Autumn garden going in the ground
There is a moment every year when the vegetable garden starts to change.
The tomatoes are still producing. The peppers certainly haven't given up. There are flowers everywhere, and in the middle of the day it can still feel very much like summer here in Catalonia.
But the light is different.
The mornings are cooler. The shadows are getting longer. And suddenly I find myself looking at empty spaces in the vegetable garden and thinking not about tomatoes and cucumbers, but about cabbages, cauliflower, peas, carrots and everything I want to eat this winter.
The autumn garden is going in the ground.
And after the summer we've had, I am more than ready for it.
Gardening here means thinking one season ahead
One thing I've had to learn about growing food in Spain is that autumn isn't the end of the vegetable gardening year.
In many ways, it's the beginning of another one.
Coming from Sweden, September still triggers something deep inside me that says the growing season is over. You harvest everything, clean up the garden and wait for spring.
That isn't how it works here.
Our winters can certainly get cold. I'm in the mountains of inland Catalonia rather than down on the Mediterranean coast, and we do get frost and occasionally even snow.
But there is still an enormous amount that can grow through autumn and winter.
The trick is getting it established before the days become too short and cold.
So while part of the garden is still hanging onto summer, I'm already planting the next season underneath and around it.
First in: the brassicas
The big autumn planting this year is brassicas.
I've planted Brunswick and Copenhagen Market cabbages, along with cauliflower, and I've been giving them rather more attention than any cabbage probably deserves.
Partly because brassicas here seem to come with their own personal army of enemies.
Cabbage white butterflies absolutely love my garden.
I have been checking the leaves constantly for those tiny yellow eggs and removing them before they hatch. It's surprisingly satisfying and so far my plants have stayed remarkably free of caterpillar damage.
I know I'm tempting fate by writing that publicly. ;)
But the bigger problem this year hasn't actually been caterpillars.
It's been the heat.
Apparently September didn't get the autumn memo
I planted the bulk of my brassicas in late August, expecting temperatures to start becoming slightly more reasonable.
Instead, we got another blast of summer.
After spending months trying to keep tomatoes, corn, cucumbers and everything else alive through extraordinary heat, I suddenly found myself doing exactly the same thing with vegetables that are supposed to be taking me into autumn.
Some of the young plants looked thoroughly miserable.
And this is one of the strange things about autumn gardening here: the calendar might say it's time to plant cool-season crops, while the weather strongly disagrees.
Plant too late and they don't have enough time to establish before winter.
Plant too early and you risk cooking them.
Welcome to September gardening in Catalonia.
Now the beds are filling up again
I love this stage.
A bed that looked exhausted and empty a few weeks ago suddenly has neat little rows of green plants again.
There is something incredibly optimistic about planting an autumn garden.
Spring planting is easy to get excited about. Everything is waking up, the days are getting longer and you have an entire growing season ahead of you.
Autumn planting feels different.
You're planting into declining light.
You know growth is going to slow down. You know frost will eventually arrive. You're essentially making a little investment now and trusting that the garden will keep quietly working while you're inside lighting the fireplace.
And I rather love that.
Roots, greens and peas are next
The brassicas are only the beginning.
I'm also making room for the crops that actually prefer the cooler months.
There will be carrots and beetroot, and I want another good crop of peas. Kale can take its place in the winter garden too, and there are leeks and onions to think about.
The potatoes have already gone into the ground 24 plants, planted at the beginning of September which feels slightly rebellious when so many gardeners elsewhere are digging theirs up at this time of year.
But that's one of the great advantages of gardening here.
I don't really have one vegetable-growing season.
I have several overlapping ones.
Summer crops are finishing while autumn crops are beginning. Autumn crops will become winter crops, and before some of those have even been harvested I'll already be sowing things for spring.
The garden never completely stops.
I'm also trying to get better at succession
This is something I want to improve.
When I first started growing more of our food, my instinct was basically:
Plant ALL THE THINGS.
Two hundred onions? Absolutely.
Two hundred and forty corn plants? Apparently that seemed reasonable too.
But producing food throughout the year isn't necessarily about having enormous quantities of one vegetable ready at exactly the same moment.
It's about continuity.
I want something coming out of the garden in November.
And December.
And January.
And February.
That means thinking much more carefully about sowing dates, varieties and how long things can stay in the ground.
I'm slowly moving from simply growing vegetables towards trying to make the vegetable garden function as part of our pantry.
There's a difference.
The soil needs some attention too
After a Mediterranean summer, the beds look tired.
Frankly, so do I.
Months of heat, constant watering and hungry summer crops take their toll. Before replanting beds, I'm adding compost and organic matter wherever I can.
My soil needs all the help it can get.
We have areas of clay, lots of rock and plenty of lime, and improving it isn't something I'm going to accomplish in one season. Every bucket of compost, every bit of manure and every layer of organic matter is part of a much longer project.
I'm particularly interested in improving water retention.
This summer made that painfully obvious.
If the soil can hold moisture for longer, that's less time standing outside with a hose and less stress on the plants when temperatures suddenly shoot upwards.
There is something wonderful about the autumn garden
The summer vegetable garden is spectacular.
It's chaotic, enormous and slightly ridiculous. Tomatoes are climbing everywhere. Cucumbers are trying to take over. Zinnias have turned into trees. Dahlias are flowering, pumpkins are wandering off in directions nobody authorised, and every trip outside seems to result in another basket of something.
The autumn garden is quieter.
Neater.
Almost calmer.
Tiny cabbage plants don't look particularly impressive compared with a two-metre tomato plant.
But I look at them and see future food.
I see cabbage with winter dinners. Cauliflower coming into the kitchen on a cold morning. Peas climbing their supports. Carrots being pulled from cold soil. Leeks going into soups.
And perhaps that's why I enjoy planting at this time of year so much.
Summer isn't quite finished but the next season has begun
There are still peppers to harvest.
There are still dahlias flowering.
The tomatoes haven't completely surrendered.
On a sunny afternoon, it can still feel ridiculous to talk about autumn at all.
But the garden knows the season is changing.
And so do I.
The beds are being cleared, compost is going down, seedlings are going in and the vegetable garden is slowly changing from its wild summer version into something completely different.
After an exceptionally difficult summer, I'm actually looking forward to seeing what the cooler months bring.
Although, knowing me, I'll probably fill every available bed and then spend December wondering why on earth I planted that many cabbages.
Some things apparently don't change with the seasons.
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