It’s over 90 degrees today. Yet we know fall has officially arrived.
How? The lovebugs are back!
If you live in Florida or near the Gulf Coast, you know all about lovebugs, those salacious little insects that spontaneously appear in droves.
Or at least you know three main facts.
1. You know lovebugs show up in spring and then again at the beginning of fall.
2. You know the smashed bodies of lovebugs will eat away at the paint on your car and choke up your radiator.
3. And finally, you know lovebugs were created in a lab by the University of Florida.
Some say they were created to get rid of mosquitoes, but I prefer to believe they were created to let us know when it’s time to start prepping fall garden beds.
Lovebugs mean cooler weather is coming. And with it, fall gardening season.
Here are the 7 tasks we’ll be doing over the next couple of months.
1. Get rid of the weeds of summer
Everything ends up a wreck at the end of summer. In fall we clear out weeds and keep their seeds down as best as we can. Cool days are great for reclaiming garden beds. We often combine this task with –
2. Harvesting
As we weed our beds and Grocery Row Gardens, we also save plant seeds and dig up sweet potatoes and yams. We also harvest sugarcane, gather chestnuts and pecans, pick persimmons and hunt for edible mushrooms in the woods.
3. Mulch
After weeding the garden, we mulch, and if we have manure, we throw it on the beds as well. If we’re going to re-plant the garden with fall crops, we do that too. If we’re short on mulch, we plant cold-hardy cover crops like daikons, crimson clover, kale, ryegrass, oats, rye, winter peas, etc., and mixes thereof.
4. Do a final chop-and-drop in the food forest
After a good rain, we slash down the weeds, nitrogen-fixers and biomass producing plants in the food forest, throwing them around plants and trees to rot down over the winter. This year we also plan to plant “Balansa fixation clover” through the food forest as an experiment. It’s a variety that was recommended to us by Wildlife Management Services as a huge biomass producer and nitrogen fixer in a wide range of soils. That could give us an early food forest chop-and-drop in the spring.
5. Prep the greenhouse
The greenhouse is always a mess after summer. Gaps need fixing, clips need repairing, weeds need pulling, and lots of plants need care and reorganization. It’s important to get more of this done before the cold starts killing things.
6. Make compost
As the fall leaves drop, compost awaits! We always have lots of garden “waste” and some final grass clippings to pile up with the leaves. Doing this now gives compost time to break down over the lull of winter.
7. Plant fruit trees and shrubs
Fall is a good time for planting many trees and shrubs. They have time to establish and then wake up in spring. We’re planning to add a lot of more pears and some apples to our yard.
It’s a beautiful season. Just be sure to rinse the lovebug guts off the car.
I originally wrote this list for The Survival Gardener Newsletter. At the end of it I added a “P.S” that read “I know multiple people are going to write and say, “hey David, NO, lovebugs weren’t made in a lab to tell Floridians it’s fall.” But that’s like telling a kid “there is no Santa.” I want to believe!”
And guess what? Two people wrote to tell me that I shouldn’t say lovebugs were made in a lab by UF. But that particular urban legend is just so funny. Hence the PS. The thought of scientists “creating” an insect in a lab just gets me.Â
