Category Autumn

Saving seed from my own plants at season's end sounds simple until you're standing over a drying pod trying to decide if today is the day. Here's how I actually make that call, and where my notebook comes in.

Eager to get ahead one September, I put my garlic in weeks before I should have. It came up fast, grew tall well before winter, and I ended up with a harvest I wasn't proud of the following summer.

My landlord's lease is clear about no permanent structures in the yard, which meant I had to figure out an entire end of season routine using only things I could set up and take apart myself.

I used to circle the average first frost date on my calendar and plan around it like a deadline. One October it arrived nearly two weeks early and I lost a whole tray of seedlings because I hadn't been watching anything but that number.

My peppers were still setting fruit in late August, and I couldn't bring myself to pull them for the fall sowing I'd planned. That hesitation cost me half a bed's worth of growing time.

For two seasons I treated September as cleanup month and nothing else. It took a stubborn patch of lettuce and a look back through my notebook to show me I had a whole second planting window sitting unused.