Carrots are one of the most popular fall gardening plantings here in the Morris County area. Loaded with anti-oxidant and cancer-fighting Vitamin A and beta-carotene, these healthy veggies are used raw in salads, served as crudités at a party, boiled or steamed as a side dish with spices like cinnamon and nutmeg, added to grilling veggie mixes right through fall, and also made into hearty soups and bisques for fall holiday entertaining.

Nutritionists say that cooking carrots releases their calcium for an even greater health kick. This versatile veggie in your garden can save you a significant amount from your grocery budget.

The fun thing about fall and cold-weather crop carrots is that they get sweeter as the temperature cools.

You’ll find sweet carrots in traditional long form, as well as in smaller baby carrots and even small and round ‘balls’ as well as cylindrical shapes. Carrots grown from seed might range from light to dark orange, pale orange, nearly-white, red and even purple.

When you put carrot seeds in the ground, follow the package directions to the letter, helping your carrot crop grow efficiently for good harvesting cycles throughout the cooler weather months. And pile a thin layer of mulch over the roots to keep the soil from freezing, so that the carrots can continue to grow even in some temperature-dip snaps, giving you a regular harvest all through the fall and early winter.

What Carrots Need:

Light: Sun, Part Sun

Height: 6 – 15” tall

Width: 6 – 15” wide

Help Your Fall Plantings Thrive By:

• Following seed packet or plant pot directions carefully
• Making sure your garden or container soil has good drainage
• Making sure your garden or container soil has the right pH level
• Adding Dr. Earth fertilizer with probiotics to your soil
• Protecting them from garden pests with regular organic pest control treatments
• Removing weeds in a timely manner

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

I can’t stop myself from the cliché: Give Peas a Chance. Silly, yes, but also one of the smartest cold-weather crops to ‘give a chance’ in your veggie garden right now.

Just give them a little structure to climb on – like a length of wooden trellis or a metal teepee – and your pea crop can deliver the following cool weather-loving treats:

• Green peas, also called shell, pod or English peas. (A cook’s hint: pick them right before meal-prep before their natural sugars turn into starches, providing better taste.)
• Snap peas, which give you long, plump pods that you just need to boil or steam for eating as a side dish, as an add-in to a stir-fry or even a veggie addition to a lasagna. No part of the snap pea goes to waste, which is why it was historically one of the top pick for inclusion in ‘victory gardens’ of the late 1940s and also in European kitchen gardens.
• Snow peas also give you pea-stuffed pods for stir-fries and other dishes.

If you plant peas, expect them to go fast. A big pile of pea pods will make enough for one meal for the family, and if there’s any crop to plant generously with multiple plantings, it’s this one. Kids especially love being given the job of harvesting the pea pods, plucking them from the vines and dropping them in their very own pea-picking buckets (check out our kids’ buckets here at The Farm.) Oh, and take a second to smell these pea pods…the fresh aroma is unbelievable, a soul-quenching connection to the natural act of growing from the earth.

What Peas Need:

Light: Sun, Part Sun

Height: 1’ – 7’ tall

Width: 6 – 12” wide

Help Your Fall Plantings Thrive By:

• Following seed packet or plant pot directions carefully
• Making sure your garden or container soil has good drainage
• Making sure your garden or container soil has the right pH level
• Adding Dr. Earth fertilizer with probiotics to your soil
• Protecting them from garden pests with regular organic pest control treatments
• Removing weeds in a timely manner

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing bagged lettuce prices soaring at the supermarket here in North Jersey. And, I completely admit that I grab the bagged lettuce out of laziness, instead of buying heads of lettuce and chopping them up. But if I grew my own lettuces, I’d be invested in my crop and all too happy to chop up my homegrown lettuces into a garden, Cobb or veggie-blend salad of my own making.

Not wanting to pay $5 for a small handful of greens in a plastic bag anymore, I’m adding lettuces to my veggie garden. Plus, they’d be organic veggies, grown right here on my garden plot and thus not requiring any carbon footprint for having to be shipped from anywhere. I see no downside to growing lettuces! I didn’t have room for them this summer, but since lettuces are a happy fall and cold-weather crop, I’m clearing space and getting ready to plant a collection of great lettuces.

They’re one of the most versatile types of garden plants, coming in so many different textures, tastes and colors. I love a salad of curly-edged greens, with buttery leaves, and a mix of fall color like those varieties having reddish-bronze leaves. Add in some radishes and fall veggies, and lunch is ready to go…for free. Plant lettuce plants, or sprinkle some seeds every week to keep your lettuce crop coming up and at you every week during the cooler to cold months, even into the time of frost.

