 Hello, I'm Megan Humphrey. I'm the executive director of Hands. And we are a nonprofit in Burlington, Vermont, whose mission is to get food to seniors who are lower income. So we have a number of programs, including this one, Our Hands in the Dirt. And we partner with the very famous Charlie Nardosi and Vermont Community Garden Network to bring gardening programs. We have Hands in the Kitchen, which is a nutrition education workshop series as well. And we're already, shockingly, gearing up to distribute, to deliver about 1,000 meals and gift bags all over the county on Christmas. So we have a lot going on. And we have also partnered with Heineberg Senior Center to do the Support Buddies program in response to COVID. So those are our other programs. And we wanted to especially thank AARP Vermont, CCTV, Town Meeting TV, Gardener Supply, Hannaford, and Red Wagon Plants for all of their support for all of these programs. And I wanted to point out, once again, I have Marie Davis, Peapod earrings on, which is kind of fun. She's a local artist. And as Charlie knows, I love August more than any other month. But suddenly we're talking about fall in today's series. And then we have one more on September 15th about putting food by for the winter. So Charlie, thank you so much for once again coming. And here you go. Well, thank you very much, Megan. It's always great to be here. Let's see, I just wanted to do that. There we go. Yes, so welcome. And yes, it is August. It kind of creeps up on you, doesn't it? You look at the calendar and all of a sudden, oh my god, it's August. And there's lots more things to do. But it is a very bountiful month in the garden. I know our gardens are doing really well with lots of produce coming in, lots of berries. We have a lot of berry bushes and fruit trees, and lots of flowers too. We're getting into those fall flowers. So what I wanted to talk about though is not so much harvesting in this little talk, but I wanted to talk more about what to do to keep the harvest going. So that would include things you could have planted, perhaps in the spring, that will be long-season crops that you're gonna actually be harvesting in the fall and into maybe even to early winter. But also things you can do now that will help you get the garden growing and get some new plants planted and growing so that you can enjoy that bountiful harvest into September, October, and November. So without further ado, let me share my screen and we will get going with this whole talk on fall gardening. Okay, so the fall vegetable garden. You know, a lot of us started out gardening with the idea that we'll plant things in May, plant things in June, and then we kind of just let it do its course, you might say, and really don't think about continually planting throughout the season. I know in previous talks that I've given for hands this season, I've talked about succession planting, you know, continually planting things right through the summer so you have more in late summer and fall. But now is a good time to kind of get that last gasp, that last big planting in before it gets a little too late for things to mature in the fall. And there are a lot of options and that's really what I want to highlight with this talk and really kind of give you some ideas that as things kind of fade, you know, the beans kind of fade or the summer squashes start fading and cucumbers, plants like that instead of just pulling them out or cutting them back and cleaning out the bed, you can do that for sure and you may want to do that, but also take that as an opportunity to plant something else in that bed. And the something else will be what we'll be talking about here. But before we go there, I want to talk a little bit about harvesting some of those summer crops that are really pushing along with our warm, humid weather, wet weather that we've had a lot of things like the melons, for example, and then moving along really quickly and often people have questions about when to harvest them. So we're talking about cantaloupes or melons. It's really a simple crop to harvest. The best way to know when to harvest them is you lift them up and when they slip off the vine, literally they just slip right off the stem, that means they're ripe. Another thing I always do is I give them a sniff. You can just sniff the blossom end of them and if they smell like a ripe melon, you know it's a ripe melon. Another thing of course you can do is watch and see what the wildlife is doing. If you've got squirrels or mice and bowls interested in your melons, you know they're probably ripe. So you want to pick them. The thing you do want to do is let them ripen on the vine. These are not the kinds of fruits that will continue to ripen, you know like some of our other fruits that we have, these will not continue to ripen after they've been harvested. So if you do have problems say with pests, like mice and bowls and squirrels, you might want to put a little wire cage around some of your prized melons just so you can protect them so they don't get hollowed out while they're sitting there trying to ripen. Water melons also are maturing nicely. We've got some nice ones in our garden they're putting on some size now. And these are a little harder to know when to harvest these because water melons will not slip right off the vine when they're ripe. So you're going to have to use some other cues. Some people will look at the bottom of a watermelon and when that bottom that's usually kind of white you know the bottom is on the soil surface that area