Ep. 163 – Plant a Fall Garden in July!

What can you grow in July?  

The seed displays are gone from the store. You can outdo the normies by planting a great Fall garden – even in the heat of July.

Hear how to plant squash in July and beat the wave of squash bugs. How to start sensitive greens and carrots.

I’m back! Where have I been all this time? I’ve planted a lot of things this Spring and for a while there I was watering day and night and working in the garden and turning over soil and one of the things that really was a problem was my garden got out of hand. It got really weedy because I don’t go back there all that much. It’s in Zone 2, borderline zone 3. My garden in Zone 2 is being taken over by bindweed, a really big hassle that is going to require some significant work during the down season  

I started building garden beds and raised beds closer to the house. That way I have more eyeballs on them and I can intervene without it being taken over by weeds. 

In addition to that, I’ve been spending a lot of time on having local conversations or just personal off-the-record conversations.  There’s no need to turn on the microphone and record everything all the time! Live in the moment!  

I’ve had great conversations with friends, folks that have been on the podcast before, and I have also been developing local community.  

Everything needs to go hyper-local and I’ll talk more about that on a future episode. 

It’s July in Kansas, and next week we are going to break 100 for the first time this Summer. We have had a lot of rain.  

None of the stores have any plants left. Around here, all the seed displays disappear around 4th of July and everything goes on clearance. This year I got a ton of stuff. I followed Grant Payne’s model and I went around and just cleaned out the clearance items. I got fig trees at Lowe’s, blackberries from Ace Hardware, and lots and lots of echinacea. I’ve got all kinds of different colors of echinacea that I planted pretty much everywhere. 

The normies aren’t growing anything in July. Every time I have tried to grow or start something in July from seed, it usually fails just because of the heat. But as I’m looking at Clyde’s Garden Planner, I put it at my last frost date, which is October 20th, and I’ve got a lot of options for things that can still be planted and can still be harvested by the time the frost comes, which is almost three months away. I can plant cabbage. Of course, cabbage can go past the first frost. I can plant cucumbers, okra. Pumpkins (if they’re not 120-day pumpkins). You can plant winter squash, carrots, of course, and a lot of greens. Now the carrots and the greens will not germinate because of the sun and the heat and the soil temperature, but I have a couple of garden beds that are in the partial shade and I’ve been able to plant Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, which is my favorite kind of lettuce. It is the cut-and-come-again lettuce. I’ve been able to plant it in the raised beds and get it to germinate.  

You could use shade cloth to shelter it enough to maybe get it to germinate in the full garden.  

Another benefit is if you plant squash this late, then you can sometimes avoid the squash bugs because the squash bug wave has passed by the time the squash is getting ready to bear. That’s happened to me a couple of times. I have been able to get Winter Squash. It gets kind of squirrely because it gets a bit close to that first Frost date. But last year we had this kind of weather pattern where we had rain into July. And then it turned hot and dry with drought, and it stayed hot all the way through the Fall. We didn’t have a normal Fall at all, and the first major frost was not until Thanksgiving (instead of October 20^th). It made for some miserable deer hunting. It made it difficult to dig up some trees and replant them somewhere else, because they weren’t fully dormant yet. But one of the side benefits was that if I planted trees in September that gave me a little bit more time for root growth. I planted 2 apple trees in September and they had great root growth, and came back super strong this Spring. 

I also have sweet potatoes that are growing really well. In previous years I have had sweet potatoes that were as big as footballs.  

So give it a try. Don’t give up on your garden and you’ll have a great harvest this Fall.  

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Times are tough. You want to be more self sufficient and grow more food, with enough to share with family and friends or even sell some of that surplus.

You’ve heard of this “food forest” thing, but it’s so overwhelming to get started. I can help.

My Thriving Food Forest Design can help you realize your dreams of an edible foodscape or perennial paradise that will come back every year so you can grow more food and be more self sufficient. Schedule your FREE Discovery call with me at:

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Buy my chestnuts, hazelnuts, elderberry, and comfrey that are adapted to the Midwest.

GrowNutTrees.com

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Raised beds that I am building to test Perennial Kitchen Garden layouts:

Vego Garden Modular Metal Raised Bed (which I will make 5′ x 3.5′, 17″ tall).

I use this for a perennial kitchen garden – growing herbs to use daily in the kitchen. Just come along and pick what you need for tonight’s dinner.

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Meadow Creature Broadfork is my favorite tool for starting new garden beds. I turn over the sod, add a layer of compost, then Milpa, and cover with woodchips.