The real autumn is here. The past week we started with our first mild morning frost temperatures and morning fogs. Of course, this means that soon there won’t be much left in the garden. The only veggies that can survive the autumn in my forest garden are brassicas, so soon my garden will be almost empty.

I was going to plant some early veggies for next year during October, but due to rain and neverending fogs, I had no chance of planting, mostly because I didn’t have time to dig the beds. The temperatures now are way too low for the seeds to germinate, so I decided to move the early garden to the balcony.

Actually for a while now I’ve been thinking about making a yard pot garden, and the pots in the balcony will just be a sort of an opening act for the main show next year. This year I’ll only have a couple of pots on the balcony, but next year I’m planning to move all the shallow-rooted veggies to the pots.

I’ve already started with pot planting earlier this month when I’ve sown some lettuce and spinach to the pots that were earlier filled with balcony flowers. After the first cold temperatures, the flowers started dying, so I’ve sown some cutting lettuce and early spinach. The temperatures have been quite low, so the plants are growing fairly slowly, but spinach is looking better every day.

I’ve also sown a couple of cloves separately, just to be on the safe side if the bulb planting fails miserably.

My wooden crate also needed new plants, so I decided to sow some shallots. This is the first time I actually managed to buy shallot sets, and I’d feel really bad if they would rot due to me not planting them in the garden, so I’ve decided to plant them in the crate. They don’t need much space, so the crate will be perfect for them. The rest of the onion sets that I bought will wait for the spring in the basement.

I was planning to sow more veggies, but the rest of the pots are still occupied with sedums and houseleeks which I didn’t manage to plant to the garage rooftop, so that’s another task that will be moved to the next gardening year.

Even though the next gardening year is still 3 months away, my task list is already almost full and it seems it will be a really busy year.