The Members Room

August and September 2026

What I am changing in my own beds this El Niño winter

Members post. About 11 minutes to read.

NOAA has the Niño 3.4 region running 1.4 degrees C above average as of July. Over 90 percent odds of a very strong event. A 69 percent chance it ends up the strongest since 1950. The peak lands October through December, right on top of our planting season.

The free post covers what that means for Florida. Wet dry season instead of a cold one, more cloud, milder nights, and the severe weather odds climbing in the second half of winter. If you have not read it, start there.

The shorter version, free for everybody

This post is the part I left out. What I am actually doing about it in my yard.

None of this is advice. These are the calls I made for my own yard, based on my soil and my beds and how many plants I am willing to lose. Your ground is different, so look at yours before you copy any of it.

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The changes I am making

Fewer plants in the same beds. Wet leaves are how most of our winter disease moves. A crowded bed in a grey wet December holds water on the leaves until noon. Wider spacing means the leaves dry earlier in the day.

Everything goes in on the early side of its window. I want the plants big and setting fruit before the wettest stretch, not tiny and sitting in it.

I am testing drainage before I plant, not after. Every year I find out where the water sits by watching something die there. This year I am checking first.

Anything in a low spot gets moved or skipped. No exceptions this season, even for beds I like.

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Crop by crop

These windows are the UF/IFAS ones for Central Florida. South Florida runs later, north of about Ocala runs earlier. Look up your own region before you use my dates.

Tomato, pepper, eggplant. August to September.

Tomatoes: planting, but fewer. Tomatoes are the crop with the most to lose in a wet cloudy winter. Bacterial spot and target spot both move by splash and both love a leaf that stays wet. I am planting at the front of the window so the plants are established and setting before the heaviest rain, and I am cutting the count so the ones I keep have air around them.

Peppers: planting, no cutback. Peppers get bacterial spot too, but they produce over a long stretch and they hold on through weather that finishes a tomato. They earn their space.

Eggplant: planting a couple, not a row. Same window, same reasoning, but eggplant takes up a lot of room for what it gives me and I would rather hand that room to peppers this year.

Lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, collards, kale, mustard. September to February.

This is where I am splitting the difference, because these are not one crop.

Collards, kale and mustard: planting more, not less. They do not have to form a head to be worth harvesting. You pick the lower leaves and the plant keeps going. If the weather turns bad in January I have still been eating off them since October. Downy mildew is the thing to watch on all three.

Lettuce: planting, in small batches. Every two to three weeks instead of one big sowing. If a batch gets hit there is another one two weeks behind it.

Broccoli and cabbage: cutting back hard. These sit in the bed for months and then have to form one head at the end. Heading is temperature driven, and warm weather at the wrong moment gives you small loose heads or buttons instead. In a mild winter you can do everything right for three months and still get nothing at the end. I am keeping a few plants because I want to see what happens, and giving the rest of that space to greens.

Carrots and bunching onions. August to March.

Carrots: planting, but later in the window. The window runs to March so there is no reason to force it into the wettest weeks. Germination is the hard part with carrots and heavy rain crusts the surface over the seed. Wet soil also gets you splitting and forking. I am waiting for a stretch I like, sowing into a bed I know drains, and keeping the surface covered until they are up.

Bunching onions: planting, no changes. They take the wet better than most things in the bed and the window is long enough to try again.

Cucumber. September.

Skipping, or one short trellis at most. Central Florida gets one month for fall cucumbers, so if the planting fails there is no second sowing. Downy mildew on cucurbits moves hard in cool wet weather, which is what we are forecast to get. If I do put any in they go on a trellis with a foot between plants so the vines are up in the air and not lying in a wet bed.

Turnip. September to October.

Planting. Fast, cheap, and the greens are worth the row even if the roots disappoint. Short season crops are the ones I want more of in a season I cannot predict.

Beans. August to September.

Planting a short row, and not counting on it. Bean seed rots in saturated soil before it ever comes up, and standing wet weather brings rust. I am sowing at the front of the window on the highest ground I have, and if that row rots I am not fighting it a second time.

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Drainage, and how to actually test it

Two tests. Do the free one first.

The morning after test. Go out the morning after a hard rain and walk the whole yard. Anywhere water is still standing, anywhere your footprint fills, anywhere the soil is slick instead of damp. Mark those spots and keep winter crops out of them.

The hole test. Dig a hole about 12 inches deep and 12 inches across in the bed you are worried about. Fill it with water and let it drain all the way out. Then fill it again and time the second one, measuring how far the water drops.

Rough reading on the second fill:

• A drop of about an inch an hour or more. Fine for winter vegetables.
• Around half an inch an hour. Workable, but raise the bed.
• Still holding water the next day. That is not a soil problem you fix with a bag of compost.

While you are digging, notice what the shovel hits. A lot of Florida flatwoods ground has a compacted layer a foot or two down that water perches on top of. If the hole punches through loose sand and then hits something that feels like a pan, that is what is holding your water, and nothing you add to the top will change it.

If it fails: raised or mounded

Mounded means pulling your native soil up into a row, roughly 6 to 8 inches high and 2 to 3 feet across. It costs nothing but labour, and it gets your roots above the water table. It also loses its shape in heavy rain. Mulch it and plant it soon after you build it or you will be rebuilding it.

Raised with sides gives you 10 to 12 inches of a mix you chose, it holds its shape through a wet winter, and you can work from the path without compacting the bed. It costs money and it dries out faster in the spring, which is not this season's problem.

