What to Plant in August for a Seattle Fall Garden

I took July off from writing, which is the first time I have done that since starting this blog. The garden did not take July off. If you follow along with the garden, you know July was busy. The summer crops are still going, the first tomatoes are close, and right now, this week, I'm planting fall. Here is what is happening across the beds, what went wrong, what I'm learning, and where I'm heading next.

Starting Your Seattle Fall Garden Before Summer Is Over

This is the part most gardeners miss. You are standing in your summer garden in August, everything looks fine, and starting kale and cabbage feels completely wrong. It's not. If you want to harvest anything in October and November here in Seattle, you needed to start now, and honestly, some of it should have gone in two weeks ago.

I started my fall and winter crops this week (again!). The longer-lifecycle ones (broccoli, cabbage, and kale) went in first, because they need at least 60 to 90 days before the first frost, and we lose daylight fast once September arrives. I'll seed the shorter ones, arugula, corn salad, spinach, and winter lettuce, directly into the beds through the end of August. These are forgiving and fast. You still have time.

The Berry Mistake I'm Still Dealing With

I have two varieties of Elderberry in the garden (Nova and York), and I'm going to be honest. I planted them without thinking hard enough about how they would work together.

An elderflower head in full bloom. Every one of these I cut for tea is a bunch of elderberries I am choosing not to harvest later.

Every year both plants flower heavily. Big full heads of elderflower, more than I could ever use. And every year, almost no berries. I decided it had to be a pollination problem, because Nova and York are sold as a pair and I assumed I had somehow got the planting wrong.

This week I went out and actually looked instead of guessing. The berries are forming. They are just not staying. It is the birds.

Which I should have worked out a long time ago. Elderberry is one of the most attractive things you can put in a garden if you happen to be a bird, and I already know exactly what the birds around here are capable of. I have written about the grapes that get stripped in a single night. I have hung CDs over my pea shoots for this precise reason. It never occurred to me to defend a plant I had already decided was broken.

Here is what I am doing about it, and what I am not.

I am not putting netting over them. I have said this before, I am too nervous about a bird getting tangled in loose netting, and that is not a trade I am willing to make for fruit. What works instead is fine mesh drawstring bags slipped over the individual berry heads once they start to color. Nothing loose for anything to catch in, and you take them off and reuse them year after year.

The other half of it is timing. Elderberries ripen unevenly, and the birds start on them at the first hint of color, not when the cluster looks perfect to you. So cut the whole head as soon as most of it has turned and finish the ripening indoors. Waiting for the perfect moment is how you end up with a bare shrub and a theory about pollination.

What I do get, I use. The flowers make good tea and tincture. And this year, for the first time, I might actually find out what the berries taste like.

The Flower Bed That Is Done, Not Empty

The flower bed along the house is finished for the season. Not empty, finished. Most of it is brown and gone to seed, and the only things still going are the sunflowers and one stubborn pink flower that has not read the calendar.

The bed at the end of its season. The sunflowers are still going, but the bamboo canes gave up before the plants did.

Here is what I got wrong. I staked those sunflowers with thin bamboo canes, and the canes lost. Sunflower stems get heavy at the top once the heads fill out, and a thin cane just bends along with them. Now half of them are lying sideways across the bed and hanging over the wood chips. If you grow sunflowers, use a real stake, something like a one-inch wooden stake or a piece of rebar driven deep, and tie them in at least twice as they grow. Put the stake in when you plant, not when they start to lean. By the time they lean, the root ball is already loose and you are just propping up a problem.

The location is the other issue, and this one is not really a mistake so much as a limitation I keep forgetting. That bed runs along the foundation under the eaves, so it sits in a rain shadow and takes reflected heat off the concrete all afternoon. In a dry August like this one it dries out faster than anything else in the garden. Thirsty annuals are the wrong choice for a narrow strip like that, and I keep planting them anyway.

Before I clear it out, I am collecting seed. All that brown material is seed heads, and free seed for next year is the best reason to not be tidy in August. I am also leaving the sunflower heads standing for now, because the birds will strip them, and leaving some hollow stems through winter gives solitary bees somewhere to overwinter. The bee hotel gets all the attention, but dead stems do the same job for free.

For fall I am thinking about drought-tolerant perennials in that strip instead of another round of annuals. Something that can handle a dry summer against a hot wall without me standing there with a hose every evening. I have not fully decided. I'll share what goes in when I plant it.

The Rats Won the Carrot Bed

I lost my carrots to rats. The entire bed, cleared out. I came back from my vacation and they were gone, not just nibbled but gone, roots pulled and tops left scattered.

I don't have a photo of the carrots because there were no carrots left by the time I thought to take one. What I do have is a photo of the bed after I cleaned it out, now prepped and ready for cabbage starts and fall crops.

The carrot bed after the cleanup, turned over and waiting for cabbage. No carrots to show you, because there were none left to photograph.

Sometimes that is the most useful documentation anyway, not what you lost, but what you did next.

