If you were on the Victory Garden 2.0 kick when the pandemic hit earlier in the spring of 2020, I suggest you keep your focus and carry through with a fall vegetable gardening—and *gasp!* maybe even the first bit of winter. Are you as tired as your tomato plants look now? Feel weighed down with the work as much as your zucchini is weighed down by its layers of powdery mildew? There’s a cure for the exhaustion and a remedy for the heat-loving diseases. Just rip up the summer stuff and plant a new fall-loving garden.

The fall garden is filled with items that don’t mind some heat early in their lives but do okay with increasingly cooler days and nights. And for certain types of veggies—such as broccoli and kale, for example, a touch of frost can actually enhance the veggie’s flavor. Other pluses is it’s less hot so you can cut back on the constant watering, and fewer bugs are around to bother your plants.

Fall Vegetable Gardening Tips

I may be making fall gardening sound like a piece of cake. While it’s pretty easy, there are a few directions you should keep in mind.

First Frost Date

Knowing that the average first date of frost in your specific area is around November 1, for example, allows you determine when you should sow any fall veg seed and plant vegetable starts. It’ll also give you a good heads up as to whether you should be prepared with materials to cover and protect your crops. Bonnie Plants offers a nice average first frost map.

Days to Harvest

If you are sowing seeds, their packets usually have a “days to harvest” section. This tells you how long it takes on average from the day to sow them to the day you should harvest. Use your first frost date as the day on which you’ll harvest, and then count backwards to find the day you should plant. I typically assume I will harvest my fall crops a little immature—smaller heads of broccoli, baby chard and kale, that sort of thing—and plant everything on the same day, regardless of days to harvest. Unless you’re in a warm winter climate area like southern Florida or Texas, keep in mind the growing season for your fall vegetable garden will be much shorter. Keep that in mind when choosing your crops.

Less Light

Days are getting shorter. And unlike in spring when you grew cool-season crops early on, you’ll have even less light in your fall vegetable garden because you may have the additional obstacle of trees full of leaves. Find the absolute sunniest location in your garden and plant there.

Seeds Versus Plants

Where I am writing from at the moment—the very last day of August in New England—I should have sown seeds for my fall vegetable garden about two weeks ago. I didn’t because I was still in the throes of my brutally hot summer garden with zucchini and tomatoes growing off the hook. Two weeks ago would have been a great time to sow seeds. Right now, though, I’m seeking vegetable starts of broccoli, chard, lettuce and other cool-growing items at my garden center. If you have the time for sow-to-harvest with seeds, go right ahead. If you’re in crunch time like me and want to get something in the ground, look for small plants.