Seasonal guide

What to Plant in July for a Fall Harvest

Updated for July · 3 min read

If July has you thinking the season is winding down, here is the good news: for a lot of what you grow, it is just getting started. Midsummer is when a fall garden gets set up. The trick is knowing what still has time to finish where you garden.

Why July is really a beginning

The spring rush ends, the garden goes quiet, and it is easy to assume the planting is done. But many plants sown now mature into the cool nights of autumn, and those cool nights make greens and roots sweeter than anything spring gives you. There is a whole second wave here for the taking.

Fast growers you can still start

These come up quickly enough to ripen before the season turns in most temperate gardens.

• Bush beans. Roughly 50 to 55 days from seed, no transplanting, and they feed the soil as they grow.
• Cucumbers. Fast and heat-loving. A midsummer sowing often sidesteps the early-season pests that trouble spring plants.
• Summer squash and zucchini. A fresh plant now can outproduce a tired spring one that is winding down.
• Beets. Quick to size up, and the greens are worth picking along the way.

What to start now for fall

These are the ones that reward you later, sown in mid to late summer to mature as it cools.

• Kale and hardy greens. They shrug off a light frost and sweeten with it.
• Broccoli, cabbage, and other brassicas. Start them now for a fall head.
• Carrots. Sown now and pulled after the first cool nights, they are hard to beat.
• Lettuce, spinach, and Asian greens. Quick, forgiving, and much happier out of high summer heat.

The part that is specific to you

Here is the honest bit. Whether any one of these finishes in time depends on your local climate, not the date on the calendar. Some of you have months of growing left. Some have weeks. A generic planting chart cannot tell the difference, which is exactly the problem it leaves you with.

That is what Verna is for. It reads your local conditions and each plant's needs, then tells you what still fits and when to start it, specific to your garden. No counting backward from a frost date on the back of a napkin.

See what still has time in your garden

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