The Vegetable Garden

in Autumn

The jobs required in the vegetable garden in Autumn obviously vary depending on your climate, but as a Southerner, we are in a cool climate. This means relatively settled and quite sunny days with cool nights. Some areas will start to experience frosts which will spell the end of the warm season summer crops of plants such as corn, capsicums, chillies, tomatoes, cucumbers etc.

Autumn is the time to start planning out the crop rotation of your vegetable garden beds and to clear and prepare any beds of plantings from Summer.

Tomato Bed:

Clear away dead/dying tomato vines. Any unripened (green) fruit can be kept for making pickle. Any ripening fruit that has started to change colour will continue to do so if the fruit is placed in a sunny/warm position inside (or in a greenhouse) Because they don't develop the same intense flavour as summer fruit, I oven roast these with herbs, salt, pepper and olive oil and bottle them.

Treat this bed with a dose of dolomite lime to "sweeten" the soil at a rate of approximately one handful per square meter in preparation for the legumes to follow. If you're a fan, now is the time to plant broad beans, perhaps a late crop of snow peas and depending on variety, podding peas for shelling. In the warmer months to follow next season, these will be supplemented with more peas, then move into beans in the next round of warmer months.

Pumpkin/Cucurbit Bed:

When it comes to clearing the vegetable garden Pumpkin patch, you need to evaluate the condition of the crop. The cool weather will be killing off the vines and you will likely have an attack of White Powdery Mildew. Before picking the pumpkins, make sure that they are ripe and ready. The Pumpkin stalk that attaches it to the vine should be tough and dried out. If it is still fleshy and moist, the pumpkin isn't ready.

Cut your pumpkins off the vine, leaving a good length of the stalk attached. This is important as it helps to prevent insects and disease getting into the fruit and causing rot. Store the pumpkins somewhere sunny and airy, protected from rain, to enable the skns to harden. This will extend the keeping time for the pumpkins into winter. When storing/airing make sure the pumpkins are on their side, not sitting on the bottom to ensure you don't get rot in the base.

Any vines infected with mildew should be thrown away, not composted.

We also grow Sweetcorn in our pumpkin bed, so need to deal with the dead corn plants. These are somewhat tough and can be slow to break down. I find the easiest approach, is to chop them off at ground level with a sharp spade, leaving the roots in the soil to compost. Roughly chop the stalks up and compost them. Feed the bed with a good dose of your choice of animal manure, but if using chicken manure, not too much as this will cause excessive leaf growth and less fruit in the Tomatoes next year.

Root Crops Bed:

Your root crop bed should be well and truly producing. Carrots, parsnips, beetroot ect should be ripe for the picking. Parsnips in particular will benefit from the cool autmn nights that spell the end of many others in the vegetable garden at this time of year. As the temperatures drop, the parsnips will fix more natural sugars in the root for the winter and the crop will that much sweeter. Keep the weeds down by hand weeding only (to avoid damage to the crops) until the bed has been harvested.

The root bed will become the Cucurbit bed next season. As such, a bed full of well rotted organic matter is ideal and the best approach to achieve this is to plant a green manure crop.
This, when grown and dug back in, will provide a a good source of rotted organic matter, especially when side dressed with fertilisers such as blood and bone and manures. If you have limited space, you can double up here, planting a crop of broad beans early that will rise high enough to be underplanted with your green manure crop and then dug back in when harvested.

Leaf Crops Bed:

The leaf crop bed should still be producing from successive plantings in summer. I transfer my winter greens planting across to the now vacant Legume bed. As you harvest your root crops, move the new plantings of Garlic, Onion, Carrots etc into this bed as you vacate this years old root crop bed. Do not fertilise this bed as excessive nitrogen will result in poor bulb development and forking of carrots etc.

Legume Bed:

The legumes (beans, peas etc) are nitrogen fixers. This means that as they grow they add nitrogen back into the soil. When clearing the legumes out, cut the plants off at soil level and leave the roots in the ground to break down. This bed will be planted with your winter greens.

If you're not ready to plant or sow the winter greens yet, feed this vacant legume bed with a dressing of blood and bone and manures. (I prefer chicken as it's high in nitrogen and essential for good leaf growth) It is important not to plant directly into a freshly manured bed as you risk burning the young seedlings/germinating seed. Leave the bed for at least 2 weeks. This provides an ample amount of time to raise seedlings of Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Kale, Spinach etc in a green house or sunny window ledge and when matured enough, these can be planted out into the waiting garden bed.

What can I grow now?

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