The September vegetable garden; what to do and when to do it. For instance, cry in the potato patch. Handy tips like that for your end of summer garden. Also methods for storing most of your vegetables over the winter.
Whenever someone says “Oh, it’s September, I guess you’ll have more time on your hands now that gardening season is over.” my initial thought is to push them in a puddle.
Not a terribly deep one, but a puddle nonetheless. Maybe one with a worm floating in it. I never act on this thought but I do think about it.
I shouldn’t become enraged the way I do, because this person obviously isn’t a vegetable gardener or they would KNOW that September? Yeah, that’s the busiest vegetable gardening season of all.
Table of Contents
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM SEPTEMBER
I expect at this point whether you’re a new or a seasoned gardener you’ve stood in the middle of your garden and cried at least once this year.
It could have been bacterial wilt or cucumber beetles or raccoons that led you to blubber right there in the middle of your blight riddled tomato plants. But whatever it was, you need to put those tissues away and get a hold of yourself.
It’s harvest time.
TASKS
Maintenance
- Obviously your plants might still be alive so continue to try to keep them that way for as long as possible. If a frost is coming that’ll damage your tomato plants COVER them up if you want more tomatoes! Just drape a sheet to keep the frost off. Why? Because in zones 5 or 6 there’s sometimes a single frost in September, but not another one until October! October could in fact have a heat wave! That’s an entire month you could have had your tomatoes (or other tender vegetables) longer. So if you love it, cover it.
- Make sure you clean up any beds that are already done for the season. Rake them out so they’re smooth, remove all debris in case it harbours disease and put a nice inch or two of compost on top of the bed so it’s ready to go next spring.
- Harvest, preserve, harvest, preserve.
THIS IN DEPTH POST SHOWS YOU HOW TO STORE VEGETABLES LONG TERM
(over the winter)
But here’s a rundown of how to harvest and preserve some of the more popular garden vegetables:
POTATOES – Dig your potatoes up by loosening the soil with a garden fork around the potato plant. Pull straight up on the plant while also using your garden fork in the soil to push the plant upwards. Pull potatoes off of the runners and then dig around with your hands looking for more in the soil. They hide. They hide well.
Before storing potatoes, cure them. Just set them in a humid area that’s around 60 degrees. A basement is often the best place.
STORE POTATOES in a cool dark room. The ideal temperature for storing potatoes is between 35 and 40 degrees F . These are optimal conditions. Storing them at a higher temperature just means they won’t store as long. Storing them at a cooler temperature will convert their starches to sugars and change their flavor and texture in a bad way.
During, and at the end of the season I sometimes give away egg cartons filled with food.
TOMATOES – If you aren’t into covering your tomato plants with a sheet, then make sure you harvest ALL of the tomatoes on your vines the day before a frost is predicted. Unripe green tomatoes will ripen on the counter with surprisingly good results and quality. The one exception to this is if the green tomato is shiny. If the tomato is so young its skin is still shiny, it will not ripen.
PRESERVE TOMATOES by freezing them whole, pressing and canning them, or roasting them and freezing them. You can read about how to press and can tomatoes here, and how to make a quick and easy roasted tomato sauce for freezing here.
CARROTS/BEETS – Both carrots and beets can be left in the ground and harvested straight from the garden until December or until the ground is so solid you can’t pull them up anymore. Carrots touched by frost sweeten (the same way potatoes sweeten when they’re kept too cold). But with carrots this is a good thing.
STORE CARROTS in either sand or (very slightly damp) peat moss in a breathable container like a cardboard box with holes in the sides or a wood crate. Line the container with plastic that has holes for ventilation punched into it. The plastic helps retain moisture and keeps the sand or peat moss from spilling out of the cardboard or wood box.
Store them like this with something covering the top of the box lightly. The ideal temperature for storing carrots is 38 F. Storing carrots this way I was able to keep my carrot harvest viable for almost a full year. In June I was eating carrots that I had harvested in September of the year before. I opt for peat moss instead of sand because it’s lighter to lug around. Coco Coir is also a viable option.
