Good Growing

It may be hot out there, but fall gardening has already started in Illinois. This week on the Good Growing Podcast Ken and Chris share how the summer veggies faired and then describe their plans for fall crops. Learn about what you can get started in August for harvest in October and even into the winter. Plus tips on gardening as the weather turns cold.

Watch us on YouTube! https://youtu.be/4l3AcXRNP8c 

0:39 Hey Ken!
1:10 – How has the summer garden faired this year? What we grew, what worked, and what didn’t.
First talking Shiso earlier in the year https://youtu.be/hww7vEXP3_0?t=271
9:30 - Have tomatoes been delayed this year?
11:13 - Recording this year’s garden crops for rotating next year
12:25 – What are some good fall garden crops?
13:50 - What might it be too late to plant for a fall garden as of the first week of August?
15:28 – Chris seeds red Russian kale
16:10 – A hack for labeling your seed starts
17:52 – Using pelleted seeds for tiny seeds and seeders
18:55 – Using seed tape of making your own for tiny seeds
19:30 – Carrots are tricky to germinate. Here are some tips.
20:09 – Starting spinach indoors
21:11 – Sowing turnips in the garden
21:49 – Cover crops for the fall
25:05 – Garlic is already selling out at many seed suppliers. Time to order ASAP. If you can find it, here’s what is recommended to grow in Illinois
27:31 – Storing garlic for the winter
29:12 – Our preferences for starting seeds indoors or directly in the garden. 
30:44 – Why do we need to plant our fall garden in the summer?
32:10 – Season extension to push the garden into winter
Build your own low tunnel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nln3DVuwQXY 
33:42 – If we could only pick one fall crop what would we choose?
36:06 – Thank yous and coming up next week

Contact us! 
Chris Enroth: cenroth@illinois.edu
Ken Johnson: kjohnso@illinois.edu 

Check out the Good Growing Blog: https://go.illinois.edu/goodgrowing

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Any products or companies mentioned during the podcast are in no way a promotion or endorsement of these products or companies.

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Creators and Guests

Host
Chris Enroth
University of Illinois Extension Horticulture Educator serving Henderson, Knox, McDonough, and Warren Counties
Host
Ken Johnson
University of Illinois Extension Horticulture Educator serving Calhoun, Cass, Greene, Morgan, and Scott Counties

What is Good Growing?

Talking all things horticulture, ecology, and design.

Chris Enroth:

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator with University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Macomb, Illinois, and we have got a great show for you today. We are gonna be talking about getting ready for the fall vegetable garden and what we have to do to get prepared because it might be the middle of summer, but baby, we gotta get going right now on this stuff. So we'll talk all about that, and you know I'm not doing this by myself. I'm joined as always every single week by horticulture educator Ken Johnson in Jacksonville.

Chris Enroth:

Hey, Ken.

Ken Johnson:

Hello, Chris. I'm already behind on my fall garden.

Chris Enroth:

Me too. Yes. Especially as we were chatting before the show started and you're like, oh, we already have to get this stuff in the ground. I'm like, well, I don't even have my seed ordered yet for certain things. So we're definitely behind the the eight ball as usual.

Chris Enroth:

But I I feel like I'm I'm more prepared this year than I have been for a long time. But we'll get into how that's gonna pan out here in just a bit. But before we dive into our fall vegetable gardening, let's get an update of how's our summer garden going so far this year. And since you've you've been on vacation for several weeks, Ken, how did it fare as you were gone?

Ken Johnson:

We had a severe case of vacation void come through. Oh, no. What chemical can you spray for that? H2O? Yeah, that's pretty much.

Ken Johnson:

Our green beans are looking pretty good. We did we're growing black beans, so I just kind of sit there and let them do their thing. Pretty much all of our artichoke and cardoons died. Celery looks pretty good. I'm going run some of the pink celery.

Ken Johnson:

I had some of that, it's very celery tasting. So if you don't like celery, it's probably not gonna be one for you.