Here’s a primer on the types of lettuces you can blend in your garden:

• Crisphead: you know this one better as iceberg, a satisfying crunch but not as many nutrients as other lettuce varieties.
• Butterhead: these lettuces have smaller, looser heads
• Loose-leaf: this one doesn’t form a head at all, but rather spreads out into looser leaves
• Romaine: this popular, nutrient-rich lettuce grows upright in a cylindrical shape

Lettuce grown in cooler temperatures actually tastes better, since those grown in hot weather can be more bitter and quickly going to seed. So if you tried lettuce this past spring and summer and didn’t get a good crop, don’t be afraid to try again. Chances are far better for your lettuces this fall.

What Lettuce needs:

Light: Sun, Part Sun

Height: 2 – 12” tall

Width: 2 – 12” wide

Help Your Fall Plantings Thrive By:

• Following seed packet or plant pot directions carefully
• Making sure your garden or container soil has good drainage
• Making sure your garden or container soil has the right pH level
• Adding Dr. Earth fertilizer with probiotics to your soil
• Protecting them from garden pests with regular organic pest control treatments
• Removing weeds in a timely manner

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

Cabbage adds zest to fall potato salads, cole slaw and sauerkraut for football game tailgate parties, and stuffed cabbage rolls for party appetizers. With fall-friendly cabbage in your garden, you get to choose from late cabbage varieties that can be planted right now and harvested in autumn, saving you in produce fees at the supermarket and adding fresh crunch to your family’s dinners.

Fall-growing cabbages can grow to softball-sized heads in less than 60 days. They’re full and fresh, and they also add a dash of color to your garden, such as red-leaf varieties like ‘Ruby Ball’ introducing red leaves, and purple-red striations in your crops. In addition to being pretty and autumn color-inspired, red cabbages are said to have the sweetest flavors, so look for red-leaf types to mix in with your yellow and green varieties.

Cabbages picked young and fresh have milder flavors, as well, so don’t be afraid to pluck your smaller cabbages when it’s their time.

What Cabbages need:

Light: Sun, Part Sun

Height: 6 – 18” tall

Width: 10 – 30” wide

Help Your Fall Plantings Thrive By:

• Following seed packet or plant pot directions carefully
• Making sure your garden or container soil has good drainage
• Making sure your garden or container soil has the right pH level
• Adding Dr. Earth fertilizer with probiotics to your soil
• Protecting them from garden pests with regular organic pest control treatments
• Removing weeds in a timely manner

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

The excitement of planting a vegetable garden comes back at you again with this year’s second crop of new choices for your garden space. It’s time for Cold Crops, and this post starts a lengthy series on the top cold-crop vegetables, root veggies, greens and herb that love this cooler weather and deliver their bounty right through til winter.

Your garden is ready to give you its best from your new organic cold crops.

The first we’re starting with is Broccoli, packed with nutrients, a said cancer-fighting cruciferous, and an essential ingredient in hearty fall soups and bisques, not to mention fall veggie stir fries and cocktail party crudités.

Broccoli loves cool weather and is frost tolerant, so plant it in late summer/early fall for a great fall harvest. Bear in mind, though, that you’re not likely to get those enormous broccoli heads that you see at the farmer’s market. You’re likely to get smaller, very tender heads.  And if you leave the greens on the plant after picking your broccoli heads, the plant will give you two or three more broccoli ‘blooms’ this season.

Broccoli needs:

Light: Sun, Part Sun

Height: 18-24” tall

Width: 18-24”

Help Your Fall Plantings Thrive By:

• Following seed packet or plant pot directions carefully
• Making sure your garden or container soil has good drainage
• Making sure your garden or container soil has the right pH level
• Adding Dr. Earth fertilizer with probiotics to your soil
• Protecting them from garden pests with regular organic pest control treatments
• Removing weeds in a timely manner

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

We’ve just been buried in snow and more is in the forecast, but I’m dreaming of springtime. Yes, I know it’s only February, but now is the best time to start planning what I’m going to plant in the spring. Last year I planted perennials – some peony and geranium plants – as a foundation for my flower bed. But I need to plan how I’m going to add that extra pop of color or that new sweet floral scent to my yard this year.

I’m considering night phlox (zaluzianskya) or perhaps night scented stock (matthiola bicornis) for a rush of scent in the summer night air. For color, I’m thinking about zinnias, cosmos, and Gerbera daisies. But… I suppose that mixture of plants lends itself to a bit of a mish mash of design. That’s why I rely on The Farm at Green Village.

I love gardening. I love digging in the dirt and watching plants grow. However, I’m not very talented when it comes to landscaping. Colors sometimes clash. The plant sizes are all wrong. Whole sections of the flower garden are out of bloom at the same time. Since I found The Farm at Green Village, that’s not the case.

Last year, I was meandering through the rows of flowers, adding plants to my basket and removing them in a bewildered state, when a staff member noticed the look of uncertainty on my face. He asked about the layout of my flower beds, even asking me to sketch them for him. Then he recommended which groundcover would be most suitable for yard. He even gave me tips on the best mulch and how to perk up a little lilac bush that was dying.

So while my flower beds may be sleeping beneath a foot (or two!) of snow, my mind is thinking about planting flowers in the spring.