on the skin is usually white when it turns kind of a yellowish color they use that as an indicator. Some people will thump them, literally thump them with their fingers and when it has more of a hollow sound that tends to tell people that it's time to harvest but really the most easiest way and the most foolproof way of telling if your melons are ripe is looking at the tendrils. So when you look at this image I have up there now you could see if you go to the right maybe about one o'clock or so on that screen you could see a little shoot coming out and little curly cues coming and hanging out there. Those are tendrils that's a tendril that comes out of the vine that's usually what it uses to grab hold of things. When that tendril closest to the watermelon starts to brown and fade that's an indication your watermelon is ripe and ready to harvest. So that's really probably the best way to know when to harvest your watermelons is waiting for those tendrils to turn brown. If you wait too long and they get really brown then your watermelons gonna start cracking and kind of be kind of mealy. If you pick it too early well we've all done that probably in the past it's kind of green and doesn't really have that flavor you're looking for. Winter squash is a little bit easier than watermelon because they turn a certain color when they're ripe. So you get for example, butternut squash and most of the varieties of butternut squash are gonna turn this kind of brownish color. When they turn that color, that mature color then you know that you can harvest them or you can even just leave them in the field or leave them in the garden. They're okay to sitting there as long as they don't get hit by a hard frost they'll be fine as far as storage goes. Now some of the new varieties of winter squash acorn squash and the turban squashes and all of those they mature to all different kinds of colors from white to green to black to red. So sometimes it's a little hard to know what the mature color should be for that. So another thing you can do with your winter squash is take your thumb and just press it press your thumbnail onto the skin of the winter squash. And if you can press your thumb onto it and you get some resistance meaning that it doesn't easily pierce the skin then it's probably ripe and ready to harvest. But like I said most of these winter squash can just be left out in the garden as long as they don't get zapped by a cold frost they'll be fine out there and then you can harvest them at your leisure. That's a nice thing about them. Another thing you wanna do with your any of these curbs so melons and squashes for example is this time of year it's good to really encourage the fruit that is already set to size up and ripen. So you wanna stop the plants from creating new vines that have new flowers and new fruit because those new flowers and fruits are not gonna have enough time to mature. So this time of year it's good to go out to your melon patch or your winter squash patch or your pumpkin patch and it's snip off those little shoots. So that little shoot there you see at the end just go back maybe three or four inches or so snip off the flowers and the little fruits on it so that you can see those other fruits that have set off to the left there they're gonna have a chance to fill out. In fact that one vine that's probably about well about seven o'clock I guess on your screen you can see that there's a little fruit there and then at the end of it there's another flower I would snip off that flower and just let all the energy go to that fruit so you can get a big size fruit that matures before a frost happens. Now tomatoes are pretty simple, they're starting to come they're a little slow this year at least in our garden I know the farmers markets are loaded with tomatoes but often a lot of the local farmers now use hoop houses which helps them get a jump on the season and also helps them get harvest of tomatoes a lot earlier but they will come along, we're still in August we've got plenty of time for tomatoes and we'll have lots of them in the next few weeks. So the thing of course with tomatoes regardless of which variety you go and there's a whole bunch from our garden a couple years ago you can see all the different heirlooms, different colors, different shapes and sizes regardless of the variety you're growing you wanna make sure it starts coloring up before you harvest it. So this is really more of a tip for into September and October where you have some green tomatoes still out there and there's threats of frost coming so can I harvest it and bring it indoors to rip it? And the answer is if you have some color on that fruit yes you can, you could bring it inside a lot of people will wrap it up in an individual fruits into a newspaper, put it in a warm dark place doesn't need light, it just needs warmth and it will continue ripening so you'll have that nice tomato flavor maybe even October, November depending on how many green tomatoes you have if the green tomatoes have not shown any indication of color they will not ripen indoors so it's best to harvest those and fry them up as green tomatoes or pickle them or do something with that with them. So just like the pinching of the cucurbits you can pinch tomatoes too but you don't wanna do that quite yet. Now if you have some of those big heirloom varieties like some of the ones I just showed you there those you might start thinking maybe the end of the month starting to pinch the tops of the plants and the idea with pinching the tops of the plants