Chris Enroth:

No. Well, actually our neighbor, she gave me some pink celery too. But when we went over to their house a few weeks ago, we noticed kind of way to get some of that celery flavor, but not overpowering. She picks the leaves actually, and then she dries them, and then crushes them like you would with like dried basil or oregano or something, and she adds that in the stuff. And she said, it's not as powerful as this that stalk of celery.

Chris Enroth:

So give that a try if it's too too much celery for you.

Ken Johnson:

I don't know if you need to blanch it before you pick it or

Chris Enroth:

I think they I'm not sure. I'd have to check as I know she put it into some type of dehydrator, which for me would be an oven set to low. But that that's about all I would be able to do. But I think they're gonna crush it and just throw it in empty spice bottle and just use it until it runs out till

Ken Johnson:

the Yeah. For the winter. Celery salt almost. Yep. Yep.

Ken Johnson:

Without the salt. Exactly.

Chris Enroth:

That's exactly what it is. Celery salt without the salt. Yeah. So right. Pink celery, very celery like.

Chris Enroth:

What else did you grow rice again this year? How how did that go?

Ken Johnson:

We grew rice, but it took so long to get it out. It was looking pretty crummy when we put it. We've got a few here and there that look okay, but not doing all that great. So the next year I think we're gonna to push that planting seeding day back a little bit in case we get into another spring where it's we just can't get it out because it's too cool and stuff. Corn is pretty patchy.

Ken Johnson:

I was gonna I did save some corn smut fungus from last year. Nice. Put it in the freezer, I don't know if that's way it'll store it or not. Then when we were on vacation we lost power And when we were cleaning the freezer out, I got tossed so I didn't get to inoculate my corn. And that kind of patchy coming up.

Ken Johnson:

It's been a bit of a disappointment this year, we've still got black beans and some corn. Corn should be able to pick here in the next week or two. We gotta plant it a little bit later than normal. Pumpkins look pretty good.

Chris Enroth:

Okay, pumpkins. So that's something we can look forward to later on. So that's good. Now you we kinda made a big deal about Shizo when we talked about this in the spring. Yeah.

Chris Enroth:

You can you can listeners, viewers can go back in time to to that episode. We'll leave a link in the linky description thing that we use. But Shizo. Remind us again, what is Shizo and how'd that fare this year, Ken?

Ken Johnson:

It is an herb. I couldn't tell you what it tastes like because did I have any success with it this year? We tried some early in the year, we've got some AeroGardens, tried it in there, it came up and then died. Didn't have any room to do seedlings. We just ran out of space so I direct seeded some.

Ken Johnson:

It got really dry and never came up. And I have not tried again. Maybe I'll do it this fall, don't if I'll have enough time, but if not, try again next year. You know, try a couple times before I completely give up on it.

Chris Enroth:

That's right. That's right. You got a three strike rule. Yeah.

Ken Johnson:

Maybe by September, October I'll be able to report back, but don't hold your breath for that one. Hey, I won't.

Chris Enroth:

I'm not although I was so we were so like, Shizo, what an interesting herb to be growing. So we're well, not this fall, next year.

Ken Johnson:

Eventually, at some point.

Chris Enroth:

Will get it We'll to find it at the grocery store.

Ken Johnson:

So how's your vegetable garden doing?

Chris Enroth:

We really scaled back quite a bit this year. We decided we're not gonna do tomatoes. We we we kinda where our rotation is limited, and so we we had to really pick and choose what to grow. So we kind of took everything out of the ground this year after being in the ground for a few years, because we really only have like one spot in the ground that we can grow in. And we did stuff in containers this year.

Chris Enroth:

So didn't do tomatoes, we didn't do peppers, but we did a lot of potatoes in bags. And we did onions, I did a few onions in the ground, got the celery in the ground as I mentioned, and and and and we had our parsnips that were held over from last fall. But otherwise, that's about all that that we did. Now in terms of our onions, it's very healthy onion crop. I think the instruction said, you know, provide two to three inches of water per week.

