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Do you think you should wait until next spring to start your new garden?  Well you shouldn’t!  In fact autumn is really the best season to get ready to grow all those wonderful herbs and vegetables you’ve wanted to add to the landscape around your home.  Perhaps you’ve been meaning to install a full blown Victory Garden.  Well wait no longer.  Fall is here and it’s the perfect time to get started.

Prepare New Garden Beds.  Rather than wait until the chilly days of late winter to prepare a place to garden why not take care of that task now?  There are in fact advantages to preparing garden beds in the fall but let’s start at the beginning.  Select an area that receives adequate sunlight and is relatively flat.  Perhaps part of your lawn would serve better as a garden than as a thirst bed of grass that needs mowing all summer?  There are many methods of soil preparation for getting your garden going.  For more instantaneous results with less strain on your back use a tiller.  Or you can double dig your beds.  This means instead of just turning over a few inches of soil to prepare for your vegetables, you will dig down and break up the soil at least 24” to allow for greater drainage and to give your vegetables room to grow extensive root systems for water and nutrient uptake. This will also allow you to work compost or other organic materials deeper into the soil.  You can also sheet mulch and build up the soil lasagna style.    There’s also the alternative of creating raised beds with side boards to contain the soil.  Any of these options will give you an area ready to plant next spring, but the work of bed preparation will be done.  Once you’ve built your beds plant a cover crop to stabilize the soil during the winter.  Cover Crops are sown on the bare soil of your new beds.  These temporary plants serve to stabilize the soil during the winter as their roots work to aerate your new garden.  Some cover crops fix nitrogen from the air and add it to the soil.  In the spring you can till in your cover crop adding even more nitrogen for your vegetables.  You’ll be happy that the work of establishing you garden plot is out of the way.  You’ll be ready to plant.

Stock Pile Leaves. Autumn is upon us and already the leaves of deciduous trees are beginning to fall.  If you are blessed to live in a part of the country that has lots of these trees collect leaves for next year’s garden.  One of the reasons people often give for not wanting to garden is weeding.  I do not weed.  Seriously I don’t and my garden isn’t a jungle.  After I plant spring vegetables I cover the surrounding ground with several inches of leaves.  This eliminates almost all weeds from sprouting. It also holds moisture in the soil reducing the amount of watering I have to do.  In the fall when most of my vegetables are done I turn the leaves into the soil further adding organic material into my beds.  Then I sow cover crops again for the reasons listed above and repeat the following spring.  To begin this cycle however you must collect leaves when they are available in the fall.  Collect many more than you need.  They will lose much of their mass as they begin to decompose during the winter months.  You’ll be surprised at how your pile shrinks.   Trust me, you can’t have too many.

Start A Compost Pile.  Successful composting requires both carbon and nitrogen inputs.  Carbon is readily available in the form of fallen leaves.  Again these are only available in the fall so gather lots of them.  You can add nitrogen in the form of grass clippings from late season mowing.  You can also add your spent tomato plants and other vegetable bio mass from your dwindling garden.  If you gather enough leaves for composting you’ll have plenty of carbon next spring and summer when nitrogen in the form of green leaves is more easily available.  As the weather warms up and your compost pile microbes go to work you want to have enough leaves to provide carbon to your compost all throughout the growing season.

Extend Your Season.  Collect old glass, discarded old windows work well.  Plastic sheeting works in a pinch.  You can use these items to build simple greenhouses called cold frames.  Place them in you garden and add the seeds or seedlings of cool crop vegetables.  You might be fortunate enough to get lettuce, spinach, carrots, and other veggies much later into the winter than without utilizing such a method.  If you live in more temperature climates like mine you might be able to grow lettuce all winter long.   And you’ll have wonderful place to stat seeds next spring.  You can begin growing seedlings well before the soil is ready in other parts of your garden.  The when the weather warms up, simply remove the cold frames and store them for use next fall.  Start small so as not to overwhelm yourself.  See if you can grow just a single cold frame of late season veggies.

Save Seeds.  This something that is best done throughout the growing season but it’s worth mentioning specifically as a fall task.  If you haven’t set aside seeds from that excellent tomato plant you so enjoyed now is your last chance.  Perhaps like me you never got around to cleaning out all of the spring lettuce that went to seed.  Take a walk through the garden and you might be surprised at all the plants that are offering up next year’s crops.  Store dry seeds in well labeled containers and you’ll be even more ready to garden when next spring rolls around.

Plant Perennials.  Fall is an excellent time to plant trees and bushes.  Consider adding fruit trees and berries to your landscape.  Now is an excellent time to get going with these plans.  As the vegetable harvest slows use your time to find areas of your yard that could benefit from more plants.  There’s always more room!  Fruit and nut trees like apples, pears, pecans and chestnuts will bear food year after year with little effort of your own.  Likewise blueberry, blackberry and raspberry bushes, among others, will offer food for you and your family on an annual basis without replanting.  Perennials such as strawberries, lemon balm and rosemary (here in the south) are happy to establish themselves in you garden in the fall.  They’ll grow roots and get ready in the winter and sprout strong early in the spring to offer up their bounty.  They need only be added to your landscape and fall is an excellent time.

Clean And Sharpen Tools (and your mind).  OK this doesn’t sounds like a great deal of fun but it is a good way to be ready early next spring.  Also replace tools and equipment you will need next year.  Gardening supplies will be on sale at this time of year.  Save money but now.  It’s also fairly common to see some folks throwing away this year’s gardening supplies. Every tomato cage in our yard and most of my hoses came from someone’s trash.  Keep an eye out for such freebies.   It wouldn’t hurt jot down a few notes about the successes and the failures of your gardening efforts from this past season.  This will help you next year to remember thoughts you would have forgotten.

Autumn is often overlooked as an extremely important time of year for those of us who garden and grow food for ourselves and our families.  Be sure to take advantage of all of the possibilities this season has to offer.