Five Openers in Fifteen Days

September is the month Missouri stops being patient. We spend August getting ready and then everything comes at us at once. Five separate openers fall inside the first half of the month, and if you don't sort out ahead of time which ones you actually care about, you'll spend the whole month half-committed to all of them and good at none.

So here's the calendar, and then here's what we'd do with it.

The Dates

Dove opens September 1 and runs through November 29 (Migratory Bird and Waterfowl Hunting Digest 2026–2027, via the Outdoor Calendar in the September 2026 Missouri Conservationist, p. 33). This is the one that gets people out of bed. It's also the one where we see the most well-meaning trouble.

Teal opens September 12 and runs just nine days, through September 20 (same Outdoor Calendar, p. 33). Nine days. Blink and it's gone.

Archery deer and the archery portion of fall turkey both open September 15. Archery deer runs September 15 through November 13, then picks back up November 25 through January 15, 2027. The archery turkey portion follows the same calendar (2026 Fall Deer & Turkey Hunting Regulations and Information, pp. 20 and 22). Your Resident Archer's Hunting Permit is good for two deer, and there are limits on antlered deer across archery and firearms combined — only one antlered deer before November 14, and two total for the seasons combined (p. 5). A Resident Fall Turkey Hunting Permit covers two turkeys for the whole fall season, both portions combined, either sex, and you can take two in the same day (p. 22).

Stream gigging opens September 15 and runs through February 15, 2027, sunrise to midnight, on streams and impounded waters (A Summary of Missouri Fishing Regulations 2026, p. 21). Before that date, gigging is limited to impounded waters and daylight hours only — the mid-September change is what opens up the rivers.

That's five openers in fifteen days. Also worth noting, since it catches people off guard: the firearms portion of fall turkey opens October 1 and runs the whole month (p. 22), and the early antlerless portion of firearms deer season is October 9–11 in open counties (p. 24). October arrives fast.

Dove, and the Mistake We See Most

Doves are the easiest bird in Missouri to hunt badly and legally, and the easiest to hunt well and illegally. The line is bait.

Use of bait while hunting is illegal, and bait means grain or feed placed or scattered to attract birds. An area stays baited for ten days after the bait is completely removed. Here's the part that matters: you can be in violation if you take or attempt to take a bird by the aid of bait where you know or reasonably should know the area is or has been baited. It's also illegal to place bait in a way that puts someone else in violation (2026 Fall Deer & Turkey Hunting Regulations, p. 4 — the deer and turkey rules, but the baiting principle is the same one enforced on doves).

The legal side is straightforward once you know it. It's legal to hunt over a harvested crop field, but not legal to add grain or other crops to the field after it's been harvested. Manipulating a standing crop — mowing it, knocking it down — is not considered baiting for deer and turkeys, though it is for waterfowl.

The September Conservationist runs a case from Christian County that's worth reading: Conservation Agent Makayla Ryan got a call from the electric cooperative about a shot fiber optic line, found seeds and feathers scattered around a burnt patch of ground, and worked the area with Corporal Alex Walker. Seven adults and two juveniles had hunted the property on opening day. The landowner had spread the seed. Most of the group got warnings; the man caught in person got citations for taking migratory birds by bait and for subjecting others to violations of the baiting rule (pp. 6–7).

That last charge is the one to think about if you own the ground. You can put your guests in legal jeopardy without ever firing a shot.

What we'd do instead: mow strips through standing sunflowers or milo weeks ahead, leave the seed where it grew, and let the birds find it. Put out water if you have it. Doves want grit, seed, water, and bare ground to walk on, and a disced strip along a field edge gives them all four without a single kernel getting moved. If you've got questions about what's legal on your specific setup, call your local conservation agent before opening day, not after.

Teal: Nine Days

Teal season is short enough that we treat it differently from everything else. There's no scouting-then-hunting rhythm. You go when the birds are there or you miss it.

