Don't Change Seasons All at Once: The Easiest Way to Ease a Garden Into Fall

Your garden doesn’t have to become pumpkins, mums, and straw bales on September 1st — the most natural way to move into fall is to keep what’s working, pull what’s tired, and add cooler-season plants as space opens up.

By September, a spring annual has already done a lot. If you bought a hanging basket in April, you’ve potentially gotten five months out of it — that’s a successful plant. Some annuals will happily run until frost, and if they still look good, absolutely keep them. But September is also when I’d give you permission to stop fighting the plants that need constant cutting, feeding, and watering just to look mediocre.

Ornamental kale is almost the opposite of a spring annual. You don’t need it to grow into a monster. You don’t need hundreds of flowers. You buy it for the foliage — big rosettes of green, white, pink, and purple that bring color back into beds that have lost a lot of their summer show.

And cooler temperatures actually make it better. As the weather falls, the colors intensify. Kale is also remarkably cold tolerant — a light frost that finishes some summer annuals isn’t necessarily the end for ornamental kale, and it can keep providing color well into late fall depending on conditions.

This is the part people miss. You don’t rip everything out and start over. You open up space and fill it:

• ✓ Keep the angelonia that’s still beautiful.
• ✓ Keep the coleus that’s enormous.
• ✓ Keep the geraniums that are still flowering.
• ✓ Pull the petunia that’s mostly stems.
• ✓ Put a kale in that opening — then maybe add an aster or a mum nearby.

That’s how you transition a garden into fall without a single big teardown weekend.

The reason this works is that it mirrors what’s actually happening outside. The season isn’t flipping from summer to fall overnight — it’s gradually becoming fall — so your garden can gradually become a fall garden too. Keep the summer plants that are still earning their spot, replace the ones that are done, and add cool-season color a little at a time.

Reference: Purdue University Extension · Schlegel Greenhouse production notes