Fall and Winter Gardening

We require gardening to be year-round, and there are many options. Here’s what you are allowed to do or plant. When we tend to our gardens every month, we have fewer varmints and some really great vegetables.

1.  Fall and Winter Crops:

There are many guides online that detail when and what to plant for each month from fall through winter. These are my favorites:

https://www.gardenate.com/zones/USA+-+Zone+10b

https://www.almanac.com/gardening/planting-calendar/CA/Thousand%20Oaks – this one is a blog post on our own website

2.  Cover Crops are wonderful to replenish nourishment (especially Nitrogen) back into your soil. A garden that plants a cover crop is considered “resting” your plot. No plot may be fallow. Cover crops still require members to come water and tend to weeds.

Mary Church wrote a wonderful article about cover crops:

  • See all those white butterflies flitting about LFCG? Well, they are not a good butterfly. They produce Cabbage Worms and attack all brassicas. Brassicas include broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collard greens, kale, and turnips.So it is a good practice to always cover them immediately to keep the worms away from your seedlings. They can take down a whole plant in hours, and especially like young, tender plants.
  • Watering – during the winter months, you will not need to water as often, once a week is standard. 
  • Row Covers are recommended to protect your plants from insects and varmints. It also provides a little more warmth when our temperatures dip really low (a mild frost for us). 
  • Weeds in any garden suck all the nutrients from your soil, so your plants will have deficits of available nutrition. Keep weeds at bay for successful gardening, and your neighbors will love you for it.

FALL PLANTS IN ZONE 10B

Beets

Broccoli

Brussels Sprouts

Cabbage

Carrots

Cauliflower

Celery

Chinese cabbage

Collards

Daikon Radish – puts nitrogen back into your soil

Endive/Escarole

Garlic

Kale

Kohlrabi

Leek

Lettuce: Crisp, Butter-head, Leaf & Romaine

Mustard

Onions, Bulbing

Onions, Bunching

Parsley

Parsnips

Peas, English

Potatoes

Radish

Rutabaga

Spinach

Strawberry

Swiss Chard

Turnips