When to Plant: Find your average last frost date (The Old Farmer's Almanac offers an online calculator) and count backward from the seed’s average maturity period to figure the optimum planting time, adding a week or two for weather variations."It’s hard to believe during the hottest days of summer, but autumn is on its way. And although we often think of late summer as the height of the harvest season, by planting a second-season garden you can yield crops all the way into early winter. In fact, some varieties grow best during the milder days and cooler nights of fall. 

It’s hard to believe during the hottest days of summer, but autumn is on its way. And although we often think of late summer as the height of the harvest season, by planting a second-season garden you can yield crops all the way into early winter. In fact, some varieties grow best during the milder days and cooler nights of fall. 

When to Plant: Find your average last frost date (The Old Farmer's Almanac offers an online calculator) and count backward from the seed’s average maturity period to figure the optimum planting time, adding a week or two for weather variations.

Successful Second-Season Planting

• Make room for new late-season plants by pulling out any varieties that are no longer performing well, taking care to remove stems and roots.

• Prepare the late-season garden bed by loosening any compacted soil and digging in organic matter.

• When an early frost is predicted, cover plants overnight with woven fabric to provide additional protection of 2 to 5 degrees.

• For faster gratification, choose quick-growing varieties that go from seed to table in 40 days or less, such as arugula and lettuce.

• Select fall or winter varieties of seeds when available, or look for cultivars with earlier maturing dates.

• For the quickest harvest, check your garden center for end-of-season discounts on vegetable transplants.

• Young plants can also be protected from early frosts with season-extending row covers, cold frames or straw mulch.

How Low Can You Go?

If you live in a cold climate with early frosts, you can still enjoy a late-season harvest with these extremely hardy vegetable plants:

• Beets, carrots, Swiss chard, lettuce and parsnips can all tolerate a light frost (28 to 32 degrees).

• Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, snow peas and radishes will usually handle temperatures that dip to the upper 20s.

• Collard greens and kale can survive mid-20 degree temperatures, and because the plants produce natural sugars as a defense against the cold, they often taste sweeter and more flavorful after a hard frost."

What to Plant:

Arugula

Beets

Broccoli

Brussels Sprouts

Carrots

Collard Greens

Green Onions

Kale

Kohlrabi

Lettuce

Parsnips

Winter Radishes

Snow Peas

Spinach

From Mother Earth News , Author Eliza Cross

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"Harvest handfuls. Gather herbs early in the day, after the dew has dried but before the sun bakes the plants' essential oils. If you're harvesting an herb's leaves, cut the stems at their peak, when the flowers start to form. If you like, gather the blooms of herbs when they develop fully." 

From Better Homes & Gardens

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We are putting in a demonstration installation of Garden Circles right here at our headquarters on the Hunt Utilities Group Resilient Living Research Campus.  The process of figuring out just where and what it would look like was interesting and may be useful to others out there contemplating how to plan Garden Circle installations.  Of course, we can always help, too.

Criteria

First we decided what was important to us and came up with this list:

1. Creative shape demonstrating the creativity of the system
2. Good visible location where visitors could see it well
3. Location where it could be tended and observed.

So we picked the front yard of the founders' home in the center of our research campus.  

Making a Map

We got an image from Google Earth that showed the interesting shape of the yard between curvy sidewalks.  I opened that image in a free drawing program called Inkscape and used it as the base layer.  I scaled the image within the program based on the measured size of a large concrete patio that was 20ft X 40 ft, a one time staging surface and possible garage floor).   To scale it, I made a rectangle that was 200X400 pixels (so each pixel was 0.1 ft), made it partially transparent, and then scaled the image and rotated it till it fit directly over the patio in the image.

Trying out Ideas

Then we started drawing circles.  

The first design was simple and would show off the simple round shapes of different sizes and be easy to tend near the sidewalk.  Not much pzazz, though.

The second design was meant to be similar, but show off the linking feature.  Paul and Lynn, the founders and my parents, were not moved by this one, either.

Then went a little more creative.  we figured it would not be understandable artistically except from the air, plus it was more beds than we thought we wanted to manage.  It's a cute sorta seahorse, though.