Chris Enroth:

They definitely did not get that, and they grew just fine. So maybe the dry weather helped a little bit with the bulb development there. Got near perfect onion bulbs, and I I'm not sure what to tell you about potatoes. I'm pretty sure I have a potato with some disease, some type of some problem. There's this one bag, the sprouts will come up, and it'll immediately wilt and die back.

Chris Enroth:

And so I am keeping I'm happy it's not in the ground, and I'm keeping that one separate from the others, and I'm kind of curious to dig that up here. But the potatoes have all started to die back, which means we could harvest now if we really wanted to. We'd get some smaller potatoes, a few larger ones, but for the most part, I'm probably gonna wait a little bit longer. And otherwise, I'm just growing ginger and turmeric like a crazy person still, and that's doing just fine this year. Definitely noticed a a difference between the stuff growing in full sun.

Chris Enroth:

So ginger in full sun is definitely more stunted than the ones that we have in the shade of the of the yard. So becoming more and more convinced that it might not necessarily be a full sun crop for us here in Illinois, but still trying to figure that out.

Ken Johnson:

Yeah. Say for onions, we had a very good onion year. That's almost the size of a softball. Garlic was good. The potatoes, they started dying back, started digging them.

Ken Johnson:

Absolutely nothing. Oh, we got no potatoes this year.

Chris Enroth:

Well, now I'm nervous. Maybe I need to start no. I I just top dressed my potatoes or I hilled my potatoes just couple days ago because the tubers started popping out of the ground. So I think I got growth. But were you growing in the ground for your potatoes?

Ken Johnson:

In raised beds.

Chris Enroth:

Raised beds? Okay. So it was kind of close to my containers. We're growing in just a pure artificial potting mix. I mended it with a little bit of compost and some slow release.

Chris Enroth:

But I definitely know one potato bag is not gonna look so good this year.

Ken Johnson:

Yeah. We've grown potatoes in the in the past and I'm wondering if we didn't have something in the soil or something go ahead and so that may be a no potatoes for foreseeable future in that. Yeah. And those raised beds may have to go back to in ground.

Chris Enroth:

And the other thing that I've heard about tomatoes is that I think related maybe more towards the drought is that our tomatoes have been later this year than normal. Usually, like at the farmer's market, you'll have growers with tomatoes that first week of July. And I'll definitely say now that we are in the first week of August, finally getting red tomatoes appearing at least on the plants here at our our food donation garden here in Macomb where we're at, that seems a little bit later than normal. Have you experienced kind of late tomatoes this year?

Ken Johnson:

Yeah, so the garden we've got with that we're doing with some of the kids from the YMCA finally starting to get tomatoes with last week and week before being so hot. Didn't get a lot of coloring. It looks like they are starting to get a little bit of color in them. But I'm interested to see in, you know, a week or two are we gonna have a gap there.

Chris Enroth:

Mhmm.

Ken Johnson:

We had real hot temperatures. I would be surprised if a lot of those flowers got aborted. We've got a gap in production there because of that.

Chris Enroth:

Yeah. Yeah. We were setting heat records last week in the hundreds, and I think Macomb set its own heat index record. It was like a 125 heat index in Macomb. That was also the same day that I decided to help out a friend and and and move some Russian sage for them.

Chris Enroth:

Don't do that. When it's a 125 degrees outside, you will not feel well afterwards. So and neither will the plants.

Ken Johnson:

Maybe all those plants and pots may have not put it in the ground yet because because it's been so hot.

Chris Enroth:

Well, I I will say one more thing that I will talk about with the summer garden is what we're doing. This is our food donation garden. The green rectangles are our garden beds. And so probably after we're done recording this podcast, I'm gonna head out and we're gonna make sure to mark where we have each crop for this year. We did have some disease issues pop up with our tomatoes and peppers.

