Our strong crop of Kale ‘Glamour’ this year is a wonderful value for late season color.

It handles light frost well and Kale always freshens up in the remaining warm weather after the first cold snap.

We like the rose-colored center of this plant, and we really admire how well rounded this kale is. It’s open without being loose, with a nice, mounded form.

Right about now, the need for instant, impressive color cranks right up. Halloween is a decoration holiday, and a number of homes and businesses really get into the spirit of things during the second half of the month. Our 12-inch mum crop is perfect for creating that big, impressive centerpiece for the holiday, and the color is blooming out just in time. These plants are big . . .  they’re as tall as a baseball bat!

For landscapers with commercial accounts—a quick phone call to offer extra large mum planters for the front of a business can result in some end-of-season revenue.There will be no waiting for the full impact to open up, and the planters will provide big color for the entire holiday season.

Regular readers of our Field Notes know that we like form and texture as much as color. This time of year, when the nights start to get cold, we turn to cabbages, kales and mustards—their colors intensify with the onset of fall.

Ornamental cabbages have been around for a while, but we find a lot of interesting shapes when we look beyond them. Here is an example of a single burgundy red running across three types of ornamentals:   

Asters are often seen as mum wannabes, but they are actually useful tools in the Autumn Design Kit. They color up with a thick head of blooms like Mums, but with a smaller flower and a finer texture to the petals.

Their strength is their color palette—Asters provide colors that Mums don't quite deliver. Also, when setting up a larger, more complex landscape presentation, it helps to have something similar, but different, to break up the visual arrangement.