GREEN BEANS – Green beans are the sneakiest of all the vegetables. They aren’t a vegetable you want to challenge to a game of hide and go seek because the bean will win every time. If you still have fresh green beans left on the vine pick them! If you have beans that are starting to dry on the vine leave them. They can become next year’s seed source once they’re dried (as long as they aren’t a hybrid bean).
You can also check to see if you can use that particular bean as a dried bean. Most beans can be dried in the pod and then used as a dry bean.
PRESERVE BEANS by blanching them for 3 minutes and then freezing them. Green beans are also probably the easiest vegetable to can. You just stuff them in a jar, add boiling water and salt and process them. The full instructions are here. Finally you can make dilly beans! Or any kind of pickled bean as a matter of fact. This year I added them to the brine of my fermented dill pickles. They turned out way crispier than the cucumbers and were a lot faster to make too.
PESTS AND SOLUTIONS
Don’t worry about it. Seriously. At this point just keep harvesting and preserving and if frost is a concern in your area make sure you have some row cover to protect plants from a surprise frost.
TOOLS
- Baskets and bins for carrying your harvest home.
- Garden fork, and shovel for digging up anything you planted that grows underground like potatoes.
- Work gloves.
- A good hand scrubber.
WHAT CAN BE PLANTED THIS MONTH
Wheat. That’s right. If you want to grow wheat but didn’t get it planted in the spring, you can do a fall planting (it needs to grow 6-8 weeks before a hard frost and consistently cold temperatures). Your wheat will be ready for harvest early next summer.
I even have some beets starting on my kitchen windowsill that I'm going to try to plant and harvest by using a variety of greenhouse techniques. I'll let you know how that goes.
You can also throw some radishes in and hope for the best.
Next time, in the final installment of this series, I’ll show you inventive ways you can plan on using your classic fall produce like squash, carrots and beets for your Thanksgiving feasts.
Until that time I promise not to push anyone in a puddle.
Hi Karen!
Your gardens and posts are so beautiful and awesome! You are such an inspiration. Today when I saw The Woks of Life post, I immediately thought of you! Your the only one I know who grows loofah's. If you're interested, they make a stir fry with them. Here's the link: https://thewoksoflife.com/loofah-stir-fry/ Enjoy!
Yes! They're similar to a zucchini when you pick them young. I never pick them though because I don't want to give up any chance at a loofah. ~ karen!
My youngest has just made tomato sauce and now starting her stewed tomatoes, both she freezes so yummy. So i went online and looked at canning tomatoes , my preferred method in the past. I stumbled upon Yellow tomatoe canning OMG it looked sooo tasted with sooo many different applications.
I just had to tell you 😆.
I'll have to use my green sauce soon! ~ karen
We're in zone 7 point 5 here but sometimes, just sometimes we get a frost mid-October and then it gets mild for a coupla weeks and then it gets wet cold and miserable. Sorta maybe. It's crazy making.
so i'm pulling out the spent tomato plants and readying the row cover in case the Other tomato plants I don't remember planting on the Other side of the garden need covering.
The next planting of lettuce and radish and kale and chard are coming along fine.
The first kinda late planting of beets are humongous now so I guess the pickling and borschting should be happening but I'm busy processing the pears for dehydrating. Harvesting beans, yeah and filling in the empty spaces with mesclun, mustard greens and the like.
I don't have a place cool enough for cellaring so most stuff needs froze pickled or dried etc.
Yup. Way too busy.
Have you ever heard of gundruk? It's like fermented greens that are dried afterward. Crazy for it in Tibet or was it Bhutan? Hmmmm. If I could grow cabbage minus the moths (and what's that gnarly root malady) I might try to do sauerkraut but it's not happening. I'll be happy once the garlic and broad beans are in and I can switch back to sittin' and knittin'.....
I have not heard of gundruk but now I'm going to look it up because I do have cabbage. (covered with netting so no moths get on it to lay) ~ karen!
Just kinda wonderin', do you use a basement fridge to keep things like potatoes and carrots at that optimum cold temp? Also, would I be well advised to store my meager potato purchases refrigerated? Left in a wire basket on my counter the 3-4 taters tend to turn into multi-legged alien creatures before I can use them.
