All the Seeds I'm Sowing in September

If you’re a gardener, you can sense it: The end of seed sowing is near. Most of my seed trays and seed-starting equipment are washed, sterilized, and packed up already. September isn’t the end of gardening season, though. There’s still plenty to sow and grow outdoors. This year, I’m excited to celebrate the change in seasons by starting a new indoor seed tradition: hydroponics. Here’s what I’m seeding this month. 

Sow perennial and annual flowers now

Although it feels counterintuitive, there are hardy annual flowers like cornflower, annual poppies, and larkspur that will benefit from being sown now. These specific flowers will cold stratify over the winter for a particularly bountiful bloom next year. The same is true for perennials like delphiniums, ammi, and nigella. Remember, these won’t sprout this year, but next year, so overseed. 

You can seed these vegetables outside right now

You should still have time to directly seed your basic succession crops outside right now: lettuce, radish, scallion, and beets.  Depending on your zone and climate, you may even be able to get one more round in, in a few weeks. If you’re confident, you can try to direct sow winter brassicas, like broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower as well, though at this point you’d be safer planting vegetable starts instead.

What you should lay down a lot of is both carrots and onions. Choose a few varieties of carrots—both short carrots that will be ready in sixty days and keeper carrots that can remain in the ground over winter. As it happens, carrots deeply benefit from that overwintering. Onions require a long time to grow, so again, you can find onion starts to plant right now, but you should also try to grow from seed. 

Plant garlic

Fall is when garlic goes into the ground, and the goal is to beat winter to the punch, so you have a little time. You should be able to find garlic at your garden center and online for purchase. 

Saffron crocuses give you something to look forward to

The expensive flavoring and color agent is the stamen of a particular type of crocus, and this is the end of the season to order those crocuses so they arrive for planting in the coming weeks. Saffron crocus are perennial, so building a patch you can sustain from year to year is ideal. 

Get your hydroponic winter crops going

For the first year, I’m going in hard on my hydroponic indoor gardens so I can continue some of my summer crops and herbs inside. To that end, I’ve turned over all my indoor gardens and have restarted parsley, basil, cilantro, dill, Thai basil, and thyme in my herb garden. I’ve got new tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant that I seeded a few weeks ago going, and I’ve added lettuces to it. 

What gardeners do over winter break

This round of seeding lands us solidly in fall, which means that after the above tasks are taken care of, I’ll be taking a break from sowing until February.