Chris Enroth:

Looks like maybe some early blight possible and definitely some bacterial spot, which actually submitted a sample to our U of I plant clinic and they confirmed that. And we think we have cutworm, and but we we never saw them. So we tried digging around, never found anything. But that's another key thing I think is is marking where you have planted crops this year, because I always say I'll remember, and I never do remember. So making sure that you're you're you're cataloging where everything was so the next year you can rotate your crops and try to break some disease cycles.

Ken Johnson:

Yes. Or if you're planting a full garden, don't follow-up.

Chris Enroth:

Yes. Necessarily. With the same family per se. Speaking of fall gardens, Ken, that's the topic of the day, now that we've finally gotten out of the summer garden. So planting a fall garden, I have my plan is while we record today, I am going to start seeding some some cell packs.

Chris Enroth:

They're already they already have potting mix in them. Because I normally don't do this until like September, because I'm that and just so you know, that's way way too late. But I still give it a try. But if I do it today, I might be ahead of the game at least with some crops. But Ken, are there any what crops would you say some of your go to's for the fall?

Ken Johnson:

Well, I'd say pretty much anything you're growing in the spring. The most part you can grow in the fall. So what we usually do, we usually do carrots and lettuce are the two biggies that we do mainly because we're usually late and lettuce is pretty quick. Carrots you can hold over a little bit longer. They can take some frost and still do fairly well.

Ken Johnson:

Obviously you can do things like beets. This year with peas, we held some of our peas back, seeds back, so we can plant them again this fall. We've got some that are only thirty to fifty days. So we may be able to do maybe even a couple plantings of those. You could do broccoli and cabbage and cauliflower and all that stuff.

Ken Johnson:

With those you want to use transplants though, and we're, at least here in Jacksonville, I've never seen transplants for those for sale really anywhere I've lived. I've never really seen them for sale in the fall of those transplants. Typically we've to make those ourselves and we want to seed those I think early early July. Usually sore. If you haven't done started your seed day, probably going to be too late.

Ken Johnson:

If you've got extra seeds and you want to try, you're not going hurt anything.

Chris Enroth:

Yeah. What if you have seeds and hope? Like just hope that they'll do something. Go for it. Because that

Ken Johnson:

stuff can especially broccoli and stuff, they can handle a frost and not get killed. So if we get lucky, we get a mild fall, early winter, you may be able to get something, but I wouldn't get your hopes up necessarily if you haven't started seeds yet. Or if you can get seeds to look for something that's got a fairly quick maturity. You don't necessarily want a long season one if you haven't started seeds yet. And with a lot of these crops, you know, they like cool weather.

Ken Johnson:

And since they're harvested, they're going to be maturing in cooler weather of the fall. A lot of times people say they taste better. I think about when we're doing them in the spring, they start off in the cool weather. By the time we get to harvest, it's getting hot. And that's not ideal for them.

Ken Johnson:

And some of them carrots and broccoli and stuff, if you get a light light frost, a lot of times they taste a little bit sweeter. The sugars get a little more concentrated. So they they taste better too.

Chris Enroth:

I have a red Russian kale that I'm gonna be seeding right now, and I normally prefer the green kale, you know, star boar, winter boar, one of those types. I I find that that green kale holds up a little bit better, I think, to some of the cold, the frost. But all I have today is red Russian, and that is kind of a good point here to make that if you wanna do a fall garden now or two weeks ago is the time to order your seeds. And so I've got my red Russian kale now planted in a six pack, and next thing to do is to label that six pack. So I'll I'll show you listeners not listeners, viewers, listeners, you're just gonna have to listen to what and imagine what I'm doing here right now.

Chris Enroth:

So there's a lot of different ways we can label these six packs. You can use popsicle sticks, just what this is. Just write on them with a marker. You even have your fancy, like, real plant tag labels. You can use marker or pencil or pen.