If you have a pond or a wetland on your place, the thing worth doing right now is checking what's growing in the shallows. Blue-winged teal are early migrants moving through on a schedule that has nothing to do with your convenience. The September Conservationist notes that at Otter Slough Conservation Area in the Bootheel, September brings the arrival of blue-winged teal, shovelers, and pintail (p. 30). If you're hunting public ground, reservations for managed waterfowl hunts open September 1 and run through September 18, covering thirteen intensively managed wetlands (p. 5). That's a separate process from the teal season itself, but the timing overlaps and it's worth knowing the window exists.

For a landowner with a shallow pond, here's our honest take: nine days is not enough to justify major work. If the habitat's already there, hunt it. If it isn't, spend the money on something with a longer payoff and hunt teal somewhere else.

Archery Deer, and the Two Weeks Before Acorns

September 15 through roughly the end of the month is a strange window for bowhunting. Deer are still on summer patterns — predictable, food-driven, and not yet scattered — but the thing that will scatter them is coming.

When acorns hit the ground, deer abandon everything else. The MDC's Hunting White-Tailed Deer in Missouri puts it plainly: during the fall, deer abandon other food sources to search for acorns. White oak acorns are preferred because of lower tannin content, which makes them more palatable. And critically — in years when production is high, deer tend to be spread out and can forage with little movement. When production is low, they concentrate in the areas that did produce and travel from tree to tree, which makes them more visible to hunters (p. 18).

That's the whole early-season strategy in one paragraph. Go walk your white oaks in the next week and look up. If the crop is heavy, plan on hunting oaks by early October and get your green-food hunting done now. If the crop is light or spotty, find the trees that did produce and you've found where deer will be for a month.

While you're out there, look down too. The same guide recommends looking for hoof prints, deer pellets, and broken acorn shells under trees to find active feeding sites — and notes that when acorns are on the ground, the area gets used at all times of day (p. 18).

Before the acorns, deer are on green food. Soybean leaves and pods are heavily sought in summer for antler growth and lactation, and as soybean leaves turn yellow, deer visit less. That yellowing is your signal — that's when acorns are starting to drop, and that's when to shift (p. 18).

On food plots, the guide is honest in a way we appreciate: food plots supplement native forage, they don't replace it. And the more you hunt over a food plot, the fewer deer you'll see. Scaring deer and leaving scent causes them to avoid the plot during daylight or quit using it altogether. Better to plant several small plots or hunt the transition zones between food and cover and only rarely sit directly over a plot (p. 19).

That's the piece most people get backward. They plant a plot, hang a stand over the middle of it, and burn it out by the end of September.

Stream Gigging

September 15 is also when the rivers open to gigging, and we think it's one of the more underrated things a Missouri landowner can do in the fall. The daily limit is 20 nongame fish, combined total of all species, with a possession limit of twice that (A Summary of Missouri Fishing Regulations 2026, p. 21). Goldfish and the invasive carps — bighead, common, grass, and silver — don't count toward the limit and can be taken in any number.

There are stretches where gigging is off the table, and they're worth knowing before you launch. Gigging is prohibited on the Blue Ribbon Trout Areas — Barren Fork Creek, Blue Springs Creek, Crane Creek, the upper Current River above Cedargrove, the Eleven Point from Greer Spring Branch to Turner Mill, Little Piney, Mill Creek, the North Fork of the White above Patrick Bridge, and Spring Creek in Phelps County — and fish taken by those methods can't even be possessed on those waters or their banks (pp. 30–35). Gigging is also prohibited within 700 feet below the spillway walls of Clearwater Dam on the Black River and Wappapello Dam on the St. Francis (pp. 30, 35).

One more thing, and it matters: if you gig Ozark streams, don't move rocks. Hellbenders live under flat rocks and in crevices in clear, swift-flowing streams throughout the Ozarks, they're state and federally endangered, and it's illegal to possess, harm, or kill them. Moving rocks destroys the crevices where they shelter (A Summary of Missouri Fishing Regulations 2026, p. 33). Easy thing to avoid once you know.

What We'd Actually Do

If we had this September to spend and couldn't do everything, here's the order: walk the white oaks first, because that one observation shapes the next six weeks. Get dove ground mowed and legal. Hunt teal if the water's already there and skip it if it isn't. Hang archery stands on the transitions rather than over the plots. And put one September night on a river with a gig, because the water's still warm and the season's long.