is just like with the cucurbits you're trying to send more energy to the existing fruits to get them to ripen in time so you can just pinch the tops off so the fruits that are there that are just starting to size up looking like a good size they'll still have enough time to get to full maturity and ripen for you. The exception to this would be cherry tomatoes. So if you have cherry tomatoes you do not wanna pinch those vines by the end of August because that's still too soon. They are very prolific, they grow very fast and they only have small little fruits to mature. So I would wait till mid even end of September to pinch the vines of those cherry tomatoes that way you can get the maximum amount of production from them before a frost comes. This time of year it's good to make a new bed and this is kind of the traditional way of making beds you get the rototiller out there or you get the shovel out there and you start digging up the sod and tilling it all under and doing that but let me introduce you to a new way of doing it and I actually talked about this in a previous presentation that we did I think probably in the spring and that's called no dig gardening and no dig gardening really uses a tenant that we should be imitating what's happening in nature and this idea of tilling the soil and turning the soil every year is actually not a good thing for your soil, for the plants and for the wildlife that's involved in it because we found out that in a teaspoon of soil there's over four billion microbes and those microbes are in there creating basically creating relationships with plants with plant roots and one of the most famous ones of course are the Mycorrhizae fungi and what they do is that they create this symbiotic relationship where they're working together so that the Mycorrhizae lives on the roots and what the Mycorrhizae do is open up those roots so they can bring in more water and nutrients and your plants grow better. So this is a whole sophisticated system that's happening under the soil and every time you till the soil you break up that system so it has to recreate itself. So a better way to garden especially if you're starting a new garden whether it be on a lawn like this or just in a weedy area or just expanding an existing garden is to do a no dig system and this is how no dig works. What you want to do if you have a lawn or even a weedy area, mow it down close to the ground you just kind of scalp the grass down and then lay about four to six layers of a newspaper on it and we're using like seven days here. For example, seven days is great and works really well for smothering out the grass. You don't have to worry about the colored ink on the page because that's fine but you don't want to use glossy paper so sometimes they have glossy inserts you don't want to use that by putting about a four to six inch thick layer and watering it down so it doesn't blow away. What that does is smother that grass, kills the grass but preserves all of that soil biological life that's under there and all the humus that's there all the real rich soil that's there right underneath the surface of the roots of those grasses. Then on top of that we're going to put a six to eight inch thick layer of hay or straw. I like to use hay because it's cheap and easy to find but straw is fine too. Chopped leaves would be fine too. And then on top of that we're putting a two to three inch thick layer of compost. And so if you do this in the fall which is this is an extension of one of our gardens we did a number of years ago that we did in the fall by the spring this is all broken down enough so that you can literally plant right through it and plant your plants right in it. So if you're doing this for a new garden whether it be a vegetable garden or a flower garden now is a great time of year to do this to mark out that area, mow it all down, lay down the newspaper, the hay, the straw, the organic materials make a nice thick layer, just leave it there and then cap it with compost. Sometimes what I'd like to do also is cap the compost a little more hay just so the compost doesn't get eroded away in the winter. And that's a great system to kind of set up now. If you have really tenacious weeds in the area where you're going so you have golden rod that comes up or wild raspberries then you might want to use cardboard instead of that newsprint that I was talking about but the cardboard you want to use is a corrugated cardboard. You don't want to use paperboard. You don't want to use like cereal boxes for example. You want to use the boxes that you would get when you buy an appliance or some of those corrugated boxes of course strip off all of the plastic that's around it all of any metal staples, any things like that that I'm not going to decompose and lay down a layer of that then you build on top of that with the organic materials and then the compost. The cardboard will take a little bit longer to break down but that's okay because if you do it now you've got a good six months or so before you're going to start gardening so by the spring you probably be able to use it. So once you have your bed then you want to plant and yet you can still plant things this time of year in late August. We're planting fall veggies and so what kind of things you want to grow? Well, anything that's green well literally anything that's leafy green lettuces, spinach, kale, Swiss chard, mescaline mixes any of those will work really well this time of year. The reason is even if they only grow a little bit and you get a little