As long as the air conditioning is on (as in, not the heat anyway), I find a relatively good spot for storing the 1-10lb bags of store potatoes is near a vent. Those little plastic CD/DVD crates sold especially around back to school time, or at dollar stores and office supply areas are nice to store them in a nearly single layer, then stack the next crate on top, etc. The larger crates like these work too. Works especially well if you line them with newspaper and crumple up some balls of newspaper between (if using newspaper you can even do more than a single layer). In my land lady's kitchen the vent has a cupboard on either side then a small gap before the paper shredder to the side of one of the cupboards, so I put my CD potato crates in there. They're near the cold air when the air comes on but not close enough for a too cold blast. In the winter I just stick the crates in the garage. If they cured the store potatoes (which I'm starting to think they don't) they should keep well near the vent for a few weeks. In the garage, once cooled, longer. Hope that was some help/ sense. :)
Hey Randy. I use my mudroom which is unheated, so much like a garage. Don't put your potatoes in the fridge, but put them in the coolest part of your house or kitchen. In a cupboard on an outside wall for instance. ~ karen!
Question - can I use a plastic container without the lid and put my carrots in it with organic potting soil? I got some to repot my peppers to keep inside. I will be putting the carrots in my cold room. Also, do I have to trim back my pepper plants before I repot them?
Hi Chris,
I always say to try something because you never know it *might* work. But with soil as your storage medium for root vegetables you run the risk of them growing! Also soil will dry out very quickly and so will your carrots then. Sand or peat moss will more easily stay damp keeping the carrots humid enough to stay crisp. For pepper plants remove all the fruit, leaves and any excessive branching, so you basically just have a couple of stems. Then dig it up, shake the dirt off of the rootball and cut the roots back enough that they'll fit into a 6" pot or whatever you want to pot it in. It's not a bad idea to spray with insecticidal soap. Pot it up and bring it inside to keep somewhere cool. You want it to stay dormant, so only it enough to keep it alive. Once a month or so ~ karen!
Should hibernating pepper plants be under a lamp?
(Ps, our windows are uv coated, so if anything needs light, it has to be a lamp. Ugh.)
Do you know how (/if possible) to hibernate eggplants?
Hi Kat, no they don't need to be under light. ~ karen!
Ha! Whenever someone says to ME "oh, it's September" (full stop) - My intitial thought is to push them into a puddle.
Does this mean if I hang around your garden, I’ll eventually score an egg carton of food or just a push in a puddle?
Today’s been mostly spent saying farewell to the Queen 👑. A sad day.
Yep. I had it on and off all day while I worked. As far as the food of the puddle I guess it depends on my mood and what you say to me, lol. ~ karen!
Larvae of this beautiful butterfly chewed off a third of leaves on my orange tree.
Is there anything I can do to get rid of squash bugs so next year they don't decimate my crop? I get great pleasure in squishing them but they reproduce faster than rabbits.
My peppers (bell, banana, jalopenos, and some mysterious super hot ones) are still coming in strong. Any suggestions for things to do with them or ways to preserve them?
Freezing green bells is the easiest way - chop and freeze. No pretreatment needed. Banana peppers work the same but they also make great pickled peppers. Hot ones I dry and make chili powder. I have a fridge full of jalapenos to stuff with cream cheese filling and freeze for poppers. My daughter cut some up into fat slices, stuck a bite of favorite sausage inside and topped with cream cheese mixed with pineapple then roasted them - AMAZING!
Thanks for the suggestions! Never thought of stuffing and then freezing the jalapenos. Gonna have to try that.
Here you go Patty .. https://www.theartofdoingstuff.com/the-38-calorie-jalapeno-popper/. ~ karen!
I don't know why the reply didn't work but I gave you some suggestions on comment just below. Hope it helps.
As a matter of fact I'm doing a post on how to preserve peppers next week, lol. For now in short form I can tell you I preserve peppers 3 ways. Roast then freeze, freeze whole without roasting and dehydrating them. More info next week.You can also pull entire pepper plants up and hang them upside down OR dig them up and keep them inside if you have room because pepper plants are perennials. :) ~ karen!
This has been quite the education for me. As a non-gardener (that was and continues to be my ex's penchant) I find the labour of love most impressive. One quick question if I may? When someone asks you what you do in your spare time as they chuckle, how long does it take them to recover from the intense flogging they receive?