Still picking tomatoes, squash, peppers, cucumbers and eggplant? Me too. But production is winding down, and I need a sign that it’s time to rip everything out and plant a Fall/Winter garden.
It’s time to banish fantasies of picking Christmas tomatoes. Can it, dry it, freeze it, use it or share it. As someone who struggles with thinning seedlings (how can a mother choose who lives and who dies?!) and pulling plants (I was just getting to know you!)… I get it. But if you don’t make space for your winter garden now, you’ll be late to the game and some plants may never catch up. Hit that sweet spot; we’re in it now.
As we indicated last month, Fall is the ideal time to plant landscape plants, bulbs, cover crops, California natives, wildflower seeds and cool-season veggies, herbs and flowers. It’s our second Spring, and your plants will use Fall and Winter to build strong root systems so that when Spring does roll around, your plants will burst into a long-simmering degree of beauty and vigor that you won’t see in Spring-planted plants! And some plants just beg to be planted in Fall.
If I had to choose just two types of plants that should be planted in Fall, it’d be California natives and flowering sweet peas. They do so much better planted now. For natives, that’s because they’ve adapted to our summer-dry, wet winter climate. And for cool-weather loving flowering sweet peas, planting now affords them a chance to get established and bloom well before warm weather causes them to wither.
~ Angela
