The fall garden gets planted in the worst week of summer

The Cruelest Trick in Gardening

Here is the trick nobody warns you about. The fall garden does not get planted in the fall. It gets planted right now, in the first two weeks of August, in the heat, while the tomatoes are still coming in and the whole yard looks like it needs a nap. You count backward from your first frost, which here in Zone 6b usually shows up somewhere around the last week of October, and you subtract the days your seed packet says it needs. The math almost always lands you in a week you do not feel like gardening.

What Goes In Now

Lettuce, spinach, kale, and arugula go in now and come up when the nights cool off, which is when they taste best anyway. Carrots, beets, radishes, and turnips have time if you sow them soon. Cilantro finally stops bolting on you. Sow a little deeper than you would in spring, keep the seedbed damp, and throw a scrap of shade cloth or an old sheet over the row for the first week, because the soil surface in August is hot enough to cook a seed before it ever wakes up. That is the whole method.

There is something quietly hopeful about pressing seed into hot dirt for a harvest you will not see for two months. It is the most ordinary act of faith we know. Below are a few shirts for the people who do it anyway.

P.S. If you sow one thing this week, make it spinach. It will sit there sulking until the nights turn, and then it will hand you salad in November while everything else has given up.

Cotton that plants. Stories that grow.

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