This year I am putting the crops I care most about into raised beds wherever I have the choice, and using mounded rows for the cheap fast stuff.

One thing not to do. Do not dig a pit into a hardpan spot and fill it with good mix. You have built a bathtub and the roots will sit in it.

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Spacing, and what it costs you

The UF/IFAS guide gives a range for most of these. I am taking the wide end of every range this year.

• Tomato: 24 to 36 inches between plants. I am at 36.
• Pepper: 12 to 24 inches. I am at 24.
• Eggplant: 24 to 36 inches. I am at 36.
• Cabbage: 12 to 24 inches. I am at 24.
• Broccoli: 12 to 18 inches. I am at 18.
• Collards: 10 to 18 inches. I am at 18.
• Kale: 18 to 24 inches. I am at 24.
• Mustard: 6 to 12 inches. I am at 12.
• Leaf lettuce: 6 to 12 inches. I am at 12.
• Carrots: thin to 2 to 3 inches. Do not skip the thinning.
• Bunching onions: 2 to 4 inches.
• Cucumber on a trellis: 12 inches.
• Bush beans: 3 to 4 inches in the row, rows 24 to 30 inches apart.
• Turnip: thin to about 4 inches for roots, tighter if you only want greens.

The cost is real. Going to the wide end takes roughly a quarter to a third of the plants out of a bed, and a third fewer plants is a third less food if nothing goes wrong. I am making that trade because a plant that stays healthy until February produces more than two plants that defoliate in December.

Two other things that do the same job as spacing. Water at the base in the morning, not over the top in the evening, so leaves are not going into the night wet. And stake or cage everything you can, because a plant lying on wet ground is the first one to go.

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What I am watching for, and when

September. Warm season transplants in early. First heavy rain of the season is a free drainage test, so go look while it is happening. Start the small batches of greens. Watch for cutworms and armyworms on new transplants.

October. The event peaks October through December. Watch the lower leaves on the tomatoes for the first spotting and pull the worst ones off. First downy mildew usually shows up on the oldest leaves of the greens. Hurricane season runs to November 30, though a strong El Niño usually suppresses Atlantic activity through wind shear.

November. This is when the cloud cover starts costing you. Everything will run behind the days on the seed packet, sometimes well behind, and that is light, not something you did wrong. Heavy rain leaches nitrogen straight through sandy soil, so I feed lighter and more often instead of one big feed.

December. Peak of the event. Fewer freezes are likely, but likely is not never, so the frost cloth stays where I can reach it in the dark. Broccoli and cabbage either head this month or they do not.

January. This is where the severe weather odds go up. Strong storms, wind, hail, tornado risk. I am going out and checking every trellis, cage and piece of shade cloth, because in a straight line wind those become sails and they take the plants with them. Also watch for root rot showing up in the fruit trees now, after months of wet ground.

February. Last of the September to February window. Decide what is worth carrying into spring and what is coming out. If the winter stayed warm and wet, disease pressure is already sitting there waiting for the spring tomatoes.

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Watch list for a wet cool winter

Downy mildew on greens. Yellow patches on the top of the leaf with straight edges where they run into the veins, and grey or purple fuzz on the underside, easiest to see early in the morning. It moves in long dew, cool nights and crowded beds. Pull the affected leaves, harvest the lower leaves as you go, and keep the air moving. It gets into collards, kale, mustard, cabbage and lettuce.

Bacterial spot on tomato and pepper. Small dark spots that look water soaked, often with a yellow ring. It spreads by splashing water, off the soil and off other plants. Mulch so the rain is not hitting bare dirt and bouncing onto the leaves. Stake so nothing touches the ground. Do not walk the rows and handle plants while they are wet, because that is you moving it. Copper is the standard home tool and it only protects the leaf that is not infected yet.

Target spot on tomato. Brown lesions with faint rings inside them, starting low and in the middle of the plant, and it strips leaves fast in humid weather. Prune the bottom leaves off early so the base of the plant has air.

Root rot on papaya, avocado and passion fruit. Phytophthora, and saturated ground is what turns it on. Papaya is the least forgiving of the three and will collapse quickly. Watch for sudden wilt, yellowing, small new leaves or branch dieback that does not respond to anything. There is no cure once it is in the roots. Keep mulch pulled back off the trunk, do not let water stand at the base, and check that nothing is draining toward those trees. I am not planting any new papaya or avocado this winter. Putting a young tree into ground that is about to stay wet for four months is not a gamble I want.

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What nobody knows

I want to be straight about the limits of all this.

A seasonal outlook is a statement about odds across a whole region over three months. It does not tell you whether it will rain on the day your beans are germinating.

There is almost no sample to learn from. The very strong events on the record are 1982 to 83, 1997 to 98 and 2015 to 16. Three winters is not a pattern, and every one of them behaved differently across Florida.

Nobody has grown a fall garden through an event this size with the baseline we have now, so anyone telling you exactly how your December will go is guessing.

Your own drainage, sun and airflow matter more to the outcome than the seasonal outlook does. A raised bed on high ground with good light can come through a bad winter fine while a low shaded bed struggles in a normal one.

And the last one. A wet mild winter is not automatically a bad winter. Greens might love it. My water bill certainly will. The risk is concentrated in the crops that need dry leaves and the crops that need cold, and that is why I sorted the list the way I did instead of scaling everything back.

I will post what actually happens in my beds as it happens, including the parts that go badly. You're not a real gardener until you've lost a few.