Growing in the Fall Vegetable Garden

Fall vegetable gardening can certainly be interesting in Tennessee!  You never quite know how the weather is going to shape up.  Is it going to frost early?  Late?  Will the temperatures be normal or extra warm like we’ll be having this week?  You just never know.  For gardening weather this October we’ve had a couple light frosts but nothing damaging which means our summer garden still has more to give – and we’re going to happily harvest until the end.  With temperatures set to be in the 80’s this week with no frost chances we have a good chance of continuing to get summer vegetables through the end of October!  Tennessee is a great place for a vegetable garden!

This morning I picked a few orange bell peppers.  I didn’t realize I had this many still coming.  In fact I had given up on the peppers a couple weeks ago thinking the weather was about to turn.  Glad I was wrong!  Peppers are very easy to grow.  Once planted they take some time to produce and we usually don’t get much until late July or August. I’ve had very few pest problems on our peppers.  This year though I had a bunny that apparently had a taste for jalapenos – still haven’t quite figured out if it liked them or it just had a very short memory.  Perhaps it thought that the next pepper it tasted might not be so spicy.  I suspect it found out differently!

I still have a whole bunch of Tabasco peppers to harvest although I haven’t a clue how I’ll use them.  Perhaps the tomatoes I still have on the vine and Tabasco peppers might make friends in some delicious October chili…

I have potatoes growing again.  I didn’t intend to grow a fall crop of potatoes – or not consciously at least. I must have left a few potatoes in the ground from spring since now we have about 12 plants growing strong.  I’ll cover them through the next couple light frosts then dig and see what we have just after a hard freeze.  They may be small potatoes – but often those are the tastiest!

Pak Choi

The actual fall vegetables I planted are doing well, I grew them from seed in this raised bed.  I’ve watered only a couple times so far, since we’ve had some rains.  We have pak choi, two types of lettuce, spinach, kale, and chard.  The other half of this bed still needs planted.  I have several PVC pipes that are curved to use for a row cover over the winter.  Hopefully we can keep the plants actively growing through December and into January.  If nothing else we’ll have some great looking plants when spring comes around.

This weekend was beautiful here in Tennessee.  I hope you had a chance to enjoy the outdoors!