Some great tips here!
All the Gardening Tasks You Should Do in September [in the Northern Hemisphere]
Be deliberate about harvesting and cleaning at the same time—it'll prevent viruses and fungi next year.
by Amanda Blum
September 3, 2024
Gleaning
"I'm choosing this word deliberately over 'harvesting' this year. After a summer where everyone I know has been plagued with fungi and viruses in the garden, it's a reminder that harvesting the spoils of your garden is about our own benefit, but it also removes a vector of disease from our beds. After many years of "chop and drop" (where you chop down spent plants at ground level and leave them to compost in place) evangelism, it's become a common topic of conversation amongst gardening groups to ensure you remove yard waste from your garden beds to prevent the spread of soil-borne diseases. So this year, I'm making an effort to get into my beds and chop the plants and remove them. Diseased plants go in the trash (not #compost, even city compost) and healthy plants go into my #CompostPile. Even though they'll end up in roughly the same place after composting (back in the beds), the heat from compost pile will kill many of the viruses that could be present.
Seed collection
"Instead of leaving fruit to rot in the beds, it's advised to be more deliberate about which plants you should propagate for next year. The solution is seed collection, an endeavor I've become a lot more serious about in recent years. While the cost of seeds is a great justification of this, finances aren't my primary motivation. By choosing the plants that have done the best in my yard, and doing so year after year, I am actually creating my own strain of that fruit that is bred to do well in my yard. After all, it's already thrived in those conditions."
Read more:
https://lifehacker.com/home/gardening-tasks-to-do-in-september?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