small plant you can eat it because you're eating the leafy greens of it. So these are plants that are adapted to the cool temperatures and they do okay with the short day lengths and that's really going to be a limiting factor very soon here as we get into September and October. So that's why it's important to get these in the ground soon so you can get them up and growing before the days get really short. Beets, radishes, and baby carrots are even a possibility. The beets of course, even if you don't get a beet you can eat the beet greens. Radishes are very fast growing, everyone knows that. And baby carrots are worth a try. If you have a protected spot that gets a lot of sun you might try a little baby carrot or maybe you have a raised bed one of those elevated raised beds or a container you might get some little baby carrots you know like the Sambalina carrots or the baby fingers, little ones, little fingers before the cold in the short days really stops their growth. And then Asian greens everything from bok choy to mizuna to mabuna. There's lots of different types of Asian greens out there the mustards. Again, you're eating the leafy greens of them so even if they're a small plant they'll be worth growing. So when you're planting lettuce and greens I usually say if you can plan ahead and this is probably a little late to try to do this now but if we were doing this say in the end of July I'd say start them from seed indoors or in a patio or on a deck or somewhere and get a little seedling going. So once you have a little seedling going then three weeks or so later you can transplant that out. That's gonna give you a kind of a jump on the season but also it's gonna help the plant because this time of year there's a lot of insect pressure. There's a lot of insects out there ready to munch on things. You might have rabbits and mice and other kinds of critters running around your garden. If a little seedling pops out of the ground and gets munched on by someone it's gonna die pretty quickly. But if you have a transplant like this it's probably gonna be able to survive especially if you can protect it a little bit and grow into a nice sized plant. Of course, this time of year it might be getting a little late to be doing this so you're probably gonna have to just direct sow seeds as we get towards the end of August. And that works really well for things like spinach. Again, spinach you can just do what I call a broadcast seeding. So you have a little spot on your bed maybe a one foot by one foot diameter spot. You excavate the soil, push it aside a little bit sprinkle all the spinach seed in there cover it back over, water it and just let it go. Spinach will germinate really well cool temperatures. It grows up really fast and you can start eating it as a baby spinach or you can overwinter it. I'll talk about that in a little bit. Arugula is a really nice green to grow because it really tolerates cold temperatures. So if you can get your arugula up and growing now and one of the things people have a problem with arugula in the spring is that it tends to get a little bitter especially when it gets warm but when you're growing it in the fall you don't get those hot temperatures so much. So it can continue to grow and you can just leave it in the garden and harvest it as you need it and have that nice crisp taste to it. Radishes are really quick growing and really fast growing plant easy to seed these now within 20, 30 days. Usually you'll get a radish to eat because we're going into the fall though you have to remember the days are continuing to get shorter and shorter by September our days are the same day length as they are in March. So that's gonna slow down the growth of plants. So your radishes that normally are ready in 20 days they might take 40 or 50 days. So putting them in now will guarantee that you'll have them by the end of September and kale, you know these are kale plants that were planted in the spring this is kind of how we grow kale it's called red boar is this variety really beautiful and tasty variety but the way we grow kale is planted in the spring let it grow up protected from cabbage worms and things of that nature. By this time of year we've got plants that are two or three feet tall loaded with leaves and then we won't start eating them until September, October. So you can grow kale that way or you can grow it from seed starting now and again, it'll be a little plant that'll have tender leaves and really nice one to grow even for like salads. So there's a lot of those leafy greens and some of those root crops that you can grow that'll really be a nice ones to start but the key is to get out there like this weekend if you can and plant some of these things find a spot where you can clean out some old plants put some compost down, sow these plants in there even check garden centers they might still have some things like some of these leafy greens that are still in stock so that you can take some of those and pop them in. Plants like cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli it's too late to start those from seeds. It's almost too late to even put the transplants in at this point. They really should be in the ground by more like the end of July or so or early August to get that nice fall crop of those. It's a great crop to grow and I always grow cauliflower and cabbage for the fall because those shorter days allow you to leave the plant out there longer without having to worry about it bolting or cracking or anything but you do have to plan for it so I