Dig In: Garden Checklist for week of Sept. 9

Keep harvesting those tomatoes. (Photo: Kathy Morrison)

Gardening’s ‘shoulder season’ offers late summer harvest, fall planting opportunities

By Debbie Arrington

Mid-September is gardening’s version of a “shoulder season,” the travel industry’s term for the period right before or after peak season. Shoulder season is a time packed with opportunities. For travelers, that means bargains. For gardeners, that means harvesting crops from one season while planting for the next. 

With one foot in summer and the other in fall, gardeners need to balance those two sides of September. Here’s how: 

* Keep harvesting tomatoes, peppers, squash, melons and eggplant. For the most part, those summer crops are wrapping up, but some plants are still flowering and trying to set more fruit while the weather is warm. If that’s the case in your garden, give those late bloomers a boost of bone meal (after watering deeply). If the bees pollinate those flowers and October stays warm, you could have fresh-picked “summer” veggies for the holidays.

* Compost annuals and vegetable crops that have finished producing. 

* Cultivate and add compost to the soil to replenish its nutrients for fall and winter vegetables and flowers.

* Fertilize deciduous fruit trees.

* Pick up fallen fruit. If you live in the current quarantine area for Oriental fruit fly (a zone that covers most of Sacramento), double bag in plastic that discarded fruit and call the Sacramento County agricultural office (916-875-6603) for disposal.

* Plant onions, lettuce, peas, radishes, turnips, beets, carrots, bok choy, spinach and potatoes directly into the vegetable beds. 

* Transplant cabbage, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower as well as lettuce seedlings.

* Sow seeds of California poppies, clarkia and African daisies. 

* Transplant cool-weather annuals such as pansies, violas, fairy primroses, calendulas, stocks and snapdragons.