Chris Enroth:

I have a a little hack that I use. I have window blinds. So these are window blinds that I have right here, and they're just white window blinds, and I just cut a little spear like this, and I take my marker right here, and I write on my window blind red Russian kale. And just so you know, this works really well if you're doing stuff inside. Window blinds don't last very long outside, and they'll actually start to fall apart in the garden within about about two months.

Chris Enroth:

So just be mindful of that. This works great though for a starting seed inside. You got an old window blinds that you're gonna get rid of.

Ken Johnson:

When I do seeds, I usually book the date I started them too. So I know that sometimes they're out of sight, out of mind, and I come back a few weeks later and so I have an idea of whether or not I should be concerned that they haven't come up yet or if I still have time

Chris Enroth:

to wait. Yeah. So you got Red Russian, they got my date, August 1 on here. And Ken, I'm I'm gonna have something this fall now. I I at least got one six cell pack planted.

Chris Enroth:

I also have some mystery seeds. They're just in this cup. I don't know what they are. I'm gonna put one mystery seed. I'm gonna plant one a mystery seed.

Chris Enroth:

I'm pretty sure it is sala Salanova lettuce because I normally order the pelletized seed, and that's what this is. These are pelletized lettuce seeds, and it's pelleted so that you can use something like a seed plate, like what this is for a cedar. And these little grooves, they just pick up the seed as it spins and it just drops it into a furrow that's created by your cedar. But I like these because I can pick up this lettuce seed very easily with my fingers. However, Ken, you mentioned carrots.

Chris Enroth:

I also have pelletized carrots as well, and I have my own pelletized carrot seed plate here somewhere, here it is, right here. So after this show, after we're done recording, I am going to go seed some carrots. Promise that it's gonna happen this year.

Ken Johnson:

If you don't want to do pellets, you can also get seed tape for stuff that you can buy. So it's basically kind of like tissue paper that those seeds are in. And they're not evenly spaced and just kind of tear that tape and bury it in the ground. You can also do it yourself. Use like a paper towel or toilet paper, a little white glue, Helmer's glue.

Ken Johnson:

Don't go too crazy with it. Commitly smother your seed just a little bit, stick it to the paper towel or toilet paper and then bury that.

Chris Enroth:

I'd say carrots are some of the hardest ones. I in the past to germinate because they're so finely seeded if they're not pelletized, and then they they really need to stay kind of this this like damp surface of that soil, and just needs to stay a little bit wet all the time.

Ken Johnson:

Too wet, And no they take a long time to come up too. If you get any kind of crusting, they don't like it. So I've heard a lot people weeds. Plant radishes with them to help keep that crusting down. Mhmm.

Chris Enroth:

Well, one more thing that I know I definitely want to plant in my my last cell pack here, because I've never done this indoors, is spinach. Have you ever started spinach inside, Ken?

Ken Johnson:

I think we've always direct seeded. I don't remember ever starting it inside.

Chris Enroth:

I've always direct seeded as well, but as hot as it's been, I don't think it's going to germinate because spinach does kind of need a little bit of a cooler soil temperature to germinate. So I'm gonna try to do this inside in the basement. Hopefully, it'll be cool enough. We'll get some germination, and I'm gonna seed the variety space, which is just a kind of a leaf spinach here, and it stands up pretty upright for cutting. So I'm gonna try that one this year.

Chris Enroth:

I've heard of success that people have had seeding spinach inside, and so hopefully, we'll have the same amount of success this year. And then then, of course, I the one that we can't do indoors though is turnips, and so I have the Hacuriei turnips, which is a white turnip, and I again have a seed plate for that, which I will use to just seed that directly into the garden. That's probably one of my favorite ones to grow, and it's probably one of my kids' favorite thing to pick out of the garden. They love pulling those things out of the garden. They're like these white golf balls that come out of the garden.

Ken Johnson:

Need to get a cedar.