always will put that in maybe right after a really early crop of something you know some lettuces or something like that that have gone by and they're done by end of June then after that I'll start moving some of these fall crops into the garden. So that's what you need to do right now so there's a little push happening then there'll be another little push for planting in October and that's to plant garlic and everybody loves garlic right? But you want to plant this the same time you're planting tulips and daffodils so generally mid-October in the Champlain Valley Connecticut River Valley maybe even a little earlier up in the Northeast Kingdom and in the mountainous areas. There are two different types there's a softneck garlic that you use often you see braided like this and New York white is one of those varieties and you do want to get varieties that have names to them that are adapted to our climate. You don't want to just go out to the grocery store and buy whatever's in the grocery store because those tend to be California varieties that don't really mature very well here. So softneck varieties you can braid they have very supple leaves they're really nice to have you can put them in a kitchen like this really sweet to cook with or there are hardneck varieties and these have those scapes that you probably have seen in farmers markets or in people's gardens and that's the flower shoot basically the scapes are edible in fact we make scape pesto usually every year which is really intense because it's a lot of garlic flavor but that is just a sign that that garlic is getting ready to mature. You do want to remove those scapes whether you eat them or not because that will send more energy into the garlic bulb getting bigger. Generally the difference between the softneck garlic and a hardneck garlic is that the softneck tends to have more cloves but maybe a little bit smaller size the hardneck varieties like the Romanian red and a number of other ones they tend to have larger cloves but fewer of them. It's really kind of a preference and a nice thing about garlic is that you can save some every year when you harvest it in July which is what we've done and you can take out the biggest cloves the nicest ones you have save those aside and those are the ones you plant in October and the more you do that you kind of create your own variety almost that's adapted to your climate your weather, your conditions and I've done that with other plants and I've gotten really large bulbs that way. Elephant garlic speaking of large bulbs this is one that people tend not to grow much but it's a lot of fun. It literally is as big as a palm of your hand but you think, oh my God that must have such a strong flavor with those just one clove but it doesn't. It's a very mild flavor it's actually related more to leeks and garlic but it forms a garlic bulb so that's a fun one to grow if you want kind of a mild garlic flavor and you want a lot of garlic I would really do that. When you're planting garlic again you got to find a bed so by October though it's a lot easier to find a bed to clean out because everything's kind of going by or been hit by frost and then once you clean the plants out there and I would suggest if those plants are healthy I would just chop them and not pull out the roots again trying not to disturb the soil which is one of the tenants of no-dig garden. So try to chop them off and maybe chop them into pieces I talk about chop and drop them a little bit or remove them if they're diseased and then come in with a layer of compost right on top of the bed and then pop in your garlic spaced about six inches or so apart a couple inches deep into the soil bed. Really simple thing to do if you grow them in a raised bed you'll see that you have very few problems with them. I have rarely had problems with my garlic the only time I did I remember is when I tried to plant them right directly in the ground not in a raised bed and we had a really kind of wet winter a lot of rain that kind of thing and they rotted but other than that I've never had problems with garlic so one of the easier crops to grow and by spring they start coming up you give them a little fertilizer keep them weeded, watered by July you're harvesting them. Now shallots is another bulb that's kind of like garlic that a few people really grow as a fall crop but I grow it as a spring and fall crop it's kind of fun. So I will plant some of my shallots which are like a mild onion they're small, very famous in French cooking in particular I pop those in with the garlic this fall and then next spring they'll grow up and they actually mature a little sooner than the garlic will mature and you can tell when they're ready they'll just kind of break apart and you'll see the individual bulbs like these pull those out and clean them up and keep them but I also then plant again in the spring so I have a fall crop that matures in the spring and then a spring crop that's going to mature very soon that way we have a bunch of shallots for winter and these are great they last a long time in storage and they have that nice mild flavor and this is a crop that I've been saving year after year from replanting the biggest one so now I get some that are like the size of small onions which makes them really much easier to peel and use once you have all your shallots and your garlic planted for fall then you want to cover them up and you can do this early after you're done planting or you can wait I usually wait till November or so throw some hay or straw over