Fall garden

Start These Seeds in July for a Fall Garden

Updated for July · 3 min read

A fall garden begins in the heat of summer. Here are the seeds to start in July, and a few tricks for getting them up when the soil is warm and dry.

The fall garden is a summer job

It feels backward to sow for autumn while it is still hot, but that is the rhythm. Plants started now grow through the tail of summer and mature as the nights cool, and cool nights make greens and roots sweeter than anything spring gives you.

What to start now

• Brassicas: broccoli, cabbage, kale, cauliflower. Start them now for a fall head.
• Carrots and beets. Sown now and pulled after the first cool nights, they are hard to beat.
• Lettuce, spinach, and Asian greens. Quick and forgiving, and much happier as the heat fades.

Getting seeds up in summer heat

The hard part is not growing these, it is germinating them in hot, dry soil. The short version: sow a little deeper than you would in spring, keep the top inch (2.5 cm) consistently moist until seedlings appear, and shade the row with a board or a piece of cloth until they are up. For the full toolkit, see getting seeds to sprout in summer heat.

The part that depends on your garden

How many of these will finish for you depends on your local climate, not a date on a chart. Some gardens have months of growing left; others have weeks. That is the piece Verna works out for your exact spot, so you start the right things at the right time.

See what still has time in your garden

Verna maps sowing, transplanting, and harvest timing to your exact spot.