The openers will keep coming whether we're ready or not. The oaks won't wait to tell us what kind of fall it's going to be.

If you're looking at a piece of ground and trying to figure out what it can actually hold, we're always happy to talk land.

Every year about this time, the phone starts ringing about property lines. Archery deer season opens September 15 and runs through November 13, then picks back up November 25 through January 15 (2026 Fall Deer & Turkey Hunting Regulations and Information, p. 20). Fall turkey archery runs the same dates, and the firearms portion for turkey covers October 1–31 (same booklet, p. 22). More people in the woods means more discovered corners, more trail cameras aimed at ground somebody else thought was theirs, and more conversations that start with "I've always hunted that ridge."

We'd rather see those conversations happen in September than in the dark on opening morning. So here's how we think about lines, in the order we'd actually work through it.

Start with the paper, not the fence

The deed describes what you own. The fence describes where somebody's cattle were kept a long time ago. Those are two different facts, and they agree less often than people expect.

Fences got built where the ground was convenient — along the top of a bench instead of down the side of a draw, around a wet spot, up the easy side of a slope. They got rebuilt in a hurry after storms. They got moved a few feet when a post rotted and there was a better tree three steps over. Do that four or five times across a century and the wire has drifted a good distance from the described line, usually in whichever direction the easier ground lay.

The practical trouble is that fences are persuasive. They look like an answer. When two neighbors have both treated an old fence as the line for thirty years, they've built a shared assumption that neither one has actually checked. That assumption holds fine until somebody sells, somebody logs, or somebody's kid puts a stand up.

What we'd do first: pull your deed and read the legal description out loud. Not skim it — read it. If it's a metes-and-bounds description, it reads like directions: a starting point, then a series of bearings and distances that eventually close back on themselves. If it's an aliquot description — the quarter-quarter-section kind — it reads more like an address within the Public Land Survey grid. Either way, you want to know which one you have and whether the acreage stated matches what you've been mowing, hunting, and paying taxes on.

Then go find the corners. Not the fence corners — the survey corners. Iron pins, concrete monuments, a cut stone, sometimes a pipe. They're often set slightly below grade and buried under leaf litter, which is why September is a decent time to look: the ground is still workable and you can walk without fighting summer growth.

When to spend money on a survey

We'll say plainly that we don't think every landowner needs a fresh survey. Plenty of tracts have good, recent, findable corners and no disagreement with anybody. Paying for a survey to confirm what three parties already agree on is money that would do more good elsewhere on the place.

But there are situations where we'd spend it without hesitating:

• You're about to invest along the line. A new fence, a road, a timber harvest near the edge, a cabin. Anything that costs real money and is hard to move.
• You can't find corners, or you find corners that don't agree with each other. Two pins twenty feet apart is not a mystery you should solve yourself.
• A neighbor has said something. Even mildly. "I always figured that went to the creek" is worth a licensed surveyor's time before it becomes worth a lawyer's.
• You're buying or selling. We'd rather a buyer know exactly what they're getting. It also protects a seller from a dispute that surfaces after closing.

The person you want is a licensed land surveyor. Not a forester, not a realtor, not a well-meaning neighbor with a handheld GPS. Consumer GPS is genuinely useful for orienting yourself in the woods and terrible for establishing a boundary — it will put you within a few yards, which is close enough to hunt by and nowhere near close enough to build by. Only a licensed surveyor can set or re-establish a corner in a way that means anything.

One more thing worth knowing: boundary length matters more than acreage when it comes to headaches. The Missouri Department of Conservation's own analysis of its land holdings found that the smallest tracts — those under 10 acres — averaged about 177 meters of boundary per acre, while tracts over 50,000 acres averaged just 8 meters per acre (Missouri's Forest Resource Assessment and Strategy, p. 112). MDC's assessment notes that greater boundary length per acre means more potential for conflicts with adjoining owners, higher maintenance costs, greater threat of invasive plant introduction, and fewer management options — prescribed fire being the obvious example (p. 112). That's a public agency describing its own problem, but the arithmetic is identical on a private tract. If you own a long, narrow forty with three neighbors, you have more boundary to know and keep than someone with a square quarter section. Budget your attention accordingly.