the top of it here I rigged up a little thing with Velcro plant ties and some boards just to hold the hay in place but you can use a covering or some boards just placed on top of it just leave it there all winter long come spring when you start seeing signs of growth that's when you remove the mulch and you let them start growing so there are also vegetables that you can hold so we talked about harvesting summer vegetables they've talked about which ones you can plant now but they're also thinking next year what vegetables can you actually plant that you don't have to do anything to and then by the fall that's when they come into their full glory leeks are definitely one of those so we plant leeks every year in the spring there's little spindly little shoots pop them in, I cover them over to keep the leek moth which I have in our garden keep that away from them and just let them grow and let them grow, keep them watered, weeded, that's it and then by September, October we got these beautiful blue cellaces the variety we grow in Tendors, another one leeks that are ready to harvest and leeks are great because I've literally gone out in November, December harvested a frozen leek brought it inside, chopped it up made a leek soup out of it and it was great so there are the kind of what I call planted and forget-about crops until the fall comes and then you can start enjoying it the same thing is true of Brussels sprouts so as long as you can keep them healthy and growing well and we grow these under covers too because we have a swede midge which is another insect that likes the brassicas so we keep them growing there I just checked them the other day and they're just forming their little sprouts all along the stem and so they will continue to do that right into September, October and then once the days get shorter and they can't really grow much anymore they'll just hang out there, they'll just wait there and I've literally gone out again in December and harvested Brussels sprouts even if they were frozen a little bit and they still taste pretty good I often get the question from people is what happens if you get into September and your little sprouts are not forming along the stem these little Brussels sprouts well at that point what you probably wanna do is top the plant just cut off the top four to six inches of the plant that just like pinching the tomatoes or pinching the melanbines is gonna send more energy into maturing those Brussels sprouts that you have along the stem you don't wanna do it yet we're still only in August so there's still time for them to form more sprouts up the stem but if you get into early and mid September nothing is happening you look all the way down to the spot on the stem and nothing's happening then you wanna top it carrots you can certainly plant and earlier in the season when they mature you can hold them in the soil you can hold them in a raised bed you do have to watch out of course for mice and bowls but carrots are not that hard you really hold through the winter if you mulch them heavily so putting a couple of foot thick layer of hay mulch on top of them say in October or so then you can go out through the winter just pull the hay mulch back, pull the snow back and just pop out those carrots as long as the ground doesn't freeze they'll be delicious if the ground freezes then when it thaws those carrots are gonna start rotting now you can do a little bit of that with beets but they're not as hardy I would say as the carrots are so what I've done with those is I just try to harvest them before you get a real cold frost a light frost is okay with beets but when the ground starts freezing a little bit it's gonna turn to mush but parsnips do not and that's another one that you in fact want to grow through the season let them grow in the fall I don't even cover ours I just leave them there until the spring till March or April when the ground starts thawing then I go out there and I dig them out and that's when they taste the best because they've sweetened up their starches have turned to sugar through the winter and they're very sweet they caramelized really well and sometimes they get huge that's one problem I've had with them is I forget them out there and some of them get like the size of like a turnip almost they're kind of woody like that so it's best to harvest them when they're smaller if you want to harvest in the fall you can but just make sure you wait till October, November after they've had a number of cold nights maybe frosty nights to really become much sweeter roots and then overwintering spinach I mentioned I was in the talk a little bit about this so if you've planted your spinach now you'll notice that it'll grow up but it'll stop growing probably in September sometime when the days get too short for it so what you can do at that point is you can cover it up and spinach is a really hardy crop and all you really need sometimes you don't need to cover it depending on the winter but just for insurance it's good to cover it is to put a floating row cover over it so there's a floating row cover over actually some bok choy in that spinach and there's three different weights of the floating row cover that's this polyspun fabric that you can see right there and you can get locally in a lot of different places there's a lightweight version which is really more for insect control keeps the bugs from coming in laying eggs and all that kind of stuff that's not gonna give you any frost protection then there's the regular weight which is what this is that's