Spring and summer months tend to monopolize gardening attention, but October through January are more than afterthoughts.
Fall and winter can be an excellent time to grow all sorts of annual vegetables because it’s still warm enough for some plants to thrive but the really hot weather that might have wilted them is starting to subside. The cooler months are also a good time to establish trees and shrubs.
However, like the summer, fall and winter are not without their pitfalls. Experts shared tips about what gardeners should know if they plan to dive into cool weather gardening.
1. Get your garden ready
If you haven’t already done it, now is the time to get rid of old summer plants that you’re not going to harvest anything from, as these can be a home for pests that can become problematic for your garden later in the season, said Aaron Fox, associate professor of urban and community agriculture at Cal Poly Pomona.
Fox also recommended that gardeners take time to make sure they check the quality of their soil and give it a refresh, if needed, by amending it with compost or dumping what they have and starting over.
“A lot of us are growing in containers around here, too, and those containers need particular attention at least once a year if not every season,” Fox said.
2. Figure out what to plant
Fall is the perfect time to plant leafy greens, including lettuces, spinach and chards, according to Van Brandon, owner of Parkview Nursery in Riverside.
Brandon said fall is also the time to start growing plants from the genus Brassica, which includes broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and cabbage.
It’s also a good time to plant deciduous fruit trees, such as apples and pears, as well as stone fruit, such as peaches, nectarines, plums and apricots, according to Tom Spellman, southwestern sales manager for Hickman, California-based Dave Wilson Nursery, which is a national wholesaler of fruit trees.
“Those can be set out now,” Spellman said. “They get a little bit of rooting in, they go into a full dormancy for the winter and they’re a little bit pre-established for the spring and they pop right back out.”
There’s one caveat to planting fruit trees right now, Spellman said, and that’s that some varieties may not be so easy to find because more people have started growing fruit trees since the start of the pandemic and that’s caused some cultivars to sell out as early as April of this year.
Spellman said nursery stock is expected to bounce back in January, which is still a good time to plant.
“On deciduous fruit trees in particular that is probably the best time because you’re putting them in while they’re fully dormant,” Spellman said. “You have young fresh stock that’s just been taken out of the ground and you can go in with this brand new tree and get it to start to root back in in the early spring and put out a nice new flush of growth.”
But gardeners shouldn’t wait if they go into a nursery and find a variety of a deciduous fruit tree they want to plant.
“As long as they can find what they are looking for anytime — October, November, even through December is a great time to get started,” Spellman said.
3. Get strategic with your planting
Space considerations can play a bigger role in fall gardening, especially if you’re growing brassicas which require more room than other veggies and herbs.
“If you have small spaces it may not be worthwhile to put in crops like broccoli and then at the end of the day you’ve only got one head of broccoli,” Fox said.
Members of the Brassicaceae family are also all susceptible to a pest called the cabbage looper. Fox advised gardeners to not plant all of the cauliflowers, cabbages, brussels sprouts and related plants in the same area.
“You don’t want to make things easy for the pest and if you sort of lay out a buffet for them, they’re going to thrive and reproduce,” Fox said. “And so just by trying to break things up a little bit and trying to mix in some different families and some things that they may not be interested in eating, it can make things just a tiny bit more difficult for them.”
Fox said some of the plants you can use to break up the brassicas include cilantro, carrots and even potatoes. However, make sure that if you deal with tomato diseases and pests earlier in the year that you’re not planting the potatoes in the same spots the tomatoes were in, as the potatoes (another member of the nightshade family) can keep those diseases and pests going. For example, both can be affected by blight and hornworms find them equally tasty.
4. These cabbage patch kids are anything but cute
Brandon said that some of the same pests that gardeners contended with in the spring and summer are still going to be around. Among them are aphids. He said there are a wide variety of organic and nonorganic treatments for the pests, but two that can work are Captain Jack’s Deadbug from Bonide and neem oil.
Cabbage loopers, the pest that Fox warned of, are small green caterpillars that later become moths. The best way to get rid of them, Fox says, is to keep an active eye out for them and pick them off the plant when you see them (the same way you might pull off a tomato hornworm during the summer).
In the case of more large scale cabbage looper infestations, Fox said that there are lots of natural solutions such as bacillus thuringiensis (BT) that can be used for pest control.
But, even if the cabbage loopers do take some bites out of your prized cabbage or cauliflower plant, it will be OK, according to Fox.
“It’s not going to hurt you to eat it,” Fox said. “It just doesn’t look as pretty.”
5. Think about the rain
Another unique challenge that the cooler months bring is that there can be more precipitation than in spring and summer months.
Fox recommends using devices such as rain gauges and soil moisture sensor irrigation timers, often called smart irrigation timers, that can be connected to automatic watering systems to control how much water is applied. Using the devices can help to keep plants from being overwatered during rainy winter weather.
“Even if you don’t invest in technology like that, just try to set yourself a reminder that as the rains start — hopefully — later this winter that you just try to keep up with your irrigation and turn things off when it’s raining,” Fox said.
