Fall planting

I’ve had my hands in the soil. The fall planting of spring flowers is in. With the help of a stellar all-woman crew, we got all the plants that were started in soil blocks into the ground during the second full week of September, on track to have a good eight weeks of time to grow and establish strong root systems before the days fall below 10 hours of daylight in November.

The window of time for planting feels narrow here; I wait until it’s not too hot, or else I’d plant in August. But the plants need at least six weeks in the ground before the days get so short that growth stops and dormancy begins. The days have been warm, and our evening time for planting (best for the plants) gets shorter the longer we wait.

We had a week of hot weather at the beginning of September, followed by a week of heavy rain. Then we waited a couple of days, which was enough for the raised rows to drain, and we were at it every evening. Natalie was my anchor; she came and worked all day the first Monday and several full evenings thereafter. Every evening I had some combination of Kelsey, Amy and Natalie. Gwen and Jamie came in the mornings. I regret that I did not think, as we were planting, to get photos of these women, whose conversation was as good as their work.

We laid out the precut landscape fabric (it took me 20 years to decide it was a good idea to use this plastic woven stuff, and I feel good about how long it lasts—years and years), got the plants in, watered, set wickets of nine-gauge wire over the plants and covered these with light frost cloth.

The immediate watering and the use of frost cloth mean life or death for the plants. Without these steps, they’d dry out, and I’d lose them in a day. After all those weeks of growing. And all the time mixing the growing medium, making the soil blocks, planting, watering and monitoring. And the money spent on seeds. So I have a roll of frost cloth set up at the end of every row, and it gets cut until as soon as each 150-foot row is fully planted and covered.

I don’t put irrigation down on these plants. I water them by hand as soon as they’re planted and also the following day, then I stagger watering for a few days, waiting for the first big rain (it came yesterday), then watch carefully and water as needed. There are more fall rains, then the plants go dormant. Then the spring rains carry them through. It’s been this way for years. I’ve put down irrigation before, but I rarely use it, and in my experience, where I grow, it’s not worth it for the fall-planted annuals. There are growers who will find this hard to believe. My soil is clayey loam (the soil type is Reading Silt Loam), and I try to use it to my advantage.

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Now we are almost done getting the direct-sown seeds into the ground—the varieties I don’t have to start indoors ahead of planting. These really should have been planted first, in early September, and the only reason they weren’t was that we didn’t have enough landscape fabric cut (and I’m not willing to plant without it; I spent decades doing more weeding than necessary). Our farm shop building has just gone up, and Bob has been busy putting in interior walls, wiring, plumbing and insulation, and those tasks have taken priority over his cutting more fabric.

The direct-sown seeds I can plant right into the soil and leave for the rain. I’ll lay used frost cloth flat on the ground over them and wait—a natural and low-tech approach. These same varieties I can sow again in February for a staggered bloom time (a month or so after the fall-sown crops), so that many of the first, such as larkspur, will bloom in May from the fall planting and June from the February planting.

The plants that do best over the winter here, no surprise, are the native species and the cultivated varieties of the natives: fancy varieties of rudbeckias (black-eyed Susans); chocolate lace flower (Dara), which is really a carrot; small-flowered eryngium (our native species is called “rattlesnake master”); larkspur; bee balm; yarrow.

Some of the non-natives that do exceptionally well are snapdragons—and I grow eight or nine favorite specialty varieties—matricaria and sweet William. My favorite dark scabiosa aren’t so tough; a very cold winter will kill them here, so I usually put a few extra plants in at the North Lawrence garden, which gets less sun but is more protected. If I have to, I’ll plant a spring crop.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost six months since I started cutting spring blooms this year. Some of those plants that have been left in the ground and cut back are sending up a few bonus blooms, small trinkets of beauty that go into bouquets for those of us who hold onto summer as long as we can.