As soon as the first autumn rain starts, it is time to prepare the garden for autumn. The harvests and success of the garden in autumn depends only on the number of sunny days, and currently, things are not looking good.

Rainy period

After an extremely dry summer, we jumped into a period of extreme rain. Over 14 days, we got over 300mm of rain, which is almost more than during the whole year. We still have the chance to make that number even higher since the rain will continue for the next two days.

Of course, due to all the rain, I have been away from the garden most of the time. The rain and wind cooled down the earth. Mornings are now pretty cold and the soil doesn’t get dry enough to do any garden work. In the past two weeks, I managed to spend only two days in the garden. The rest of the days were either rainy or too wet to walk in the downhill garden.

Fast transition to autumn

With all the rain we’ve gotten in the summer, heat-loving vegetables are completely gone. In just a couple of days, the cucumbers were killed, zucchinis got blight, and cosmoses started getting powdery mildew. Since there is no point in trying to save them it was time to get them out of the garden. I’ve pulled all of them out, together with a part of the old bush beans which have just dried up completely.

The garden now looks half empty. There are still a bunch of bush beans that are still healthy, peppers are also still growing and carrots are doing well. The vegetables which I’ve sown over the past couple of weeks are growing, but there is a lot of rain damage. The baby lettuce is almost completely rotten from all the rain we had, and I don’t think I’ll get any harvests from it.

The newest lettuce, kohlrabi, and chard are all out, but currently, they are not growing. We really need some sun if we want to have a late harvest. If we continue getting cold and rain I’m afraid this sowing batch will end up as wasted seeds.

What’s left to do?

Now that the rain has started it is time to start preparing for winter. I will be cleaning out the beds one by one and digging them for winter. There’s no point in leaving any of the empty beds for later as I can’t be sure what the weather will be like.

Also, as soon as we’ll be able to get into the garden we’ll need to remove the anti-hail netting. The leaves have started falling, and it is time to roll the netting so that it doesn’t end up covered in leaves. We’ll try to roll it to the middle of the garden and leave it there so that we don’t need to struggle to get it back on in the spring.

I will also need to start planning the next year’s garden. I have lots of ideas, but I’m not sure how many of them I will be able to do, there’s not a lot of room in the garden, and there are even fewer sunny spots, so I will need to plan well. The year flew by really quickly and we need to start thinking about the next one. It will be here faster than we think.