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Plan Ahead to Grow Quality Veggies in a Fall Garden

Gardening season isn’t over just because summer ends – there are plenty of vegetables well-adapted for planting in the late summer for fall harvest.

Planting a fall garden extends the gardening season and allows you to continue harvesting fresh vegetables long after the summer crops are gone. In fact, many cool season vegetables, including carrots, broccoli, beets, onions, brussel sprouts, spinach, lettuce and cauliflower, produce their best flavor and quality when they mature during cool weather.

Growing a productive fall vegetable garden is easy with advance planning. For instance, you’ll want to plant vegetables that take 60 or longer to mature, such as broccoli and cauliflower, in August, to allow time for harvest before a hard freeze arrives. Faster maturing vegetables, such as leafy greens, can be planted in September for harvest in October. It’s handy to stagger your plantings of leafy greens, such as lettuce, so that the crop doesn’t arrive all at once.

Just like the summer garden, most cool weather vegetables need six or more hours of sunlight daily. Remember, the sun is weaker and the days are shorter in fall, so only plant where light is adequate.

Remember that the key to successful vegetable gardening is planning and preparation. Your garden can provide you with food and fun for the whole family if you put a bit of planning into your choice of fall garden vegetables.

Lawn Sweeper for any time of the year

Any time of year, a lawn sweeper is a good thing to have. The kind you need, of course, depends on the lawn you need to sweep. Lawn sweepers come in lots of types. You can get a smallish lawn sweeper, either powered or pushed, that will handle a good sized yard. You can get good sturdy medium-duty tow lawn sweepers that you can tow behind a lawn tractor or riding mower. You can get a heavy-duty commercial lawn sweeper if you have an estate, or just enjoy a wide expanse of lawn.

The simple push lawn sweeper is inexpensive, sturdy, and practical for reasonable size areas. You can get powered or manual versions of the push sweeper. The manual push lawn sweeper will give you a little exercise, clean up the area many times faster than raking, and still be easy on the environment. Whether used as a grass sweeper or a lawn leaf sweeper, push lawn sweepers are handy to have around the property.

The tow behind lawn sweeper is a great choice for the mechanized home lawn-care person. Tow lawn sweepers come in several sizes, and can be hooked to a riding lawn mower or lawn tractor. This type of lawn sweeper pulls along at a quick pace and collects the debris into a container for disposal. You could bag those clipping or leaf sweepings, of course, but even better, you could compost them. The convenient collection devices of lawn sweepers make that a pretty simple and easy chore. The tow lawn sweeper will leave your lawn looking good and you with still some energy left to enjoy it.

When the leaves begin to fall, you'll be glad to start calling your lawn sweeper a lawn leaf sweeper for a change. Raking is hard work, though healthful and even fun, perhaps, for a while. But a lawn sweeper will beat the best raker, and delivers the leaves collected and ready to bag or compost. No more blowing them around again and again. The lawn leaf sweeper will get it done the first time around, and you can put those leaves in their place.

Anyone who's ever spent much time with a rake will appreciate a grass sweeper. It cuts down the work and does a clean job. You can opt for the tow lawn sweeper, or just an inexpensive manual push   sweeper. You can call it a grass sweeper or a lawn leaf sweeper, depending on the season. You can use a lawn sweeper in some way or other most of the year. Lawn sweepers can handle debris of various types, and leave your lawn smooth and ready to enjoy. A lawn sweeper makes mowing more effective, and easier and even safer as well.

Whatever size, big commercial lawn sweeper or small hand push sweeper, the right size and type of lawn sweeper will help you keep your place looking great.

What can SunCalc do for you?

What can SunCalc do for you? It can help you plan, it can help you succeed, it can even help you figure you why some things haven't gone the way you hoped they would. If you've ever wondered just where exactly is full sun, full shade, partial sun, or partial shade, SunCalc can tell you that. It can help you figure out where to plant whatever you want to plant. And it can help you figure out why what you planted didn't thrive.

SunCalc is an amazing little device. It's simple to use, yet extremely accurate. Funded by an academic grant and developed at a college, this instrument can give you the results that large research stations get. It is proven to be accurate and reliable. And it won't cost you nearly as much as a grant-funded research project, either.

This little device, which looks sort of like a meat thermometer, but prettier, is stuck into the ground in the location you want to evaluate. You leave it there for a day, and it tells you what the sun or shade situation is. You know how important that is. It's listed on all your seeds or plants, and is absolutely crucial for your plants to thrive.

For the record, full sun is six or more hours of sun, while partial sun is less than six hours but more than four hours of sun. Partial shade is less than four hours but more than one-and-one-half hours of sun, and full shade is less than one-and-one-half hours of sun. I'm willing to bet that some of us didn't know that. But if you had a SunCalc, it would tell you, by lighting up a little LED next to the right level, after as little as twelve hours of exposure.

You can see now what it could do for you. If your plants perished in their previous location, the SunCalc may let you know why, and where to put them next time. If you are planning a garden or maybe a major expansion project, one day of SunCalc use may be the difference between success and failure. It's easy to use, and it beats standing out in the yard and looking at your watch all day.