Fall and Winter Gardening
Las Flores Community Garden
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:
https://www.lasfloresgarden.com/cover-crops/
3. Tips
- 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