Chris Enroth:

I love my cedar. We used it to do cover crops in one garden this this summer. It didn't work out the fact that it didn't rain for like two months after we did that. So there's a lot of weeds, but we did get some a cover crop of sunflowers, sun hemp, and cow peas to germinate. And and so yeah, well you can check that out.

Chris Enroth:

But hey, oh that reminds me, that's another thing that we can plant right now is a fall cover crop in our gardens. And so that that would be another good thing to consider.

Ken Johnson:

So I usually do a cereal rye with some tillage radish, daikon radish. Usually throw in some red clover in there too, just for the heck of it usually. And a lot of times when we have a much more productive garden in the summer, I get in a little bit late so I don't get the best the rye is usually pretty good, lot of the radish. I don't get it in very well because I don't get the ground tilled up and all that well because I'm trying to do it around plants and stuff. And this year I've got a tremendous amount of tillage radish coming up in our garden that didn't germinate last fall.

Ken Johnson:

But this year hopefully I'll be able to do that. Get that in a little bit better now they don't have as many plants to travel around and getting stuff. I need to order that too here.

Chris Enroth:

Yeah. I know I have a bag of tillage radish seed here. One of my favorite fall cover crops is gonna be oats and peas. It it grows really well and it'll tolerate the first couple frost, but once we get that hard freeze, it will die completely, and I I don't have to worry about terminating it like we would with the cereal rye or with, you know, any kind of that The clover. Clover, yeah.

Chris Enroth:

That that would be persistent. But the the peas and the oats, that winter kills, gives me a nice cover of mulch for the winter and early spring, and eventually just decomposes back into the soil.

Ken Johnson:

Yeah, that is something if you're gonna do that rye cover crop, you've got to terminate that spring at some point. I usually wait until it starts heading out and then crimp it. If that doesn't work, go in with and spray it just to make sure I get everything killed off. I've still got that in my garden as a mulch. But the only thing popping up are oak trees that the squirrels have planted.

Ken Johnson:

So I don't really have a whole lot of weeds other than oak trees and those tillage radish that popped up where I planted stuff that died and now they've taken over.

Chris Enroth:

Future podcast episode, Ken, woody weeds popping up in the garden. I got mulberries everywhere. Those things are not as easy to pull up once they get just like two weeks in the ground, all of a sudden you can't pull them out.

Ken Johnson:

Yeah. I've a couple that have about ten, fifteen trunks coming out because I keep pulling them and I don't get the roots out and it just keeps re sprouting. Yep. Oh, mulberry.

Chris Enroth:

Well, another thing which I thought this year I was well ahead of the game, I was gonna order it today. I go to my trusty dusty website to order my garlic. It's all sold out. So Ken, you and I, we were hunting before the show, like, where can we find garlic? You can find it, but a lot of websites have a lot of sold out signs over their garlic.

Chris Enroth:

Feels like it's selling out quicker and quicker every single year. But I I would say if you have not ordered garlic, do it right now. And and and Ken, what type of garlic do we grow here in in Old Illinois?

Ken Johnson:

Usually your hardneck is going to be your best bet that's a little more cold hardy. I have tried growing softneck a few times. I've had decent success. I don't get nearly as many coming up and surviving as I do with the hardneck. So that hardneck is probably gonna be the way to go.

Ken Johnson:

If you're in Far Southern Illinois, you may be able to get away with softneck a little more, but further north you get hardneck. Yep.

Chris Enroth:

And I would say we've done a couple trials here in Illinois and for the most part a lot of those, some of those porcelain types, do well. Namely, I think music is the is the cultivar variety that stands out, among at least Central Illinois growers, But there's also a few of those other porcelain or the kind that has like the the purple, streaking to it. Those, those types typically do better here in Illinois. But in most of the trials, at least that I've seen, music is usually the top performer. But good luck finding it.

Ken Johnson:

We're gonna buy it all.

Chris Enroth:

Yes. Buy up the music.

