How to plan ahead for your spring garden

CATHY WURZER: We're going to close out the show right now by saying goodbye to the summer growing season. I know, I know. It's coming to an end. But that doesn't mean you can't start planning for next year. Meg Cowden, our resident gardener friend, joins us as she celebrates the goodbyes in the garden, looks ahead to spring. Meg, well, had to happen somewhere along the line, so here it is.

MEG COWDEN: Hi, Cathy. Yeah. You know what? We have absolutely nothing to complain about as far as I'm concerned. I was doing the math. It's like, I got hot in early June, and it was 90 degrees on the first day in October. We had four months of summer if you think. I know winter's longer, but that's a lot. I'm ready for fall.

CATHY WURZER: Yeah. And it's here. Beyond just a few tomatoes that I've managed to rescue from birds and maybe a handful or two of lettuce, that's all I have. What did you get out of your garden?

MEG COWDEN: Yeah. Since we last talked, I think I had mentioned maybe in August that we were going to have a really bumper crop of watermelon, and honestly, I think I harvested over 300 pounds of watermelon. We were giving them away left and right. I have dehydrated them and frozen them. We're still actually enjoying them.

That's kind of been surprising. They store pretty well. They're in a closet. We grab one once a week and cut them up. But after that big bumper crop, we've really been moving into apples. So apples season has been going on since about late August for us, and we're really shifting into the fall crops. Even though my peppers and tomatoes and eggplants and cucumbers are still in the garden, I've started to take some of them down.

With this weather changing, I have no regrets about actually pulling those plants out. I'm not going to have a lot more ripening on my peppers at this point. Tomatoes are diseased. And even the tomatoes that ripen don't taste the same as they would in the middle of August. And I find them too cooling and too cold this time of year to kind of eat raw.

I'd rather eat cooked tomatoes, and I've got plenty of those canned already, so I'm good with that. And what that also does is it opens up space, literal space in the garden, which gives us mental space to navigate the shifting seasons.

So there's a lot of letting go, and we can travel further down that path if you want, Cathy, because I think there's a lot of metaphors there. Do we hold on to things, or do we let go this time of year in the garden?

CATHY WURZER: See, I love you, Meg, because of your metaphors. I tend to hold on way too long. I'm looking at a garden that's got overgrown tomato plants. And I'm listening to you, and I'm thinking, I probably should get in there and rip some of those out. And you're really good with herbs. If your herbs have flowered, are they worthless at this point, or you salvage some of these herbs?

MEG COWDEN: I deadheaded mine. My oregano had flowered sometime not that long ago, maybe four, six weeks ago, and I cut it back. And now the newer growth I'm cutting off and I'm starting to dry for winter seasoning, obviously. You can cut your thyme.

I think when herbs flower, they tend to go a little more bitter. And a lot of them are perennials, though. My sage comes back. My oregano comes back. My thyme came back. I sort of let them ride it out. Basil I'm done with, though. I mean, we harvested all that we needed to. A lot of that flowered sometime ago, so out it came.

CATHY WURZER: OK. Yep, I've been hanging on, Meg.

MEG COWDEN: And I did just pull like my Sungolds and all my heirloom tomatoes out on Sunday. And I realized that part of the garden-- I've been avoiding it a little bit. This is the time of year when I sort of avoid it unless it's because of things like the rotting fruit on the tomato vines that I never dealt with. And now it's like, you have to face it at some point.

And when I faced it, it only took an hour of my time to pull out the 14 plants. But afterwards, it's like, oh. There's the space I was needing. So now, I feel renewed. The garden feels less onerous. It feels more welcoming, and I can see the lower growing fall crops that are there that are all in season right now. So instead of lamenting the season that's past, I'm able to see the season I'm in.

CATHY WURZER: Yes. Well said. I'm going to have to ponder this after I get off the air. We've got several people with questions for you. One person wants to know, can they sow seeds for spinach now for spring harvest?

MEG COWDEN: My last call for sewing spinach for a spring harvest is on September 22, which happens to be my mom's birthday, first day of fall, so that's why I kind of like to do it there kind of as a symbolic gesture of sowing hope. You could try. The thing that's tricky is in about three to four weeks, we're not going to have enough daylight for plants to be growing anymore.