Then we started drawing in the arching trellises made from cattle panel mesh.  We went back to extremely simple, again, but moved on very quickly to derivations of previous plans we had drawn up.

Dragonfly?  Maybe...

Spiral Labyrinth?  Interesting...

You know when you finally see something that you like and you just decide?  That is what happened with the final design and Lynn (the ultimate decision maker).   We took the Quad 4 U basic shape and added a few extra lines to make the space flow a bit more.

This shape is made with 36 Garden Circles and will have a 16ft X 16ft patio in the middle made from patio block that matches the sidewalk.   It will be a very nice addition to their outdoor living space.  And, while they are lounging or grilling on the patio, they can tend the plants.

So, that is how you can do a large installation design and try out a bunch of ideas.  Stay tuned for updates on construction of this garden, irrigation installation, and planting, tending stories.

We will even try out some seer repelling ideas on these to see what works and what doesn't.  

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It has been a busy few weekends at Mootopia as we prepare the gardens for another growing season and make upgrades.  Here are the highlights including some experimental prototypes from the Garden Circle laboratory.

Asparagus beds

The idea that asparagus is something you plant and then just harvest every spring for the next 30 years excites me.  I also like to eat it, of course, but I really like the idea of putting in plants that just keep coming back for a long time with little work.  Because it is a low maintenance plant and wouldn't need frequent tending, I thought it would work just fine to put it in lower raised beds.  So, we made 1 foot tall beds for that job.  We planted 4 asparagus per bed and they are just starting to pop up.  

The little garden beds are so cute.  Maybe we can make a product out of it.  

Yoga tested.  Queen Moo approved.  She has tested each model of garden bed we have put in.  If she likes it, the asparagus should, too.

Filled and planted with room to top it off after they sprout.  At least that's how it said to do it on the articles I read.

Straw Bale beds

Last year our tomatoes were flopping over and taking the bales with it.  This year we won't have that problem.  We are trying a different way of arranging the bales and adding the Garden Circle Squares.  We put in 3 of the beds to try out this year.  Each one will have a different kind of frame over it for supporting the tomatoes.  Stay tuned for those updates later in the season.

We also added a couple other beds of bales that are not in a mesh and fabric frame.  Those will serve as controls in this experiment.  We have started conditioning the bales with 3 cups per bale of Milorganite high nitrogen, organic fertilizer and generous watering.  It will be very interesting to see how the contained bales do compared to the un-contained bales.

Greenhouse beds

Gonna play with growing tomatoes in a hot environment, too.  After finally getting the doors on the greenhouse and shelves made from bricks and panels from a couple cheap closet cabinets we no longer wanted, we were ready to figure out how to use this greenhouse for more than sprouting. We already missed the early part of the sprouting season for this year, but now we are set up for next year.  I can only take on so many parts of this learning curve at a time. 

For the upcoming growing season we are looking at which plants like it hot.  Tomatoes come to mind.  So do peppers and sweet potatoes.  We are going to try those in our greenhouse planted in real soil.  (Maybe we can do hydroponics later.)  I plan on taking half the south side for those plants, and the greenhouse is not that big, so I chose the 3 ft diameter Garden Circles.  

Turns out they fit great.  Imagine  a couple vining tomatoes in each of those garden beds growing up along the ceiling and cranking out tomatoes like crazy.  I like that mental image a lot. One will probably have sweet potatoes the same way.

Strawberry planters

Inspired by strawberries in a gutter, but big enough to be able to handle a lot of different types of plants, these triple-decker planters will help me make the most of my greenhouse space.  This first prototype started out 4 planters high, but it didn't fit so well against the curve of the greenhouse.

Now it is 3 beds high and fits much nicer.  Now I just have to make a bunch more of them.

Rhubarb - Lots of rhubarb

Along the lines of plants that are easy to grow forever, we also put in a bunch of rhubarb along a 60 ft length of fence on the west side of the garden.  Last year there were out of control grasses and weeds in that area, so to keep the cute little rhubarbies from getting overshadowed, we put down landscape fabric and covered that with wood chip mulch.

We put in about 30 along this fence  before running out of room and then another dozen or so along the walkway into the garden.  In a few years we will have sooooo much rhubarb we will be giving it away.  

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