Remove any veggies affected by tomato blight and replace them with greens, root vegetables, and a summer squash or two.

Plant some carrots now, and you could be crunching them this fall.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—If the dreaded late blight got your upside-down tomatoes or your crops got hit hard by drought, bugs, or pests, or you just never quite got around to planting anything at all, don't despair. Now is the perfect time to start some seeds for tasty, organic, and low-cost fall eats. You can still outfit your garden to take advantage of the shorter days and cooler nights of late summer and early fall. This time of year is prime growing weather for many vegetables, especially salad greens, cabbage, broccoli, and tasty roots like carrots and beets. Since many of these crops aren't phased by a light frost or two (and some actually get sweeter after enduring a frost), you'll be able to keep harvesting well into the fall—and maybe longer, depending on where you live and whether you can give the plants a little protection on cold nights.

Upside-Down Tomato Planter: Take 2

This year (so far), late blight seemed concentrated in Canada and just a few states in the eastern U.S. But if the disease got your tomatoes, you can still use an upside-down tomato planter (store-bought or homemade) for a quick crop of cucumbers or summer squash, as many varieties offer up their first ready-to-harvest veggies in 45 to 50 days. These crops will also tolerate the first light frost if you wrap a sheet around your planter when frost threatens (take the sheet off in the morning).

Poke two or three seeds into the top of your upside-down planter and let them germinate. Or, lay the planter on its side and poke the seeds into the grow hole (at the bottom, where your tomato plants should have come out). Leave it on its side until the seeds sprout—seeds don’t germinate and grow very well upside down—keeping them well watered. Lolita squash is one of my favorites, and salad bush cucumbers are perfect for planters. If summer is already winding down in your neck of the woods, consider planting a dozen pea seeds instead. They are far more cold-tolerant than cucumbers and squash and will produce their first harvest in as little as 45 days. They'll continue bearing happily into the cool weather. Cascadia snap pea is a delicious and fast-maturing variety.

Late-Summer Salads

Lettuce, spinach, and other salad greens are made for fall growing. Loose-leaf lettuce and spinach planted now will be providing thinned plants and baby leaves in as few as three weeks, and the plants will keep producing well into the fall. You can use your aforementioned upside-down planter, provided you plant the seeds in the top, not in the bottom. Or, you can plant them in the ground: Prepare a bed in your garden, working an inch of compost into the topsoil, and plant your seeds thinly in rows that are six to 12 inches apart. Keep the area shaded and well watered so that the soil stays cool enough for your seeds to germinate. When the seedlings start touching each other, pull out enough so that you have only one plant every six inches (go ahead and eat the plants you pull out). For the plants you leave in the ground, snap off the largest outermost leaves every few days to allow the small central leaves to grow.