Ken Johnson:

And that's something we want to plant in October. And then we would harvest that harvested mine a couple weeks ago. Mhmm. So that's when you're gonna have a space and that's gonna be there for a little bit.

Chris Enroth:

Yeah. And everything was a little bit early this year, I I feel like. And so our garlic, I think we harvested it almost a month ago. And we have it cured and it's stored inside. And I think at least with the hardneck, it our hardneck in the past has stored almost throughout the entire winter, the stuff that we had been used for cooking.

Chris Enroth:

And we we keep those in like a mesh bag. Oh, I got one. So we we store a lot of our our bulbs and things like that in these mesh bags. This is just just kinda like what you might get maybe at the grocery store that might have potatoes in it, but it's got a drawstring at the top, and we just hang that stuff up in our basement. And it does really good job storing things.

Chris Enroth:

You do have to be careful with stuff drying out though, especially if you have a dry house in the wintertime.

Ken Johnson:

Yeah, we also put ours in the basement. I've just got a tray. We've got a screen bottom on that they sit in. I think ours lasted till about May ish. Then the stuff we did have left started getting a little dried out and wasn't all that great, but considering we picked that in July.

Ken Johnson:

Yeah. You know what, ten ten months.

Chris Enroth:

Mhmm. For some of it. That's pretty good storage. Yeah. We had we had cloves that would maybe in a whole bulb, two or three cloves would rot or we'd have a whole bulb just start sprouting.

Ken Johnson:

We have that.

Chris Enroth:

We have leaves coming out of our bag. Yeah. So Ken, we've talked about what we can grow, making sure that you go track down some garlic somewhere. And we've we've talked about this already about, you know, what can be started in the ground, what can be started inside. And your preference, I think, for fall gardening, you do most of it outside, right?

Ken Johnson:

Yeah. So our seed starting We we do everything direct seed. I think you usually do lettuce and pop, start that inside, don't you? Yep. I've always done lettuce.

Ken Johnson:

I've never started it inside. I need to try, but

Chris Enroth:

It's a modern world. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I will say starting lettuce inside, you get these like beautiful perfect, you know, starts to your lettuce.

Chris Enroth:

But the problem is when you do this indoor start seed starting and then you transplant outside, that hardening off period. And plants are just gonna look awful for a while. Sometimes they don't survive that stress. But when you do like like what you are doing, starting direct seed out in the garden, you don't have that problem. They emerge and they gotta get tough right away.

Chris Enroth:

Yeah. You do have to

Ken Johnson:

do usually a little more thinning, which I am not very good about. Sometimes I've got, you know, usually, especially if the kids are helping 10 lettuce plants in a square inch area that don't get thinned soon enough, but that is something to keep in mind, especially if you don't have that pelleted seed or that tape, you're just sprinkling by hand, there's there's going be some thinning that you've got to do for for anything really. I mean, especially your small seeded stuff, lettuce, carrots, all that.

Chris Enroth:

So Ken, why can't we begin our fall garden in the fall? I mean, it's middle of summer. We're just starting to get tomatoes. Why should we start planting stuff for September, October, November?

Ken Johnson:

Because really when we want to harvest that stuff, know, we start our seeds, put our plants outside September. You know, if it's got fifty days until harvest, you're in November. We probably had a couple hard frosts by then. And there's a good chance your plants aren't going to make it. And if they do, as those days get shorter, they're going to start growing.

Ken Johnson:

They're not going to grow as much as those days get shorter. So we need to extend that that growing season out about a little more, probably a week or two. So if it's, you know, fifty days to harvest, you may be looking at more fifty five, sixty days because of those shorter days. A little cooler temperatures are not going to grow as fast either. So I think the usual kind of rule of thumb is add a week or two, probably ten days to two weeks onto your kind of your days to harvest.

Ken Johnson:

Not factoring that fall, so to speak, factor of those shortening days and stuff. So if it's fifty days, you want to count back fifty days from your your first frost, add another week or two. And that's really when you want think about planting. Some of the stuff can get through a frost, but just kind of use that first frost as a general guideline.