Missouri's purple paint law, and how to use it right

Missouri allows purple paint as a legal alternative to posted signs. This is the single most cost-effective boundary tool available to a landowner, and it is routinely applied wrong.

We want to be careful here, because the exact statutory specifications — stripe dimensions, height above ground, maximum spacing between marks — are set in Missouri Revised Statutes, and we don't have that statute on our shelf. We're not going to guess at numbers you'd rely on in front of a judge. Before you paint, get the current specifications directly from the statute or confirm them with your county sheriff's office or your local conservation agent. It takes one phone call and it's the difference between a posting that holds up and a stripe of purple paint that means nothing.

What we can tell you from experience is how people get it wrong regardless of the specs:

• They paint the inside of the line. The marks have to be visible to someone approaching from outside your property. Paint the side of the tree facing out.
• They paint too sparsely. A mark every hundred yards on a brushy line is not notice. Walk it and paint it so a person moving along the boundary can't credibly claim they never saw one.
• They paint once and never again. Bark grows, trees fall, paint fades. We'd plan to re-walk and touch up painted lines every few years, and we'd do it in a season when the ground is walkable and the brush is down — late fall through early spring.
• They paint the wrong trees. This is the expensive version. If you paint a line you haven't verified, you've now formally advertised a boundary that may not be yours. That is worse than doing nothing.

The sequence matters: verify first, then paint. Not the other way around.

Posting where paint isn't enough

Paint handles the woods. For corners, gates, road frontage, and any place somebody is likely to enter with a vehicle, we'd use signs too. Redundancy is cheap on a boundary and expensive in a dispute.

If you're leasing hunting rights, posting also protects your lessee. A hunter who's paid for access deserves to know where his access stops, and so does everyone else. Lease hunting is a legitimate income source for landowners who don't want to hunt themselves but do want deer numbers managed (Hunting White-Tailed Deer in Missouri, p. 19 discusses leasing as an access arrangement; p. 17 covers the hunter-landowner relationship). A clearly marked line makes that arrangement work better for everybody.

And if you allow anyone to hunt your ground, take five minutes to explain the boundary to them. Walk it if you can. MDC's own guidance to hunters seeking permission stresses face-to-face contact and courtesy, and notes that access granted one year doesn't automatically carry to the next (Hunting White-Tailed Deer in Missouri, p. 17). That cuts both directions: the landowner who spends an afternoon showing a hunter the corners rarely has a trespass problem with that hunter.

Retrieval, drones, and dogs — the situations that actually come up

Here's where most "trespass" turns out not to be trespass at all, or turns out to be something a five-minute phone call would have solved.

A hunter who wounds a deer is required to make a reasonable effort to retrieve it and include it in his season limit — but the Wildlife Code is explicit that this does not authorize trespass (2026 Fall Deer & Turkey Hunting Regulations and Information, p. 4; the same point appears in the Code language on p. 57). Leashed dogs under the direct control of a handler may be used to track and recover wounded deer and turkeys, and handlers don't need hunting permits provided they weren't the one who wounded the animal (p. 5). Drones may be used after an animal has been shot to locate and recover it — but before launching a drone, you must get permission from the public or private property owner (p. 5).

So the law already assumes a conversation happens. Somebody's deer crosses your line, and the correct next step is that they come ask you. We think landowners should decide in advance how they want to answer that, because it will come up. Our own view is that we'd rather a neighbor knock on the door than leave a wounded animal in our timber — and the Wildlife Code also prohibits leaving or abandoning commonly edible portions of game (p. 4). A cooperative answer to a retrieval request costs you nothing and buys a great deal of goodwill.

There's a wrinkle for landowner permits worth knowing, too. Resident landowner permits are valid only on the qualifying property — to hunt elsewhere, a landowner has to purchase regular permits (2026 Fall Deer & Turkey Hunting Regulations and Information, p. 18). So the question of where your line falls isn't just a neighbor-relations issue; for a landowner-permit holder, it's a question of whether the permit in your pocket is valid where you're standing. That alone is worth knowing your corners.

