This post is a part of a series about the things I usually do/sow/harvest in my garden in a given month. I post at the beginning of each month and at the end of each month I check in to let you know how the month went in our garden(s). I am gardening in the eastern part of the Netherlands, in a cool temperate climate, roughly zone 7. Your sowing times might be somewhat different depending on your local climate.
September to do list:
Sowing outside:
winter purslane, corn salad, rocket, fall radishes, spinach (to cover with fleece later)
Sowing under cover:
spinach, rocket, mizuna, mibuna, corn salad, winter purslane, leaf mustard,
Harvesting:
Sweet corn, tomatoes, egg plant, zucchini, winter squash, French beans, kohlrabi, red beets, carrots, parsley, turnips, summer/fall radishes, lettuce, cauliflower, chard, leek
Jobs:
Harvest and cure winter squash
Harvest and store apples
Remove sick tomato plants
Earth up leeks and apply liquid fertilizer
Keep weeding
September is the month when I concentrate on making sure we will have some homegrown produce to eat during the winter. That entails two main jobs: sowing winter salads and harvesting and properly storing apples and winter squash.
September around here is the last chance to sow anything to harvest during the winter. At the beginning of the month I sow corn salad and spinach outside. The spinach will later be covered with fleece but the corn salad is hardy enough to survive without protection. Also very hardy and useful salad green is winter purslane which self sows prolifically. It only needs to be introduced to your garden once and it will come back every year. Corn salad self seeds too, but unfortunately not as much as I would like it to,which is why I keep sowing it. Sometimes I also gamble a late sowing of radishes, whether they will reach any useful size or not depends on the weather.
About halfway the month I also sow winter salads in our cold frame – chervil, sometimes parsley and different kinds of leaf mustards (Osaka purple, mizuna and mibuna) and other Oriental brassicas. These will be later covered with the glass lights and should give us several harvest of cut-and-come-again leaves throughout the winter.
This month we will also bring in the apples from our trees (we grow four different varieties that I hope to write more about soon) and the winter squashes. The apples will be stored in our cellar and the squashes in an unheated bedroom.
We also have more hardy vegetables in the garden (leeks, parsnips, endive and radicchio) that can stay in the ground and be harvested fresh when needed. Our kale was eaten by rabbits, but luckily there is also kale in the community garden. The winter vegetables will get a boost of liquid comfrey feed to stimulate them to grow to a decent size now the weather is still warm.
Even though the harvests from our garden are slowly dwindling, there should be something to pick even during the coldest month!
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