gonna give you frost protection probably down to about 28 degrees so that's good for the shoulder season spring and fall just as we're getting some frost maybe some cold nights but not really chilly nights and then there's the one we have on the left here which is the winter blanket literally you can't even see through it that's how thick it is it's like a piece of fleece almost that'll protect your plants down to 24 degrees so that's something you probably wanna put on say September, October to try to stretch whatever you're growing whether it be a spinach into next spring or even some of these crops that I've mentioned have them there and protect them through the winter you can also use a cold frame the one there is an old one I created at my old home I think I did that one for maybe $30 you got some scrap lumber I got some PVC tubing, piping there some plastic, put it together and that works really well again on those shoulder seasons it's not gonna protect plants when they get down into the low 20s but certainly into mid to upper 20s it does fine and that talks about the idea of a cold frame you're having a nice cold frame you can really design it out with some window panes and things it's a good way to protect your plants in the fall and to use that as a space for planting to have some nice greens right into the fall and early winter so I just wanna wrap it up with a little bit of fall garden cleanup too because that's also what we'll be doing very soon and in fact, you could be doing it all along as like I mentioned as things kind of slow down and start dying back in our garden I often will go through and just kind of chop them out bring some compost in and plant something else I'm always having something growing in the soil either having mulch on the soil to protect it or having something to grow it could be even a cover crop but that's an important tenant of no dig gardening and I mentioned chop and drop earlier so what I do with plants say like this broccoli plant there if it wasn't heavily diseased or insect infested what I will do is I'll go in with my head shimmers and just chop it all down when it's done when I'm kind of done with it and it's done with me I chop it all down at the little pieces just leave it there as a mulch and then in the spring I come back and a lot of that is decomposed I just throw some compost over it and plant right through it now this could be a little dicey if you like a nice clean garden but if you're okay with little messiness with little stumps here and there from the broccoli stalks or some of those stems that didn't decompose completely you can clean them up in the spring a little bit sure that's fine but you don't want to disturb the soil that's really the whole idea behind this and it protects the soil in the winter from erosion from the wind and rain and snow and all those things and it protects those microbes that's really what we're trying to protect is the microbes in the soil so you're creating a rich environment that you can just plant into next spring and you can add some compost so as I was talking as we go along every time you're planting something you want to add a little compost before you do it that's another tenant of the no dig gardening system and you can add mulch so say you have a bed of tomatoes that were heavily diseased and you don't want to leave those there so you chop them off of the ground leave the roots intact and then you can come in with hay or straw or leaves or whatever it is and just put that right on that bed that's going to protect it in fact you can do that over a whole area here our dog Linus is showing us this this is our potato patch area and so what we do here is that after we're done pulling the potatoes out and literally we don't plant potatoes we just kind of put them on the ground and then bury them in hay mulch we bring in some more hay mulch in the fall so any part of our garden that is not going to be have a cover crop on it or a crop that's going into winter or chop and drop crop it has hay mulch on it but you can use leaves you can use untreated grass clippings you can use straw you can use a variety of things to protect that soil in the winter and what you're doing also is you're building up the fertility of that soil at the same time so hopefully this gives you some ideas of what you want to do with your fall gardens one thing I forgot to mention that I'll just mention here at the end are some of the plants that you can literally bring in doors to so plants like parsley for example or maybe you have a potted hot pepper that you really love these plants are not really going to thrive in doors but you can bring them indoors come September, October to avoid a frost put them in a sunny window and continue to harvest them right up until they're done or the plants are just kind of wilted usually that would happen sometime in November, December but maybe you could use them for the holidays which would be really nice to be able to say oh yeah those are my hot peppers in that dish for the ones that are right in the window over there so hopefully all this gives you some ideas and inspirations on how to do some fall gardening so let me come back here and thank you all for coming I appreciate your time and I appreciate you watching all this and hopefully you got some good tips on what to do this fall what to plant, how to plant them when to plant them all of that stuff and as Megan mentioned next month we'll be talking about preserving food and putting food by so hopefully you'll be able to join us then