When somebody does cross

Most trespass on rural Missouri ground is not malicious. It's somebody who genuinely believed the fence was the line, or who followed a blood trail across a boundary they couldn't see, or whose grandfather hunted that ridge and nobody ever told him the ownership changed.

We'd start there. A conversation at the pickup window, before the season gets deep, resolves a remarkable share of these. "I want to make sure you know where our line runs — let me show you" is a very different opening than an accusation, and it usually gets a very different response.

If it's not a misunderstanding — if somebody's cutting your timber, running equipment on your ground, or hunting after being told not to — that's a different animal, and it's time for your county sheriff and, depending on what's happened, your local conservation agent. MDC maintains Operation Game Thief at 800-392-1111 for reporting poaching and game-law violations, with rewards available and the option to remain anonymous (2026 Fall Deer & Turkey Hunting Regulations and Information, p. 2). If you don't know who your conservation agent is, your MDC regional office can tell you. The Ozark Region office in West Plains is 417-256-7161; Southwest in Springfield is 417-895-6880; Southeast in Cape Girardeau is 573-290-5730; Central in Columbia is 573-815-7900 (p. 2).

One practical note: write things down. Date, time, location, what you saw, what was said. Not because we expect you to end up in court, but because memory gets slippery and a contemporaneous note is worth more than a recollection six months later.

What we'd actually do this month

If we had a tract with lines we weren't certain about, here's the order we'd work in before the fifteenth:

1. Read the deed description. All of it. Note the stated acreage.
2. Walk the line and look for corners. Iron pins, monuments, cut stones. Clear the litter off what you find and flag it so you can locate it again.
3. Note where the fence and the described line disagree. Don't fix anything yet. Just know.
4. Decide whether the disagreement matters. If nobody contests it and you're not about to spend money along that line, it may be fine to leave it alone for now. If it matters, call a licensed surveyor.
5. Confirm the purple paint specifications with the statute, your sheriff's office, or your conservation agent — then paint verified lines, marks facing outward.
6. Sign the corners, gates, and road frontage.
7. Talk to the neighbors. Not about the dispute. About the line. Before the season.

That's a weekend of work on most tracts, and it's the cheapest insurance in land ownership.

Good boundary management is mostly restraint. You don't need to re-survey every line, rebuild every fence, or escalate every crossing. You need to know where you actually are, mark it so others can know too, and handle the first conversation well. The rest usually takes care of itself.

If you're looking at a piece of ground and can't make sense of the description, or you're about to list a tract and aren't sure the lines are where the last owner said they were, we're always happy to talk land.

September is the month the garden stops asking and starts giving back. Most of the work left is about carrying this year's harvest forward and setting up next year's. Four jobs are worth your attention right now, and they take about one good Saturday between them.

Curing Is the Whole Ballgame With Winter Squash

Winter squash keeps for months, or it rots by Thanksgiving, and the difference is almost entirely in how you handle it the first two weeks after harvest.

Harvest when the vines are brown and the stems are drying, while the rind is deep in color and hard enough that a thumbnail won't dent it. Cut, don't pull — leave about an inch of stem attached. A squash with a broken stem is a squash with an open wound, and that's where rot starts. We treat one-inch stems as non-negotiable, and we eat the broken ones first.

MDC's harvesting and storing guide recommends washing winter squash, then processing it in a diluted bleach solution, letting it dry thoroughly, and curing it in warm, humid conditions for up to ten days before storing it somewhere cool and dry (A Guide to Harvesting and Storing Vegetables, in the Missouri Conservationist Reference Compendium, p. 279). Depending on variety, you're looking at two to six months of storage.

Here's where we'd push back on the usual advice a bit. "Warm and humid" is the part people skip, and it's the part that matters. Curing drives moisture out of the rind and seals over the small nicks you didn't notice. A spot that stays around 80 degrees for those ten days does the job — a sunny shed floor, the top of a chest freezer in the garage, a south-facing porch with the squash up off the concrete. Then move them somewhere cool. Not the basement floor next to the furnace, and not an unheated garage that will freeze in November.

