Reset the Soil Before You Plant

Fall gardening doesn’t begin when the first seed goes into the ground.

It begins with the soil.

By late summer, our gardens have been working hard. Tomatoes have been pulling nutrients from containers, peppers have been producing for months, summer heat has baked raised beds, and those pots sitting on the patio may be looking a little tired.

Before planting the next round of greens, radishes, carrots, herbs, or other cool-season crops, give your garden somewhere good to grow.

And you don’t need acres of land to do it.

Urban gardening happens everywhere — in raised beds, buckets, grow bags, community plots, balconies, patios, porches, alleyways, and whatever little patch of sunshine we can claim.

At Growrider, that’s gardening.

Grow where you’re planted.

First: Clean Up, But Don’t Tear Everything Apart

Preparing for fall doesn’t mean the entire summer garden has to disappear overnight.

Take a look around first.

If a tomato or pepper plant is still healthy and producing, let it ride. Fall crops can often be worked into the spaces opening around summer plants.

Remove plants that are finished, badly diseased, or no longer productive. Cut spent plants at soil level when practical instead of aggressively pulling everything out by the roots.

Those old roots can break down underground, feeding soil organisms and leaving tiny pathways for air and water.

Healthy leaves and plant material can go into your compost pile. Diseased material is generally better removed rather than mixed back into the garden.

The goal isn’t to make the garden look empty.

It’s to make room for what’s coming next.

Wake Up Tired Raised Beds

Raised beds are especially useful for urban gardeners, but they’re not bottomless nutrient banks.

Every harvest takes something with it.

After removing finished plants, gently loosen the top few inches of soil with a hand cultivator or garden fork. You don’t need to turn the entire bed upside down.

Then add a layer of finished compost.

An inch or two spread across the surface can help replenish organic matter while improving the soil’s ability to hold both moisture and nutrients.

If the soil level in your raised bed has dropped considerably during the season, that’s normal. Organic material decomposes and settles over time.

Top the bed off with a quality garden soil or compost blend as needed.

Think of it as feeding the block before the next crew moves in.

Container Gardeners: Your Pots Need a Reset Too

Urban gardeners often get an incredible amount of food out of containers.

But container soil works hard.

A tomato growing in a five-gallon bucket, for example, has spent months pulling nutrients from a relatively small amount of soil. Frequent summer watering can also wash nutrients through the container.

That doesn’t automatically mean the potting mix needs to be thrown away.

If the previous plant was healthy, remove the old plant and roots, loosen compacted soil, and inspect the container.

Mixing in fresh compost and quality potting mix can help restore structure and organic matter.

If the soil has become extremely compacted, drains poorly, smells sour, or supported a plant with significant disease problems, replacing more — or sometimes all — of the mix may be the better choice.

And remember:

Garden soil and potting mix aren’t the same thing.

Containers need a lightweight growing medium that drains properly. Soil dug directly from the yard can become dense and poorly aerated inside a pot.

Check Your Drainage

Fall weather eventually means cooler temperatures and, depending on where you live, potentially wetter conditions.

That makes drainage important.

Check the holes in buckets and containers to make sure roots or debris haven’t blocked them.

For raised beds, pay attention to places where water pools after watering or rain.

Healthy soil should hold moisture without becoming a swamp.

Roots need water.

They also need oxygen.

Add Compost Before Reaching for Fertilizer

It’s tempting to assume every tired garden needs fertilizer.

Not necessarily.

Compost and fertilizer perform different jobs.

Finished compost contributes organic matter and supports the overall structure and biology of the soil. Fertilizers provide specific nutrients.

Before automatically adding a large amount of fertilizer, consider what was growing there and what you’re planting next.

If you’ve been gardening in the same raised bed for several seasons, a soil test can take a lot of the guessing out of the equation.

More fertilizer isn’t always better.

Sometimes the soil already has plenty of certain nutrients and needs something else entirely.

Feed according to what the soil needs, not simply because a new season is starting.

Give Your Fall Crops Some Fresh Real Estate

One of my favorite things about urban gardening is learning to see unused space differently.

A large backyard isn’t required.

Maybe you’ve got:

• an empty five-gallon bucket,
• a sunny apartment balcony,
• three feet at the end of a raised bed,
• a grow bag beside the garage,
• an old container on the porch,
• or a small community garden plot.

That’s growing space.

Fall vegetables can be especially friendly to small gardens because many don’t require the sprawling footprint of warm-season crops.

Leaf lettuce, spinach, radishes, green onions, cilantro and other compact cool-season plants can produce a surprising amount of food from a small area.

You aren’t gardening with the space you wish you had.

You’re gardening with the space you’ve got.

And that’s enough to grow something.

Pay Attention to the Changing Sun

Here’s something summer gardeners sometimes forget:

Your fall garden doesn’t receive the same sunlight your summer garden did.

As the season changes, the sun travels lower across the sky. Buildings, fences, garages, balconies, trees and neighboring structures can begin casting shadows across areas that were sunny earlier in the year.

Urban gardeners especially need to watch this.

Before deciding where your fall containers will live, spend a day noticing where the sunlight actually falls now.

A container garden has one huge advantage here:

It has wheels — figuratively, and sometimes literally.

Move those pots.

A patio that roasted your lettuce in July might become prime growing space in October.

Learning your little piece of sunlight throughout the seasons is part of becoming a better gardener.

Don’t Forget Mulch

Once fall seedlings become established, a light layer of mulch can help regulate soil temperature, reduce evaporation and protect the soil surface.

Shredded leaves can be an especially useful fall resource.

They’re falling out of the sky for free.

Just avoid burying tiny seedlings beneath a thick layer. Give young plants some breathing room and add mulch appropriately as they establish themselves.

Your Garden Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect

Urban gardening can become intimidating when we’re constantly shown immaculate raised beds and enormous backyard harvests online.

Real gardens aren’t always like that.

Sometimes the tomato cage is crooked.

Sometimes there are three different buckets because that’s what you had.

Sometimes the prettiest pepper plant you’ve ever grown is sitting next to an air-conditioning unit.

It still counts.

A garden isn’t defined by acreage.

It’s defined by the relationship between a grower, a plant, some soil, water, sunlight and time.

So clean out that bucket.

Refresh that raised bed.

Add some compost.

Find the fall sunshine.

Then plant something.

Summer may be winding down, but the garden isn’t finished.

We’re just switching seasons.

Keep Growing Low & Slow.

— Growrider