We're going to head into this dormant period for plants that's called the Persephone period. It was coined by Eliot Coleman who was kind of a well known organic farmer out of the Northeast. So I haven't tried it, but I'm all about pushing our seasons, as you know. And I'm like, hey. If someone wants to throw some seeds in the ground today, do it. You're not going to know until you try, so anything's possible.

CATHY WURZER: OK. There are folks who are, of course, cleaning up their gardens. Another listener wants to know, is it too late to do some transplanting? Specifically, can I move a few of my hostas around?

MEG COWDEN: Fall is a great time to transplant. I'd say even with these rains that we got, it's a terrific time to move things around. We just planted some perennial shrubs, edibles, in the garden just this last weekend that we had purchased. Yeah. Fall is a great time, and I think this fall is an exceptional year for doing that kind of stuff because we're still hanging on to some warm nights even.

CATHY WURZER: Yeah. I talked to Paul Huttner earlier in the show, and of course, he was talking about frost this coming weekend. How do you prepare your garden for frost?

MEG COWDEN: Well, I prepare it by succession planting in summer so that I know that I'll have food past the first frost. So I transitioned as much of the garden as I can to things that can handle a light frost. There's a lot of stuff in my garden that I'm not actually harvesting yet because I want a frost to sweeten their roots.

My fall carrots that are going to be stored and my daikon, my watermelon radish-- I'm not pulling any of those out until after we've had several frosts. It also coincides with needing to have my root cellar cool enough to be able to store them because we have too much produce to put in a refrigerator. My root cellar is like a walk in refrigerator.

But I don't tend to hold on to things. I might even proactively take plants out. For example, my cucumbers are still producing, but they're probably going to come out on Sunday. I mean, it doesn't look like I'm going to get a frost here where we are, in the West Metro, this weekend. I could be proven wrong.

But I will start pulling out all my hot season crops because they're much more enjoyable to pull out when they're not limp and gross after a frost. I'm sure lots of listeners know what I'm talking about. It's so gross. So be proactive is my probably best advice for people to get ready for a frost. And really, the letting go. I think with annuals, we tend to hold on to them, and we really lament their senescence.

But we are surrounded by perennials, and we're watching the leaves change in awe. But they're also kind of leaving us for a time. You know what I mean? So I think we need to reframe our annual garden mentality and really look at the seasonal changes as kind of an invitation for us to clear the decks a little bit and get ready for winter.

CATHY WURZER: Speaking of clearing the decks, should we be trimming anything now, or wait until spring? I think this person means maybe some trees or shrubs.

MEG COWDEN: Oh, well, that really depends on the tree or shrub. You don't prune oak trees when they're in the growing season. You only prune them when they're dormant. But I could prune my black walnuts during the growing season, I think. So that really varies. I would defer to an arborist for that.

But in terms of cutting back your shrubs and your perennial flowers, try to leave as many of those things standing as possible. There's a lot of insect biodiversity-- if you're managing your yard well-- that is going to be overwintering in the leaf litter, in the plant stems. If they're hollow stemmed plants in particular, there's some solitary bees that might be nesting in there.

So I tend to leave everything standing. If you do need to cut stuff down, try to give it a good 18 inches or more that you leave standing. So we're all trying to be more friendly to our insect populations. I think there's a really great building awareness of that with the public, I think especially here in Minnesota, but it never hurts to continue to underscore that importance.

CATHY WURZER: I have to thank you, my friend, for teaching me how to do that because I did it last year, left some of my perennials up. And over the winter, I noticed that there were some chickadees just having a wee of a time eating the seeds. So I thought, OK. There you go. Meg was right. Leave it alone.

MEG COWDEN: Yeah, totally. That's awesome. And it's kind of easier because spring is more fun.

CATHY WURZER: It is. Oh, always fun talking to you. You always give me food for thought, so thank you. I hope you have a good rest of the day.

MEG COWDEN: Thanks, Cathy. Appreciate it. Take care.

CATHY WURZER: That's Meg Cowden, master gardener. She's the author of the book, Plant, Grow, Harvest, Repeat, founder of the gardening advice group Modern Garden Guild. She's the greatest.