Tag: fall vegetables

Ordering Seeds For Florida Fall Planting

Fall is coming soon. The time to order seeds for planting in Florida’s cooler months has come.

It’s easy to forget to order seeds for Fall planting because we only do that here in the south. When the rest of the country is winding down, cleaning up gardens, and raking leaves, our best planting time just arriving.

It is July, and suddenly I realized that Fall will be here in no time. I got busy ordering seeds from my favorite online places.

My Fall Planting List

This list contains the vegetables I will be growing from seed. Most will be planted sometime in October. After lots of trial and error, this my favorites list. I love to eat this food. Some things take forever to grow, but they are worth the wait.

Here is what I’ve ordered, with the company name.

  • Carrots – (SESE) – take 4-5 months to grow
  • Bulb Onions – (SESE & Baker Creek) – take 4-5 months to grow
  • Contender Green Beans – (SESE & The Urban Harvest) – Fast growing bush type. Succession plant all winter. Good for soil too. Have tried others, but love Contender.
  • Beets – (Baker Creek, golden, & SESE) – Usually stay small, and take a lot of time. But I love beets.
  • Chijimisai – (The Urban Harvest) – fast growing green with roundish leaves. A favorite winter green.
  • Arugula – (Baker Creek) – Grew it 2 years ago.
  • Kale – (SESE) – Not much luck before, but will try again.

Maybe I waited too long, but I had to order from a few places to get the seeds I wanted. I try to buy organic seeds, but I don’t think Baker Creek’s seeds are organic. Their seeds are heirloom and non-GMO. A lot of my currently growing Zinnias came from Baker Creek.

I have some old seeds, which are dated 2024. I’ll plant the new seeds first and if there is space left anywhere, I will throw in some older stuff.

Seeds Saved For Fall Planting

I’ve cut way down on saving seeds, but some I do save. Dill and borage like cooler weather and saving dill seeds is so easy to do. Borage is a bit trickier. I have to catch the pod before it opens and drops the black seeds out. But, this means I will have borage popping up all over – finger’s crossed.

Hont sai flowering broccoli is another one with easy to save seeds. I like to grow it for the yellow flowers that bugs love. I’m not too particular when planting and pretty much scatter the seeds around.

Holy basil is a recent favorite to grow, and it grows year round. I think it does better in cooler weather.

flowers of hon tsai broccoli
Flowering Hon Tsai Broccoli
dill flowers going to seed
Dill going to seed
yellow dill flower with wasp
Dill flower
Florida borage flowering
November flowers on borage.
Holy basil

Marigolds From Seed, and Deterring Nematodes

I did order some new Zinnia seeds and French Marigolds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. The Golden Guardian marigold variety is supposed to be very good at repelling nematodes.

Here in the south, we tend to have to deal with nematodes. They like warm weather. I have been unsuccessful at growing peppers in my yard. My eggplants that are in the ground also look pretty bad. It’s possible I have some kind of nematodes. I need to work on that by planting marigolds – maybe throughout the year. Possibly as long as they have sun they will be happy.

tall marigold in Florida garden
marigold
marigold in garden

The Marigolds I have growing now are mostly flower-less. They are very tall. When they quit growing, I will cut them up and mix them into the compost.

Florida’s gardening site has this to say about planting marigolds. Also, on this page entitled, Garden Myths, Volume 1. I still say it’s worth a try. I’ll be sure to write about trying to grow Marigolds during our Florida winter season.

green divider leaves long
Read on…

Fall Gardening is Underway

Here I have a photo of my Fall garden. It is hard to tell what is growing, and honestly not much in the…

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End of Summer Garden Clean Up

It is the beginning of September and my end of summer garden clean up is underway. I happily pulled up all the Seminole…

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Picking Green Beans in December

I planted Contender bush beans back on October 16th. Today is December 1st and I have picked my first batch of little green beans!

One plant is doing especially well in a raised bed. I planted it next to the pineapple.

one green bean plant
One green bean plant is growing next to the double-pineapple plant in a raised bed. This plant is full of beans!
green beans in garden
Beans on one plant

Finding Space For the Bean Plants

Before planting, I soaked the bean seeds overnight, then I read that they don’t really need to soak. I did not have any innoculent so they went straight into the ground. The hardest thing was trying to find space for all the plants in my small yard. Not all garden areas are ready for planting yet.

Besides the two rows of beans, I planted a few beans beside the eggplant, and a few near the hibiscus. A few more seeds were placed randomly into my white barrel raised beds.

bean plants in garden bed
garden eggplant oregano and beans
small garden with flowers and vegetables
A few bean plants in the hibiscus garden

The Leafroller Worm

I created two rows of Contender bush beans in the little garden area where my Suyo Long cucumber plants had been growing. I had lots of worms on my cucumbers, but they were pickleworms, and much more of a nuisance.

