Signs of Autumn - September Garden

Well, shoot. You suspect that summer is ending when you start getting the occasional single digits (Celsius- that is like high 40's F) at night. You know fall is coming when you see the Canada Geese practicing their v-formation flying and see your first wooly teddy bear caterpillar.  

I also keep an eye on the poplar trees. There is a row of poplars along the main road in the small town next to us, that we pass at least once a week on our way to 'town'. They start with the occasional yellow leaf here and there, suddenly trees are half yellow and you start thinking 'shucks'. I watch them go from green to yellow and then completely bare. 

As I am going to be laid up with my brand new hip for the month of September, hubby is going to be in charge of the garden... and the teardown. Always a sad time of year, but also a renewal as when the beds are all cleared out, we top dress with compost to feed the soil life (and my veggies) for next summer. It is one of those things that you do where you can see your progress, gives instant gratification. 

Here are some ideas for your September garden. I am in a Zone 3/4, on the prairies.  

A Few Quick Things NOT TO DO This Late In The Season. 

I hate to give 'do nots' but these are very important, so I will start with these....  

No fertilizing anything perennial. Not trees, shrubs, roses, or flowers. Feeding them now will slow down their shutting down process and will likely cause them to die when winter arrives. They need to go dormant. You can, however, still feed your annual flowers in hanging baskets and planter pots.  

Check out the gorgeous hips on my Blanc Double de Coupbert rose. 

No deadheading roses. Your roses need to start shutting down now, taking off the flower heads may cause them to put on a new flush of blooms, thus keeping them growing too long into the season. Allow them to make hips. Nothing prettier than rose hips! 

No pruning. At this time of year, you only want to take out anything that is dead, damaged, or diseased (referred to as the 3-d's). Broken branches, yep, take them out. Dead branches, yep, take them out. Any other pruning should be left till spring, as pruning will promote new growth. That is not what we want at this time.  

These are tomatoes in my saucing bed right now. They are beautiful, but most are still hard and green because of the cool start we had this summer. A few are blushing, which gives me hope. The cool nights will help them know that the time to ripen is now. 

We are also not going to be watering them any longer in order to stress them out and promote ripening. We cut back to once a week watering a few weeks back so for us to now go waterless/almost waterless is not going to shock them or cause any damage.  

We removed the extra foliage a couple of weeks ago, plus the blossoms (as they will not have time to grow fruit and colour up) to speed up the process. 

If letting them go dry freaks you out, or if you are still watering twice a week, slow down your watering to one good soak a week for a few weeks. Constant watering will make them keep growing and flowering instead of ripening. Plus, less often watering will make your tomatoes taste better, intensify the tomato flavours. 

Another trick to help ripening is to root prune them. A foot away from the main stem, stick a shovel 6 inches into the ground, all around the edges of the plant. This will sever some of the feeder roots and speed things along. As our beds are too high and the tomato plants too big to get in there, we are choosing to let them go dry instead. 

Cutting around the plant will also help if your lilac is not blooming (assuming that you did not prune, or pruned at the right time of year).  

The greenhouse tomatoes (right hand side) are ripening faster than the tomatoes outside. We have since pruned them back of both leaves and flowers, plus topped them (snap the tops of each stem off) to put the energy into ripening rather than growing.

Cucumbers (left side) are putting out fruits like mad. We are fresh eating and making lots of fridge dill pickles (my favourite). We also canned some dill pickles with this recipe, but I chilled the cucumbers in ice, like I do with the fridge pickles, for 6 hours before canning.  

Peppers and eggplants were planted in big grower pots this year, rather than in the greenhouse. They ended up with aphids whenever I grew them in the greenhouse but with these pots, we can roll them into the greenhouse after it has been emptied out, if we want/need to extend the season. 

These are super big pots. I put 3 or 4 pepper plants into each pot. One for mildly hot pickling peppers, one for sweets, and one for paprika peppers. Those will be ground into paprika powder - I have both hot and sweet paprika peppers, this year.  

The black grower pots are sitting in a garden bed on the south side of the house so they really soak up the heat. They are watered deeply once a week. When you water the peppers less often, they make more flowers (thus more peppers) and develop better flavour. If you water daily, you tend to get hot peppers with no heat, sweet peppers that taste watery and bland, plus a whole lot less peppers. 

Peppers will keep ripening well into the fall, so do not lift them too early. Let them gather heat! They can even handle a light frost at this time. Cover with a sheet/frost blanket  at night, or pop in greenhouse. 

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Hopefully lots of zukes coming our way after the watering disaster! 

I am freaking out a bit as I will be getting yet another high water bill. I usually set the timer for 15 minutes when I start watering a bed, but somehow forgot to do that when I hooked up the weeping hose in the zucchini bed. It was on for 2 hours before I noticed! Eek and deep sigh!

Speaking of squash... they are starting to get some powdery mildew now. Not to worry, this is very normal. Just let them keep going as long as possible to ripen the last of the squash, water at soil level only, water in the mornings so that the leaves are dry going into the night. They will get p/m regardless. As soon as the night temps drop a bit, we start finding dew on the grass in the mornings, you know that those leaves are also 'getting wet' so they will start to get mildewed. This also happens to cucumbers. 

Celery, carrots, beets, and kale all are doing stupendously. A little bit of holes in the older leaves of the kale, but nothing too bad. 

Don't deadhead your perennial or annual flowers if you want to collect seeds from them. Time to let them start drying up. You want your cosmos and zinnias to be nice and dry before you pick them or they may not be mature enough to give you flowers. 

Sunflowers are my most happy flowers, this year. They all just opened up a week ago so the bees are in heaven. These are a multi-stemmed variety, so they make a bunch of smaller heads on each stalk. 

Fall Needle Drop – If you see yellowing needles on the inside of your pine, spruce, fir, or cedar trees, rest assured that all is fine. Just as deciduous trees drop their leaves in fall, some parts of your evergreens will also go yellow or brown and drop their older needles. If, however, the outer needles are yellowing, that indicates a bug or disease issue, so you’ll need to have a closer look at it.

The needles do not acidify the soil (that is myth) so they make for a great mulch. Rake them up to use in your garden beds, around fruiting shrubs, especially great to use on slopes. They stay in place, let in water, pack tightly enough that they do not move about or allow weed seeds to germinate.

Here you can see our latest attempt to get rid of the wild oats with cardboard - behind the sunflowers by the fence. 

Weeding. We have one area that has been taken over by wild oats(?) Pretty sure that is what this tall grass with seeds/grains is. 

I planted and nursed those 'grasses' along as the dogs love to eat it, but it sure did get away from me. Is now spreading into a much larger area than I had ever intended. So, here we are, three years later, smothering it out with cardboard and mulch. 

Safest and easiest way to go about getting rid of persistent 'weeds'... even if they are not actually weeds. So tell me, why do I now feel guilty about getting rid of the dog's grasses, lol? 

Anyway... keep weeding, you all. Don't forget to top dress with compost after you clean up your garden beds. 

That is my mish mash of thoughts for the early September garden. This is what the yard looks like today, the day before my surgery. Flowers blooming everywhere, bees buzzing and birds singing. 

Happy Almost Autumn ~ Tanja