Fall Planting, Part Two

Fall peas

The peas, lettuce, carrots and green beans I planted last month are coming along well, with warm sunny days, cool nights, and more rain to encourage them.  In a few weeks, as nights get colder, I'll have to consider covering them at night, but so far we've only had one night go below 50 degrees.  My tomatoes, sweet peppers and herbs, that struggled during the worst of the summer heat are perking up and looking better now. 

With the more reliably moderate weather, I have begun planting some of the fall flowers like pansies, asters and mums.  I am careful to get hardy mums, so that I can enjoy them more than one year.



In southern areas (zones 6-9), pansies will flower all fall, intermittently during the winter, then again all next spring, only to finally die during next summer's heat.  Asters and mums will flower all fall until hard frost, then go dormant until next spring.

As I planted pansies today, I dipped the root balls in a dry mycorrhizal mix to encourage root growth.  In a couple of days, I'll water them with a liquid solution with mycorrhizae. Last year, as an experiment, I used this treatment on half of the pansies, to see if I could tell any difference in their success rate.  The answer this spring was a resounding yes!  The plants that had received this treatment had survived the winter at a much better rate than those without, and the plants were larger and had more blossoms.

As I plant any of these flowers, I mix some compost into the soil, and water them well.  I'll need to keep an eye on them over the winter, even more than well-established plants, to be sure they don't dry out.