The variety spread on storage life is real. Acorn squash is a two-month proposition no matter how carefully you treat it. Butternut and hubbard types will go five or six months in a decent spot. If you're growing squash specifically to eat in February, grow the long-keepers and treat the acorns as a fall vegetable.

One more thing: check them. Once a month, put your hands on every squash. One going soft in a crate will take its neighbors with it, and you'll never smell it through a closed door.

Sweet Potatoes Want the Opposite Treatment — At First

Sweet potatoes get cured too, but the reason is different and the conditions are stricter.

Dig them carefully. MDC's guidance on potatoes generally — dig after most of the foliage has died and handle carefully to avoid damage — applies with even more force to sweet potatoes, whose skins are thin enough to scuff with a fingernail (A Guide to Harvesting and Storing Vegetables, p. 279). Every scrape is a place for rot to get in. We dig with a fork well out from the crown, then lift by hand.

Curing sweet potatoes isn't about drying them down. It's about converting starch to sugar and healing the skin, and it wants heat and humidity — warmer and damper than winter squash, and only for about a week to ten days. A closed bathroom with a space heater, a cooler with a jug of warm water in it, a corner of the greenhouse with a tarp over it. After curing, they go somewhere cool but not cold.

That last point catches people. Do not put sweet potatoes in the refrigerator. Cold storage below about 50 degrees causes chilling injury, and they'll turn hard in the center and off in flavor. A closet on an interior wall is better than a root cellar. Ours live in a cardboard box in the back of a closet, and they're sweeter in December than they were in October.

If you skip curing entirely, you get a sweet potato that tastes like a potato and keeps for three weeks. We'd rather find a warm corner for a week.

Saving Seed Is Easier Than It Sounds — With Conditions

There are two rules that determine whether seed saving works, and everything else is detail.

First, the variety has to be open-pollinated. A hybrid — anything labeled F1 — won't come back true. You'll get plants, and they'll grow, but they won't be the thing you liked. This isn't a moral judgment on hybrids. Many are excellent. They just aren't seed-saving material.

Second, the plant has to not have crossed with something else. This is where garden seed saving gets interesting, because different crops have wildly different manners.

Tomatoes, peppers, beans, and peas are mostly self-pollinating. Squeeze tomato seeds into a jar with a little water, let it ferment three or four days until a film forms on top, rinse, and dry on a plate. Beans and peas you just let dry in the pod on the vine. These are the crops to start with, because the odds are heavily in your favor even in a small garden with several varieties.

Squash, cucumbers, and melons cross enthusiastically with anything nearby in the same species, which is why your saved zucchini seed produces something nobody wants to eat. Corn is worse. If you're growing one variety of winter squash and your neighbors aren't growing any, you'll probably get true seed. Otherwise, buy it.

Biennials — beets, carrots, cabbage, onions — don't set seed until their second year, which means overwintering the root. Possible, but it's a project rather than a chore.

Dry everything thoroughly, label it with the variety and the year, and store it cool and dry. We use paper envelopes in a coffee can. And be honest with yourself about volume: a packet of tomato seed costs a few dollars and contains more seed than most of us plant in three years. We save seed because we like knowing where it came from and because some varieties are hard to find, not because it's a meaningful line item. If somebody tells you seed saving pays the property taxes, they're selling something.

Cover Crops Are the Cheapest Thing You Can Do for Your Soil

Every bed you've pulled this month is bare ground, and bare ground in Missouri from September to April means erosion, compaction, and a spring full of weeds that got a head start on you.

MDC's soil guidance is blunt about this: the best amendment for clay or sandy soil alike is organic matter, and adding an inch or two in the fall gives beds a boost before spring planting (Missouri Forest Resource Assessment and Strategy, p. 277). A cover crop is organic matter you grow in place instead of hauling.

What to plant depends on how late you are. Cereal rye is the forgiving one — it germinates in cold soil and can go in remarkably late. Winter wheat is a good choice too, and the planting window in The Old Farmer's Almanac runs from August 11 through September 15 for the middle band of states, and August 5 to 30 in the northernmost band (The Old Farmer's Almanac 2027, p. 233). Oats will grow fast and then winterkill, which some people prefer because you don't have to terminate anything in spring.