Chris Enroth:

And some of these things can get through not only the frost, but they can get through the winter. Like spinach and carrots, if you protect them, if you keep the snow off of them, you could harvest them in January really if you wanted to on a on a warmer winter day, probably above freezing. But to to do that, you would need some type of season extension device whether that's a cold frame or a low tunnel, or if you got one, a high tunnel, or a greenhouse, something like that. But, carrots and spinach, things like that, they they're pretty tough when it comes to that cold weather. But if folks are interested more in learning about that season extension, we do have a couple resources that we can put links down below.

Chris Enroth:

I think even one of me shows you how to build a low tunnel and how you can bend your own metal pipe and just use that and and stretch some greenhouse plastic, just as a poly UV stabilized plastic over top so that the the UV light doesn't break it down. I don't go to the hardware store and buy plastic drop cloth because that stuff will disintegrate in the sunlight. So don't do that.

Ken Johnson:

And if you don't want to go quite as far as building the low tunnel stuff, if you've got old sheets, you can put those out and that'll capture some heat. If we've a real hard frost a hard frost coming and you've got stuff that may or may not make it, put that over there and that may capture enough heat that you're not going to kill your crop and extend that season maybe another week or two for you.

Chris Enroth:

So Ken, when we are are done for the day here, there's one let's say there's one thing you're allowed to plant for the the garden. Your wife says, we're done gardening, I'll let you plant one thing. What would that one cool season fall garden crop be?

Ken Johnson:

Well, this year probably be lettuce because we have a lot of lettuce seed left over. I don't want it to go to waste. Normally carrots, I think there's after having a few carrots in years past that we've had in the picked in the fall, there is a noticeable difference between your summer harvested and your fall harvested carrots, how much sweeter they are. It's almost night and day between those two.

Chris Enroth:

Yeah. I they call them candy carrots that because of the they produce so much more sugar. It's kind of their antifreeze for the the cold weather. Yeah. The the candy carrots, that's that that's a good choice.

Chris Enroth:

I like that.

Ken Johnson:

How about you?

Chris Enroth:

I I gotta stick with my old the curry turnips. Because if I don't bring those to the Thanksgiving meal, I'm in trouble. It's become a staple in the household now. But I probably one of my favorite things because you can roast them, you can saute them, bake them, and they mix really good with other root vegetables. So I'll often toss them in with potatoes or sweet potatoes, onion, things like that.

Chris Enroth:

And so that they mix really good with a lot of different things, and they they're not as spicy hot as you might think of some terms might be. They do have a little bit of heat sometimes, but they get really sweet when you cook them. That that starch converts to sugar and it gets really really sweet. Try those next year. I'll bring a pack down to you next time I see you, Ken.

Chris Enroth:

A couple of weeks. You can try them yourself. Grow them up against your house, they'll they should survive probably until maybe end of November, depending on our fall. Well, that was a lot of great information about fall gardening and I have got a lot more planting to do. I have this this tray here that that needs to get some some soil and some seed into it.

Chris Enroth:

Which one will I choose? Probably going to be more lettuce. Can't go wrong with that, in our household at least. Well, the Good Growing podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Enroth. A special thanks to Ken Johnson for hanging out with me today, chatting about summer gardening and the upcoming fall garden.

Chris Enroth:

Ken, good luck this year in in fall garden.

Ken Johnson:

Thanks. You too. Get that garlic ordered.

Chris Enroth:

I'll find it somewhere. Yes.

Ken Johnson:

No. Let's do this again next week.

Chris Enroth:

Oh, we shall do this again next week. Talk about fall gardening. We're gonna talk about fall flowering plants. So the other half of the landscape. What are some fall flowering plants that we can think of, for your landscape here in Illinois?

Chris Enroth:

So listeners, thank you for doing what you do best, and that is listening. Or if you're watching us on YouTube watching, and as always, keep on growing.