9 COMMON LATE-SEASON GARDENING MISTAKES
Being a gardener is a life long learning experience. Everyone makes gardening mistakes, even people who've been at it for decades already. Mistakes aren't failures, though, so don't let them make you feel like you should give up.
Chalk up the screwups to a learning experience, and think about how you'll do it differently next time. It can be beneficial to sit down at the end of the vegetable or flower gardening season and think about some of the challenges or mistakes you dealt with this year, and consider how you could do things differently next year.
Here are a few common late-season gardening mistakes that people make.
1. WAITING TOO LONG TO HARVEST
It can be tempting to wait just a little longer to pick your tomatoes, corn, or beans, or peas in hopes that maybe they'll produce just a few more fruits or get just a little bit bigger. But this is not a good idea.
Most veggies have an ideal ripeness stage and taste the best when they're just getting to it. If you leave them on the plant for too long, they may start to rot on the vine, which can cause other fruits on the plant to rot. With crops like peas and beans, once they get too big, they lose their flavor and start to feel dry, mealy, or stringy.
2. PLANTING FALL CROPS TOO LATE
With a relatively long growing season in Indiana, approximately 168 days long, we can grow a second crop of cool-season veggies in the fall. But since it doesn't feel like fall until late September, many people wait too late to seed fall crops.
Most fall veggie crops should be started from seed in August, so they have time to germinate and start growing happily as the weather cools off, and still have long enough to reach maturity for harvest about the time we begin to see frost. There are some fall crops you can start from transplants in September, but it's better to err on the side of early and get them in the ground in August.
Most fall crops should be planted a minimum of 6-8 weeks before the first expected frost.
3. WATERING INEFFICIENTLY OR INCONSISTENTLY
Watering your garden is a bit of an art. There are several common mistakes people make with watering.
The first mistake is watering a tiny bit very often. If you're watering your garden every few days, but only for a short period, it causes a few problems.
First, shallow watering can encourage plants to keep shallow roots, so they're less stable, more susceptible to wind, and dry out faster. Water less frequently, but deeply. Check the soil to see how far down the water has soaked about an hour after turning the water off. The deeper, the better.
Watering inconsistently is also not great, as it causes your plants to go through stressful periods of drought. They don't produce well and are more susceptible to disease and pests when they experience water stress.
Watering during the heat of the day means you lose a ton of water to evaporation from the heat. It's better to water in the early morning or late evening, and water low and slow, so it has time to sink in.
Water on the leaves of your plants can create a perfect environment for things like mildew. So if possible, water from a low angle, near the base of the plant. Soaker hoses are ideal for this.
Forgetting to water shrubs and trees in the fall is another common mistake. All of your trees and shrubs will benefit from a deep soak in the autumn. But it's especially critical for young or new trees and shrubs because they're more delicate and susceptible to winter kill if they head into the freezing months dehydrated.
4. PLANTING SPRING-BLOOMING BULBS TOO EARLY OR TOO LATE
Planting spring bulbs is exciting, and it makes your spring garden so easy, but you want to get the timing right. If you plant spring-blooming bulbs too early, like in August, they might put new shoots up out of the ground before frost.
Spring bulbs need a few weeks to develop a robust root system before the ground freeze, but not long enough to put up shoots. In the Indianapolis area, you'll want to start planting spring-blooming bulbs near the end of September to mid-October.
5. NOT DIGGING UP TENDER BULBS.
Bulbs for plants like gladiolus, dahlias, and begonias can be kept for many years if you dig them up and store them for the winter. It's a great way to save money in the garden, and get more plants for free, since they divide and create more bulbs as they grow over the summer.
Simply dig them up once the foliage has started to yellow, and lay them out on racks or newspaper to air dry for several days. You can then store them in a container of dry sand or vermiculite, or a mesh bag. Keep them somewhere cool and dark until spring.
6. LETTING WEEDS GET OUT OF CONTROL AND THEN GIVING UP
It can be incredibly discouraging to tackle the weeds in your garden if they've become overgrown and spread a lot. All gardeners struggle with weeds. Life gets busy, and weeding quickly falls down the priority list.
In reality, you can get a lot of weeding done in just 5 minutes a day. Break it down. If you have raised beds, do one bed per day. Or one row of your garden per day, or one type of weed per day. Just spend 5 minutes.
Because you don't have to be delicate with weeds, it goes faster than you think it will, and it can be therapeutic and cathartic.
7. MULCH: 'VOLCANOES' OR NO MULCH
If you add mulch, it can be tempting to pile up thick piles of mulch around the base of trees and shrubs, thinking it will give them a thick warm blanket. But a pile of mulch around a tree trunk or shrub trunk ('volcano' mulching) will retain moisture and cause the trunk of the tree to develop fungus or mold and start to rot, opening the tree up to infection, or even killing it eventually.
Not adding any mulch at all can also be a mistake. If your mulch is starting to compact down, it may not protect your plants' roots as much, and you could end up with more winterkill. Adding an extra couple inches of mulch in the fall is a pretty easy way to keep your perennials, trees, and shrubs safer through winter.
8. NOT AMENDING YOUR SOIL
Garden soil gets depleted of nutrients over time if you don't make any additions to it. Heavy feeders like tomatoes and peppers especially use up nutrients fast. One of the easiest ways to improve your soil is with a cover crop in the fall.
Cover crops help control weeds and add essential nutrients back into the soil. They also improve the texture of your soil with organic matter. All you need to do is plant them and let winter happen. Just work it under in the spring, and get gardening.
9. NOT DEADHEADING SELF-SEEDING FLOWERS
Many flowers are self-seeders. If you'd like an area to fill with a self-seeding type of plant, this can be great. But some flowers, like delphiniums, poppies, white anemone, vervain, cosmos, speedwell, phlox, yarrow, etc., can invade your garden if they're left to go to seed every year.
Clip off blossoms when you see the flower petals start to fade. If there are tons of blooms going or gone to seed already, you can prune back the whole plant a bit if you like. Just don't put dried seedheads in your compost bin, because you'll just end up with all those flowers everywhere next year.