If you want nitrogen as well as biomass, add a legume. Crimson clover is a good Missouri performer, and the Almanac's planting guidance puts crimson clover seed in the ground at broadcast rates from July into November depending on your area (The Old Farmer's Almanac 2027, p. 187 lists crimson clover as a cool-season annual sown July to November at 20 to 25 pounds broadcast per acre). For a garden bed that scales down to a few ounces — scatter it thick, rake it in shallow, and don't overthink it. The Chatmans at Three Mile Ridge Farm in Newfoundland use winter rye over their vegetable ground after harvest, then a red clover, white clover, and timothy mix on fields going to rest (Missouri Conservationist, September 2026, p. 63 — the Earth Angels feature). Small operations and big ones are doing the same thing for the same reason.

The main way people make this harder than it is: they wait for perfect conditions. Broadcast the seed, rake it in, walk on it to get seed-to-soil contact, and water once if it's dry. That's it. Rye doesn't need a tilled seedbed and it doesn't need coddling.

Our honest take on cost: a bag of cereal rye seed will cover more garden than most of us have, costs less than one bag of bagged compost, and does more good. It's the best dollar in the garden.

Order Garlic Now, Plant It in October

Garlic is the most rewarding crop we grow, and the reason is that almost all of the work happens on two days nine months apart.

Order now. Not because of some artificial urgency, but because the varieties worth having sell out, and September is when people who plan ahead are buying. Hardneck types — the ones that produce scapes — are the better bet for Missouri, and they store well.

MDC's guidance on garlic harvest is worth reading before you plant, because it tells you what you're aiming at: dig when the foliage yellows and falls over but isn't completely dry, cure the bulbs in a single layer in a dry location for two weeks, brush off dirt, remove tops and roots, and store in a cool, dry area for up to six months (A Guide to Harvesting and Storing Vegetables, p. 279).

Plant in October. Break the heads into cloves the day you plant, not before — cloves separated too early dry out. Set them pointy end up, about two inches deep, five or six inches apart. Then mulch heavily if you're in a colder part of the state.

The forestry guidance on feeding garlic is the trick we'd pass along: mix phosphorus and potassium into the bed before you sow cloves in fall, which encourages root development, and then feed with nitrogen in late spring when leaf and bulb growth is happening (Missouri Conservationist feature on root crops, September 2026, p. 72 — Jenna Rich's farmer's hack on garlic). Pull back the mulch in late spring, weed lightly, and feed a day or two before rain is expected so the rain carries the nutrients down.

If you're growing hardnecks, cut the scapes four to six weeks before harvest. This tells the plant to send energy back into the bulb, and failing to do it means smaller garlic. That single step is the difference between garlic worth bragging about and garlic you're vaguely embarrassed by.

Garlic you grow yourself keeps longer, tastes stronger, and costs less than the good stuff at the farmers' market. This is one of the few homestead projects where we'd say without hedging: it saves money, it's better than what you can buy, and it's almost impossible to fail at.

What Can Wait

Not everything on the September list is urgent. If you only have one afternoon, cure what you've harvested and get cover crop seed on the bare beds. Seed saving can happen on a rainy evening at the kitchen table. Garlic just needs to be ordered, and the planting is an October job.

And if you're looking at your ground this fall thinking it could do more than it's doing — more garden, an orchard, room for a few hens — we're always happy to talk land.

Here's the situation in a lot of our chest freezers right about now. There's a stack of crappie fillets in there, some of them going back to April, wrapped in whatever was handy that day. And come mid-September, we're going to start putting things in that same freezer that we care about a great deal more.

Archery deer season opens Sept. 15, and runs through Nov. 13 before picking back up Nov. 25 and running to Jan. 15. The archery portion of fall turkey season keeps the same dates, and the firearms portion of fall turkey runs Oct. 1–31. (2026 Fall Deer & Turkey Hunting Regulations and Information, pp. 20, 22.) So we've got a couple of weeks. If those crappie fillets are going to get eaten at their best, this is the month.

We'd rather eat the fish than feel guilty about it in February.