The Leafroller worm is named very well. It cuts a little bit of the leaf and rolls it over itself and hides inside. The worms are green with black heads. It was easy to spot their hiding places because the underside of the bean leaves is light green.

I pulled back the leaf, picked off the worm, and threw it into the grass for the lizards.

rolled leaves and worm
Leafroller Worm on bean leaf
bean leafroller worm
Leafroller worm

Whereas I gave up on picking all the worms off the cucumber plants, the bean plant infestation was not bad at all. As of this time, I don’t even see any more worms on the leaves.

December 1, 2023

Contender bean plants
Bean plants December 1st

The Weather

We’ve had some crazy up and down temperatures this fall, which is pretty typical for Florida. We can have temps in the 40’s and 50’s overnight but it gets into the 80’s during the day. A few days stayed quite chilly all day. We’ve also had a few bouts of rain which lasted for about a week each time.

It is interesting to see that the beans did very well through all these weather changes. For that reason, I have planted my second crop of green beans. The new crop is organic Blue Lake Bush beans. I have one more packet left to plant when my first batch of plants goes by.

More garden stories:

October and November Vegetable Gardening in Florida

raised garden bed in fall
Raised Garden Bed November 2017

Now that the weather is cooling off here in central Florida, gardening is on my mind.  I can comfortably step outside and work in the yard.  October was a little hot, but November has been nice.

My Gardening in Florida book says that October is the time to think about growing cool-season crops.  Now it’s November and I still don’t have enough dirt for planting.  But if I did, this is what I would have planted.

Also, further down the page, see what is still growing and beginning to produce vegetables!

What to Plant in Fall

Suggested planting includes carrots, beets (I seldom eat) and turnips (I never eat), which can be started as seeds.  No need to buy seedlings.  Last spring I planted carrots in a fabric pot and they did pretty well.

My book has a section about building strawberry pyramids – so I assume I should plant strawberries this time of year. I don’t really have the space for them, so maybe I need a pyramid? There is probably no time or money for that this year, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Or maybe I will use one of the ideas found at this page: Top 30 Stunning Low-Budget DIY Garden Pots and Containers. Some look cheap and easy enough to do! Makes me want to go to the dollar store.

What I really need is a fence. It will give me some place where I can add containers and keep the raccoons out at the same time. There is no money for that right now.

I must deal with reality, so here is my list of vegetables I could have planted in October.  My garden is 10 feet long by 3 feet wide.  So not a lot of space, but I do have fabric pots to use as well.  If only I had a garden full of good dirt.

Lettuce
Kale
Onions – plant around the edges, take up little space
Peas – Will need a trellis

Some Plants Are Still Growing Well After Summer

I all but gave up completely on growing anything over the summer.  I had planted tomatoes, eggplant, squash and peppers in Spring.  I did get some small tomatoes but the raccoons helped themselves.  The squash plant got bugs and died before it gave me any squash.  The Eggplant and Peppers are still going strong.  In fact they are now doing well.

My neighbor, who does no gardening in summer, said that when it’s too hot the plants won’t produce. She covers the ground with plastic to kill the nematodes. However, I wonder if she realizes that burning out the bad also affects the good. I’m not sure it is wise to do that.  And because my plants survived the summer and are now looking good, I plan to keep the garden going all summer long next year.

eggplant in raised bed garden
My Eggplant “Tree” and green pepper plant in the raised bed

I honestly thought everything would eventually die in the summer heat.  I kept watering, just in case.  My eggplant grew into a small tree!  It was pretty, and has plenty of purple flowers, but never gave me an eggplant to eat.  Finally I cut it back hoping the excess energy put into growing would be used to possibly give me some eggplants.

And then…. today (maybe 2 weeks after trimming it) I was watering in the morning, as I do every day, and I found a small Eggplant beginning to grow!  Yay… more please.

title eggplant beginning to grow
November 15th – Finally, a Little Eggplant is Growing!

The only other vegetable producing plants that have survived are the peppers.  The hot pepper plant gives me a pepper here and there.

I have 2 bell pepper plants.  One is in a fabric pot and it has produced a couple of peppers over summer.  Now that the weather is cooler, the other pepper plant is producing like mad!  I’ve never been able to grow peppers but maybe the secret is to plant in Spring and wait until Fall to eat them.

Screen Shot 2017-11-15 at 9.50.47 AM

So, what I’ve learned so far is that planting in Spring gives me vegetables in Fall. The plants seem to go dormant over summer and then produce when the weather gets nice.

I’m continuously amending my soil and will continue to do so.  I think poor soil was inhibiting growth.