With the tomatoes and cucumbers long gone, and only the peppers remaining from our summer garden {they are still producing wildly!}, the time has come to shift the garden. We spread cover crop seeds as we cleaned out the grow bags, and they’ve mostly all come up. We’ll keep an eye on those green manure crops, and add to them if needed – dirt likes to be covered, so covered it will winter. Come spring, we’ll cut everything back and let it break down in the soil, so if all goes to plan, the cover crops serve as double nourishment.

The last of my summer zinnias finally died out, so we’ve been clearing those beds. Lush, densely packed zinnias make for a lot of greenery to cut and add to the compost pile. In the process, we dug our sweet potato. Yes, singular. Mr.’s cousin gave us one of her slips in the spring “to see what happens,” and honestly we thought it died ages ago. But one day, when watering the zinnias, I noticed a thriving vine curling out along the bottom of the grow bag – it was the sweet potato!

Not a bad harvest for a single slip and not really doing anything during the growing. We will be growing sweet potatoes “on purpose” in the future!

The scaled-back fall garden will feature cabbages and broccoli, thanks to our local Southern States. With everything going on in August and September, we never got the seeds started. But that’s okay: sometimes you have to pivot and make a new plan, and hopefully these starts do as well for us as the squash and cucumbers we had to buy in the spring.

And we’ve started our onions for next year! When growing onions from seed, you start them in the fall {mid-September is ideal} and let them grow over winter before planting in Spring. One afternoon I made 600 mini soil blocks to start onions in, and as you can see they’ve nearly all sprouted. We had some extra onion seeds, so we’ve also sowed “late” onions in the wooden flats we usually use for the wintering process. It’ll be interesting to see how the two methods compare, and hopefully we have a lot of delicious onions next summer!

Fall is truly beginning to settle in around these parts, with cooler mornings and clear skies. Winter stars are my favorite, and while they’re not quite here yet, it is lovely to see bright stars again.

The geraniums in the carport flower boxes have been swapped out for Johnny jump-ups, and I am so ready for the return of evenings under the twinkle lights. And of course I had to update my Kindle stickers for the season! The season of cozy is upon us, and I am hoping to soak up all the slower-paced cozy living I can.

Are you ready for the seasonal shift? Have you gotten your garden {or flowerbed} “swapped over”?