing and timing.

This begins a short series--a few days and articles--on growing cool-weather crops. Here's what we will cover:

Part I: Cool-Season and Warm-Season Crops: the basics.

Part II: Planting the Autumn, Winter, and Spring Garden.

Part III: Cool-Season Vegetable Varieties: what to plant in autumn and spring.

Part IV: Extending the Season: how to get more time out of your garden.

Kitchen gardening is both an art and a science. There are plenty of growing basics to follow, and if you do you will almost always be successful, that's the science part. But gardening is also an art, which is to say both you and the weather can do something unexpected (and, for the most part, you will still be mostly successful). Growing the kitchen garden is never the same from one garden to the next and from one day or week or year to the next. The best rule to follow is to simply enjoy doing the best you and your garden can with what you know and what Nature gives you. With time, your knowledge and experience will change (and grow) and so will Nature. The lesson: enjoy each moment.

Posted by Stephen Albert on August 25, 2008 under: In The Garden , Tagged as: in the garden
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