Yard Bazaar, Issue No. 1. Written in Lutz, Florida, last week of September, air conditioning still running. Yard Bazaar is put out by Portico Goods, which is my store, so when I point at something we sell I'm telling you that up front rather than at the bottom in grey type.
Every year about now the internet decides it's fall. Boots on a porch step. A rake leaning against a fence. Orange leaves arranged in a pile by somebody who arranged them.
I opened my back door this morning and a cardinal was standing in the birdbath with his beak open, panting, because it was 88 degrees at eight in the morning.
So here's the first issue, and I'll start with the obvious thing. There are two Septembers in this country. My cousin outside Columbus got a frost advisory on her phone last Tuesday. I got love bugs on my windshield thick enough that the wipers just smeared them. We are both supposedly "heading into fall." We need completely different lists.
This one is mine. Plenty of it travels. The parts that don't, you'll know which ones they are.
1. The season isn't over. It isn't even close.
Hurricane season runs through November 30. Not October 1, which is when a certain kind of neighbor puts the plywood back in the garage and declares it done. Some of the worst storms this state has taken came ashore in October.
Nothing dramatic is required. What actually goes airborne in a yard is the light stuff: cushions, the umbrella, the little side table, the bag of charcoal, the cheap plastic chair nobody likes. Every one of those is a projectile at 70 miles an hour, and every one of them is easier to deal with if it already has somewhere to go.
A 75-gallon deck box ($99) swallows four seat cushions and an umbrella and then sits there being a bench the rest of the year. If you want the version that looks like furniture instead of a box, the 44-inch cedar storage bench ($239) has a backrest and armrests and the lid lifts. Cedar handles our humidity without being fussed over every spring, which is more than I can say for the pressure-treated pine bench I had before it.
Do it in September. Not while you're watching a cone graphic at ten at night.
2. You get your evenings back
The first honest sign of the season down here has nothing to do with color. It's a night in the second week of October when you walk outside after dinner and then you just stay out there. Nothing bites you. Nothing drips on you. The air stops pressing against your face.
Here's the problem with that night: it arrives at 7:30 and it's dark by then, and most backyards are set up for a 2 p.m. cookout, not a 9 p.m. sit.
Two cheap fixes. Solar fence and step lights ($19.99 each) screw to a step riser or a deck post, charge themselves, and come on at dusk. No wire, no transformer, no trench. Run four or five down a set of steps and the steps become usable after dark instead of a thing you warn guests about. Leave them on warm white. The color-change mode is there, it's fun for one party, and then you'll put it back.
The other fix is overhead. 197 feet of string lights ($44.99) is enough to zigzag a patio and still have slack to run out to a tree. Lights above eye level change a yard more than any piece of furniture I've ever bought. It's the cheapest thing on this list per unit of difference.
3. Down here, October is when you plant. Not when you quit.
This is the part that genuinely confuses people who moved from somewhere real. Everybody north of Ocala is putting the garden to bed right now. Mulching, pulling tomato cages, saying goodbye until April.
We're starting. October through about March is the good half of the year for growing food in zone 9. Tomatoes actually set fruit because the nights finally drop below 75. Lettuce doesn't bolt in four days. Broccoli, collards, carrots, beans, herbs. The bugs ease off. You water less.
If you're starting a bed now, the raised bed with a cold frame cover ($159) is the one I'd point at, and not for the reason you'd think. Up north that clear lid is for frost. Here it's mostly for the two or three January mornings that surprise everyone, plus it keeps the afternoon downpour from flattening seedlings and it keeps the squirrels from excavating your seed trays for fun.
If you're north of us and you're reading this with a frost date circled, same product, different argument: it's three extra weeks at each end of your season for a hundred and fifty nine dollars.
4. The cooking moves back outside
Nobody stands over a grill in August in Florida. You do it, but you don't enjoy it, and you're back inside in eleven minutes. October fixes that too.
Three things I'd actually put money on this month.
Cast iron. A three-piece skillet set ($69.99), six, eight and ten inches, pre-seasoned. Cast iron goes straight on a grill grate, into a fire, or in the oven, which is why a set that starts out in the kitchen usually ends up living outside. Don't wash them with soap, dry them on the burner, wipe them with oil. They get better every year, which almost nothing else you buy does.
A smoker, if you've been circling one. The two-door vertical charcoal smoker ($189) is the shape I'd pick for a first one. The second door is not a gimmick. It means you add coals and water without opening the chamber your meat is sitting in, and holding a steady 225 for six hours is the entire game.
And the fryer, but buy it now. The 30-quart turkey fryer set ($129) sells out in the third week of November every single year, to people who decided on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Thirty quarts also means it works the rest of the year as a jumbo boiling pot, which in this part of the world means a low country boil for twelve people without doing it in three batches.
One serious note, because this is the one thing on the list that hurts people every November. A frozen turkey and hot oil is a fireball. Thaw it completely, dry it, measure your oil with water first, and put the burner on dirt or concrete well away from the house. Never on a wooden deck. Never in the garage.
5. Fire, eventually
We get maybe a dozen nights a year cold enough that a fire pit is a pleasure rather than a punishment. They're worth setting up for.
Two small things make that a nicer dozen nights. A round firewood rack ($79) keeps the stack off the ground, which matters here more than it does anywhere cold, because wood sitting on Florida dirt is a termite invitation and a sponge. And a stainless spark screen ($85 for the 20-inch) is the difference between a fire you can sit near in a fleece and a fire that puts a hole in the fleece.
Season the firewood you buy now and it'll actually burn in January. Wood bought wet in December is just a smoke machine.
The short version
Get the loose stuff into a box before the season's over. Put light where you sit. Plant, don't mulch. Buy the fryer in September like a person who plans ahead, not in November like the rest of us.
Next issue I want to get into leaf-free yards, what to do with St. Augustine grass that's had a rough summer, and whether anybody has ever successfully kept a fern alive on a screened porch through February. I have theories. Most of them have been wrong.
Everything I pointed at is at Portico Goods. Most of it ships out of a US warehouse and lands in three to seven days, which I mention only because the other kind takes three weeks and nobody tells you that until after you've paid.
See you in October, when it might actually be fall.
— Vincent