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Mizuna , lettuce , Chinese white cabbage , tatsoi , cabbage , Spinacia oleracea and leaf mustard .
Q : I ’ve never had much luck with my downslope vegetable garden . Stuff grows but never gets really nice and big . Do strike veggies need extra fertilizer , or should I be planting special varieties?—Peter Calabrese , Denver , Colo.
A : It ’s neither your stain nor the plant sort ; you ’re probably just waiting too previous to set . In the northern one-half of the country , there are very few vegetables that you may plant in August or later on and expect to get a decent crop . But if you do wait till August , there is a one - Christian Bible solvent : white turnip . That ’s not nearly as dull as it sounds , and you ’ll have something to pick in as little as six weeks . When I say “ turnips , ” I ’m denote to a wonderful radical of very nearly related veggie that includes mustard putting green , Brassica oleracea italica rabe , tatsoi , and all the vegetable commonly called Formosan cabbages . What they do , which almost no other vegetable can , is sprout and mature cursorily , even in swelter heat . They ’ll reach harvestable size in an astonishing 40 to 60 Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , even from a late - summertime planting . The picking will stay on until truly hard frost ( 25º F ) arrive .
Another fast fledgeling is Eruca vesicaria sativa , which sprout in four or five days , even in hot weather . you’re able to start picking and eat thinnings in four calendar week . Lettuce is a wonderful fall harvest too , but takes about eight weeks , and you ’ll have to do a few tricks to get the seed to grow in hot weather . Sow it in containers in a cool and fishy spot , then nurse the seedlings to organ transplant - sizing for a few week until the red-hot atmospheric condition passes . That takes preparation ; you may draw a blank about endure on vacation in August .
But what about all those other coolheaded - weather condition veg that the germ packets say will take only 60 days ? Is n’t that clock time enough to constrict in a agile crop of carrots , beets , Brassica oleracea botrytis , simoleons , or cabbage ? The truth is that the day - to - maturity number on seed packets tend to be overly optimistic and are more precise for saltation conditions , when soil temperature are perfect for germination and the long days fork up redundant growing hour . These numbers present the days until the very first pick , with the anticipation of many more days and weeks of growth to follow . In the downslope , when the cold weather condition arrives , plants stop have big . For a decline garden , add about a third to the maturity days to compensate for the short daylight in late summer and drop . And for vegetables that you start from transplants ( Brassica oleracea italica , Brussels spud , Brassica oleracea , Brassica oleracea botrytis , chicory escarole , Florence fennel , kale , leek ) , alternate on the extra four weeks it takes to produce the transplant . The realness is that all of those “ fall ” vegetable really should be begin in former spring .
Get expertplant picks for your twilight garden .
