Planting for the end of summer is kind of sobering. You take the first hard frost date - usually in the Twin Cities it is mid October when you get that hard frost, not the little ones that nip the ends of the basil leaves, that leave a little fuzz on the grass in the mornings, the hard frost, the one that kills all the impatiens, that knocks the tomato leaves flat, that turns the basil plants black, that one.
So then you look at the seed packets for the things you'd like to have for fall, the spinach, the beets, the green onions and such, and you look at the maturity date. Say you've got a 45 day spinach, that's 15 days for October, and 30 days for September, so you can plant your spinach as late as the first of September and still get that stuff fully grown by the time the first hard frost hits. If it is something that can last past that hard frost, a cabbage, say, or a kale plant, you can count past your hard frost a little, but not too far. You can throw a row cover like a remay or a bed sheet over some things at night to protect them from frost, but for the most part, the cold will do for most everything in the garden gradually from the time of that first really hard frost.
So here I am in August, really not past the hottest days of summer yet, and I'm counting back from the hard frost. I'm thinking and plotting and planning backwards from my garden's demise. There's no wonder why the ancient peoples thought of winter as death, and celebrated the return of the sun at solstice. At midsummers you start counting backwards from the death of all your works, and at the solstice you begin to start counting forwards again, forwards to spring, to the ground thawing, to that first moment when you can put in your peas and spinach, the first seeds the cold ground can accept, on to each of the warmer plants until you get to the truly warm days of true spring and on to summer again.
