Grow A Late Season Garden With These Fall Garden Plants

Summer is the main event for most vegetable gardeners, but the fall growing season can be just as rewarding—sometimes with less effort! 

Fall garden plants can often have less pest pressure, greater productivity, and fewer weeds. The fall garden is time and again the forgotten treasure of the home garden! Use this guide to learn how to grow a fall garden!

Fresh Produce

I love visiting my local farmer's market (aka my garden) and getting great produce whenever I walk out my door. After all, who doesn’t want the freshest and best food at their table?

I have created this series of guides to help you grow your own amazing home garden at any time of the year: from winter sowing and what to plant in February, to spring seed starting, to summer planting in June, July, and August, and fall gardening with this guide.

Why You Should Embrace Fall Gardening

Fall gardening is a hidden gem! It extends the productivity of a garden, allowing you to grow more.

Spring can be stressful for gardeners (especially in Michigan). With cold northern winters, it's challenging to know when the frost will end and summer will begin. Spring tends to be the shortest and least predictable part of the growing season.

On the other hand, summer can get hot, making it hard to enjoy being in the garden during the heat of the day and harder to direct sow seeds in the hot weather. Extreme heat can even stress plants and cause problems like tomato plant blossoms dropping.

A fall garden offers the benefits of a more laid-back version of the hustle and bustle that the main-season garden can bring. Fall harvests are often the sweetest and most abundant of the year when you start succession planting in the summer months.

Starting seeds in late July, even into August and September, means plants will mature during the cooler months. Colder weather slows down things that make gardening difficult, like pests and weeds. Weeds will grow much slower, if at all, in a fall garden.

Some bugs, like squash vine borers, have a specific peak season. The squash vine borer is abundant from mid-June to late-July, so simply waiting to plant summer squash until August can reduce pest damage by up to 90%! With less chance for pests and weeds to interrupt your gardening, it will require less attention.

Depending on where you live, fall gardening tends to be less moist than in the spring, which keeps the threat of rot, powdery mildew, and corn smut away. With a little garden planning, your fall garden will thrive and give you fresh food all autumn!

When to Plant a Fall Garden

The best time to start planting your fall garden depends on your climate and the length of your growing season. Although it may seem early, I start planting in July.

Read What to Plant in July to learn the first crops I plant for my fall garden. What to Plant in August teaches you how to determine which crops you have time to grow in the fall garden before your first freeze date and the must-know tips for sowing seeds in hot weather!

What to Plant in September shares all the vegetables and flowers I plant that month, and some must-know information about your growing zone! Each of these guides has a list of the specific varieties you could plant that month. Some of them may surprise you!

Pro-Tip: Some varieties are cold-hardy and can, therefore, continue to grow for you to harvest after the frost comes, adding weeks to their growing season. You can also put season extenders into place to lengthen your growing time! Using frost cloth and cold frames, you can even grow less cold-hardy plants longer into the fall!

Refuel the Soil

After months of growing spring and summer varieties, your soil needs a little TLC. Add a new layer of compost to each bed that you want to utilize in the fall garden.

Also, leave the stumps and roots of the previous crop in the ground! This is something that I have been doing for years and seen massive results. The old roots will get broken down and give back to the soil! Plus, the soil structure remains intact when you aren't pulling up a bunch of roots.

If you want to be thorough, perform a soil test to see what nutrients the soil needs replenished. You might need a helping of Trifecta+. Don't clear away or cover the current mulch layer. Instead, push aside the mulch and pull it back around the newly amended soil.

The summer soil is perfectly warmed for outdoor seed sowing! After re-amending your beds, many fall garden varieties can be directly sown in the ground, or you can transplant seedlings that you started indoors.

Fall Garden Plants

Most people assume you can only grow cold-season crops in the fall. While it's true that vegetables like lettuce, kale, broccoli, radishes, leafy greens, turnips, and peas thrive in the colder growing season of autumn, our thinking has to shift from only looking at varieties based on their temperature requirements to focusing more on their days to maturity.

For example, there are varieties of tomatoes, beans, and cucumbers that will mature perfectly with the remaining time of the fall season. Heat-loving varieties will still be able to grow strong in August temperatures, and the fruit will mature slowly in the time before the first frost. Slowly ripened fruit will be the sweetest you have ever grown.

If you plan it well, you can use the same beds you used in your summer garden for your fall crops! Here are some of the surprising varieties I plant in the fall garden:

• Red Garnett Amaranth - We love growing and eating amaranth! It is such a versatile crop; you can eat the leaves just like spinach and the grains are a great gluten-free grain substitute.

• Ambrosia Sweet Corn - You can still plant sweet corn in July, even where I live in Michigan! It takes 75 days to mature and can be ready to harvest with the rest of your fall garden.

• Hollow Crown Parsnip - This variety needs 100 days to mature, so make sure you have enough time left in your growing season! The best part about growing root vegetables in the cooler season is the harvest becoming sweeter and sweeter each day. Root vegetables also store themselves in the autumn months; self-storage means they won't rot in the ground.

• Tendergreen Cucumber - Cucumbers are fast-maturing and don’t like super high, hot temperatures like most people think they do. Temperatures in the low to mid-70s are actually much more conducive to growing cucumbers.

• Black Beauty Zucchini - If you’ve never grown zucchini in the fall, you’ve got to try it! Black Beauty is firm, very tender, and has amazing flavor.

• Aunt Molly's Ground Cherry - This Polish heirloom is as sweet as candy, perfect for making jellies, jams, sauces, preserves, and so much more. Needs 65 days to mature.

• Gold Rush Wax Bush Bean - Beans take 50 to 55 days to mature and they are a good cover crop because they return nitrogen into the soil!

• Shogoin Turnip - I love growing turnips! Any of these turnip varieties make a good fall garden plant.

• Red Russian Kale - This kale can handle some pretty hot weather and continue growing through fall and even into early winter!

• Snowball Cauliflower - A wonderful tasting cauliflower that is perfect for making your very own cauliflower rice.

• Romanesco Broccoli - A very unique, delicious, and stunning vegetable widely grown in northern Italy. Allow 65-70 days to mature.

• Cilantro - Something a lot of people make the mistake of planting in the summer, but cilantro is actually a cool weather crop. It doesn’t not like temperatures over 70 to 75°F.

• White Icicle Radish - Its flavor is mild and less peppery than other varieties. Its size gives it a shorter growing season, only 28 to 35 days.

Pro-Tip: If your summer crops like tomatoes and peppers are still producing, intercrop your fall varieties in between them to save on space! Your soil will thank you.

There are too many potential fall garden plants to list them all here! For a complete list of all the crops I plant in the fall garden and specific variety recommendations, read these blog posts: What to Plant in July, What to Plant in August, and What to Plant in September.