FALL GARDEN - Planting a Fall Vegetable Garden In Raised Beds: Onions, Collards, Kale, & Cilantro
On this Vlog, we are planting our fall vegetable garden here on the homestead. It is a little late, but I think we should be just fine, since it stays pretty warm here in Alabama, Zone 8, until November. But I would typically plant our fall garden a couple weeks earlier, but we have been super busy here on the farm.
What fall vegetables to plant? Well, I have learned over the years to only plant things that work well in our garden & do not plant a ton of different varieties. We get real busy here on the homestead & just don't have the time to spend hours taking care of vegetables that need a lot of attention, & what we plant for our fall garden is always kale & collards. Those 2 greens never let us down & we can eat them all fall & winter, & you can just cut leaves off the plant, & get what you need for a meal, & that way, the kale or collard, just keeps producing all fall & winter long. The 2 varieties of kale & collards we like to plant on our homestead is red russian kale & alabama blue collards. Red russian kale has to be one of the easiest green in the world to grow & not only is it super easy to grow, it is quite delicious as well. Alabama blue collards is a very old heirloom variety of collard that we just love here. Super flavorful & produces these smaller purple blueish leaves. We just love it!
I am going to plant our favorite carrot, & the cosmic purple carrot. My daughter will eat here weight times 2 in cosmic purple carrots. They are quite amazing & so wonderful! They have a slight spicy flavor to them, but not hot at all. Super delicious! The only issues we have with carrots here on the homestead, is a pest called a Vole. Which looks like a mouse, but it loves to devour your garden, especially carrots. It actually digs under the soil & eats the carrots from the bottom up & you will think you have a gopher in your garden. This year I plan to set out some vole traps.
Trying something new this year in our fall garden & that is the perennial onion called the yellow potato onion. We love & use onions a lot here on the homestead, & the thing about a sweet onion is they typical all are ready to harvest the same time, & then you have to try & store them, but with a perennial onion, like the yellow potato onion, you really do not have to do that. You can harvest what you want, & just replant the ones you do not need & the it just keeps coming back every year. I also want to try another perennial onion called the egyptian walking onion next year as well. So I am super stoked about about planting this perennial onion in the fall garden & also how it actual does in our garden!
I did also plant some cilantro seeds this fall bc here in alabama cilantro doesn't do well in this heat. So I try to plant it in the fall & spring! By far my favorite herb to plant in our garden!
I do not till my raised bed garden beds. I just take a garden fork & loosen the soil & then add some organic bone meal & some organic blood meal to the soil, & then work it in. I generally do not need to amend our raised bed garden soil, since I am constantly adding organic matter & compost to the raised beds all year long, but root crops such as onion & carrots do benefit from the organic bone meal & the greens like kale & collards benefit from the organic blood meal.
I hope you enjoyed planting a fall garden on the homestead youtube video & hope you get out there, have fun & go plant fall garden!
Cog Hill Farm - 2017