Why crappie, and why now

Crappie are one of the most generous fish in Missouri. The statewide daily limit is 30, with no length limit, and the season is open all year, though a number of the big lakes have their own rules — Stockton and Table Rock both carry a 10-inch minimum with a daily limit of 15, and Wappapello allows a daily limit of 30 with no more than 15 over 9 inches. (A Summary of Missouri Fishing Regulations 2026, pp. 20, 29.) Check the page for whatever water you fish; the lake-specific rules vary quite a bit.

That generosity is the reason so many of us end up with a backlog. A good spring afternoon can put more fillets in the freezer than a family will eat in a month, and then summer gets busy and there they sit.

A word on what happens between the water and the pan, because it matters more than any batter recipe. MDC's own guidance on handling fish is worth reading in full, but the part that affects how your fish tastes at the table is straightforward: keep it cold and keep it clean. Their livewell recommendations are to run continuous aeration, ice the water when it climbs over 80 degrees, and hold no more than three-quarters of a pound of fish per gallon of water. (Handling and Releasing Fish, p. 10.) Fish that rode home warm in a crowded bucket will never fry up as well as fish that rode home cold, no matter what you dredge it in.

If you're eating the fish you catch, it's also worth knowing that the Department of Health and Senior Services keeps a consumption advisory. For crappie, the only crappie-specific entry is Clearwater Lake in Reynolds County, where sensitive populations — pregnant women, women of childbearing age, nursing mothers, and children under 13 — are advised to limit crappie over 9 inches to one meal a month. (A Summary of Missouri Fishing Regulations 2026, p. 13.) Everywhere else, crappie doesn't carry its own restriction.

What we'd do differently than most people

Two things, and then we'll leave you alone about it.

First, the oil. A lot of good crappie gets ruined by oil that isn't hot enough. Fish that goes into 300-degree oil sits there and drinks it up, and you end up with something heavy and greasy that tastes like the fryer instead of like fish. Get the oil to 350 to 360 and give it a minute to come back up between batches. Crappie fillets are thin — most of them cook through in two or three minutes — so if yours are taking five, the oil has dropped. Fry fewer at a time.

Second, the cornmeal. If you have a choice, buy the finer grind rather than the coarse stuff meant for cornbread. Coarse meal makes a crust that falls off in the basket and sits in the bottom of the pot burning while you fry the next round. Fine cornmeal with a little flour mixed in sticks to the fish and stays there.

One more, free of charge: salt the fish, not just the breading. Season the fillets themselves before they go into the buttermilk. It's a small thing and it makes a real difference.

The rest of the plate

Fried fish needs something sharp beside it, and that's what the slaw is for. We make it with buttermilk and vinegar rather than a heavy mayonnaise dressing, because the plate already has enough richness on it. Make it first and let it sit in the refrigerator while you set up to fry — it improves for an hour and it's honestly better the next day.

Hushpuppies are not optional at a Missouri fish fry, and they're the easiest part of the whole meal because they fry in the same oil right after the fish comes out. That oil has picked up a little something by then, which is exactly what you want in a hushpuppy. Don't make them ahead. Make them last, hot, and eat them standing at the stove if you're honest about it.

If you want one more thing on the table, sliced garden tomatoes with salt are still coming in this month and don't need any help from us. Skip anything heavier. This meal is rich enough.

A note on what comes next

Once the fillets are gone and the freezer has room, there's the matter of filling it back up. Whatever you take this fall, the rules on Telechecking haven't changed: deer must be checked before it leaves the county where it was harvested or by 10 p.m. on the day of harvest, whichever comes first, and turkeys by 10 p.m. on the day of harvest. (2026 Fall Deer & Turkey Hunting Regulations and Information, p. 64.)

And if you end up with more venison than your family will eat, Share the Harvest takes donations at approved processors around the state. Since 1992 the program has provided more than 6 million pounds of venison to Missourians who need it. (2026 Fall Deer & Turkey Hunting Regulations and Information, p. 70.) Deer from counties within 10 miles of where CWD has been detected must be tested before they can be donated. (p. 68.)

But that's a few weeks off yet. Tonight there's fish to fry.