Rats are a real problem in Seattle kitchen gardens and I don't see enough people talking about it. Wire mesh under and around raised beds is the most effective deterrent I know of, and I'll be adding it to this bed when I replant. More on that in a future post.

Three Things Worth Knowing This Month

St. John's Wort going to seed. My St. John's Wort is starting to seed right now.

St. John's Wort past flowering and into seed. One plant can throw a hundred thousand seeds, which explains a lot about where it keeps turning up.

A single plant can produce up to 100,000 seeds in a year, which explains why it spreads the way it does once it's established. The best window for harvesting the flowers and leaves, which carry the highest concentration of the active compounds, is earlier in the season, in early morning on a dry day when the plant is in full bloom. By now we're in seed, so I'm letting it do its thing and deciding where to let it naturalize in the garden next year. I grow it as a medicinal herb. It has been used for centuries for mild anxiety, sleep support, and topically for skin inflammation and wounds. If you're new to it, it's also beautiful in flower, worth growing for that alone.

Coffee grounds in the garden: what's actually happening. A lot of gardeners add used coffee grounds directly to vegetable beds thinking it boosts nitrogen. Here's the more complete picture. Coffee grounds do contain nitrogen, but it's not in a form that plants can use right away. Before that nitrogen becomes available, it needs to go through decomposition, and that decomposition process requires microbial activity that uses nitrogen from the surrounding soil. So in the short term, fresh grounds added directly to a bed can actually reduce the available nitrogen rather than increase it. Research has shown negative effects on broccoli, leek, and radish when coffee grounds were applied this way (Hardgrove, S.J. & Livesley, S.J. (2016). "Applying spent coffee grounds directly to urban agriculture soils greatly reduces plant growth." Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, Vol. 18, pp. 1–8. University of Melbourne). The better approach is to add them to your compost pile, let them break down fully, and use the finished compost. As a mulch layer mixed with other organic matter, they're also fine. Just not directly onto the root zone of your vegetables in large quantities, and not as a substitute for real nitrogen sources.

We need rain and we are not getting it. June, July and early August have been dry. We had a few drops last week, not enough to matter. If your raised beds are pulling away from the edges and feeling light, they need a slow, deep soak, not a quick spray. I recommend running soaker hoses for 45 minutes in the early morning on the vegetable beds, and also add a two-inch layer of compost as mulch over your veggie bed(s) to slow evaporation. A rain barrel helps when rain does eventually arrive, and even a small collection can carry you through a dry week. Until we get a real rain event, consistent deep watering in the morning is the most important thing you can do for your kitchen garden right now.

Seeds, a Book, and What's Coming Next

Where I get my seeds for fall planting. For anyone who wants to order seeds and start the same thing, here are the vendors I use for our Pacific Northwest climate:

CROP	VARIETY	VENDOR
Broccoli	Umpqua (Crown)	Territorial Seed Company
Cabbage (Red)	Red Acre	Botanical Interests
Cabbage	Charmant F1	Territorial Seed Company
Cabbage (Napa)	Michihili	Survival Garden Seeds
Cabbage (Savoy)	Savoy Perfection	Instant Latch
Kohlrabi	Terek F1 (Hybrid)	Johnny's Selected Seeds
Swiss Chard	Rhubarb	Territorial Seed Company
Beet	Feuer Kugel	Deep Harvest Seeds
Beet (Gold)	Touchstone Gold	Uprising Seeds
Leek	Carantan	Instant Latch
Onion (Bunching)	Evergreen White Bunching	Ed Hume Seeds
Onion (Bunching)	Heckenzwiebel - Freddie	A gift

What I'm reading. I found a used copy of Growing a Farmer by Kurt Timmermeister. He runs Kurtwood Farms over on Vashon Island, a ferry ride from here, and he came to farming the way most of us come to gardening, which is to say with no real idea what he was doing. He was running restaurants in Seattle when he bought four acres of blackberry brambles and started working out what it actually takes to feed yourself from your own land. What I like is that he does not clean up the hard parts. There is a lot of honest writing in there about what did not work, and that is rare in books about growing food.

A used copy, which feels like the right way to buy a book about doing things the hard way.

Coming up next. I want to go deeper on rat-proofing raised beds, what the garden looks like as we head into the first fall rains, and more about the Executive Kitchen Garden System program for anyone thinking about working together this fall. If there's something specific you want to hear about, reach out. I'm here for you.

Jackie

Palatino Garden Adventures 

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Find out what kind of kitchen gardener you are

August & September slots are now open for both the Executive Blueprint and one-on-one consultation sessions. Book yours now before they are gone, so we can plan your beds while there is still season left to plant.

→ The Blueprint is the full design phase - soil assessment, crop selection, succession plan, and layout - everything covered in this post, done for your specific space. Book here.

→ Consultation sessions are a good fit if you want to work through one piece of it yourself with guidance. Either way, the late summer planting window sets the deadline for your Seattle Fall Garden, and spots fill before it arrives. Book here.