Change in the air: fall planting season
October is the grand transition. There’s that one morning when you wake up and go outside, and the air feels ... different. It’s fall. And it’s time to start planting. month, the heat typically abates (thankfully) and the soil retains its warmth, creating the perfect planting conditions for just about any ornamental plant. And soon, we hope to have rain.
Edible gardens
Harvest the last melons, pumpkins and winter squash once their stems turn brown and start to pull away from the base.
Leave a few inches of stem attached as a handle. Store in a cool, dry, dark location.
If tomatoes, eggplants, and squashes are still producing, should you pull them out to make room for broccoli, lettuces, and kale? It’s a dilemma.
As you pull out old vegetable plants, send them off in the green waste, where they’ll be hot-composted to kill off pests and diseases.
Plant root vegetables (carrots, turnips, radishes, etc.) seeds directly into garden beds. Don’t buy seedlings; they don’t transplant well.
If your vegetable beds haven’t produced as well as in the past, you might skip cool season crops and plant cover crops to improve the soil instead. Legumes like hairy vetch add nitrogen, grains add organic matter. Buckwheat chokes out weeds, builds organic matter and suppresses nematodes. Choose the best cover crop seed for your garden.
Order and plant the seeds now.
Would you like an herb garden? Plant herb shrubs and perennials like rosemary, oregano and bay into permanent garden beds. Annuals like parsley, cilantro and dill are best grown in very large pots or in a vegetable garden.
Fruit trees
This is the last month for planting subtropicals like banana, citrus, avocado, cherimoya, or guava. If you can’t plant now, wait till next spring to plant.
Order bare root deciduous fruit trees (stone fruits, apples, etc.) from your local independent nursery. They’ll be available in January.
Are your citrus tree leaves misshapen? Does it look like some tiny insect is tunneling through the leaves? Don’t cut off those leaves. Don’t spray the plant. Your trees have leaf miner. It looks ugly but doesn’t hurt the tree nor diminish production. Cutting off infected leaves causes the tree to make new leaves, which will also get infected with leaf miner.
Ornamental plants
In the shorter, cooler days of “second spring,” watch for established plants like South
African daisy ( Arctotis) Grevillea and erupt in bloom.
Once the air is cool, it’s safe to plant permanent plants in
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Toward the end of the your garden — trees, shrubs, vines, perennials. Focus on vast options of “unthirsty” plants native to California, South Africa,
Australia, the Mediterranean and western Chile. native plants include toyon, lemonade berry, California live oak, monkey flower, and native sages expanding selection of Australian
Easy-to-grow California
Choose from the ever
Grevillea:
Cream,’ ‘Moonlight,’ ‘Long
John,’ ‘Robyn Gordon’ and many others. All are incredibly drought tolerant and easy to grow. Mulch but don’t fertilize.
Phosphorus containing fertilizers can kill these plants.
From South Africa, we can grow South African daisy ( Arctotis), many kinds of
Aloe, red hot pokers ( Kniphofia), more.
Among the Mediterranean region plants are rosemary, bay, oregano, lavenders (Spanish lavender, Lavandula stoechas is the easiest to grow), cork oak and rockrose.
From Chile, try drinia,
Peruvian lily, Chilean guava, Chilean wine palm, mayten tree, and ficus-indica ‘Peaches and and many, many
Calan
Opuntia (aka Tuna).
Check your garden for young green spears of spring bulbs
like Watsonia, Narcissus Gladiolus. and species
have bulbs that haven’t yet made it into the ground, plant them now. They may not flower next spring, but they should flower the spring after that.
Plant annual spring flowers this month and next: California poppies, native farewell-to
spring ( Clarkia),
(Layia platyglossa), tidytips flowering sweet peas,
and many more. Keep the seeds damp until they sprout.
Keep young plants damp until rains begin.
If you
Cut back spring and summer blooming sages ( Salvia) so they can resprout afresh and flower again.
Divide iris. Carefully separate the rhizomes (they look like tiny, jointed potatoes) at the “joints.” Use a sharp knife wiped clean with alcohol. Wipe the knife with alcohol again between plants so you don’t spread pests or diseases from one plant to the next.
Early in the month, shorten branches of scented geraniums and Martha Washington geraniums by a couple of inches.
Next month, cut the long branches to force the plant to grow new shoots at the base.
Feed roses with liquid fertilizer at midmonth. Inspect leaves for mold, rust, or black spot. Remove infected leaves and put them into the greenwaste bin rather than into your compost pile.
Garden prep and maintenance
Before you plant anything new, be sure your garden has a solid infrastructure:
Grade your property so water flows away from the house and into planting beds or bioswales. Your goal is to keep water onsite and keep it out of the gutter. native
Remedy heavy clay soil, hard packed subsoil, and sand by layering on 4 or more inches of coarse, wood mulch or arborist chips (ground up trees) that are 1 inch or smaller. Water well, then let it sit at least four or five months.
Beneficial microbes and tiny critters break down the mulch, incorporating it into the soil.
You’ll be amazed at how much richer the soil will be and how much better it will drain.
If your garden beds are flat, create height and contour using imported soil, up to 18 inches high. Use a soil mix of 30 percent organic matter to 79 percent inorganic soil for all
California natives and other waterwise, Mediterranean climate and desert plants.
Clean drains and rain gutters before the (hopefully) rainy
season begins. How to plant
• and let it drain. Gently pull the
plant out of its pot. Dig a hole as deep as the rootball is tall, and slightly wider. Make the hole square instead of round, and rough up the edges. Add a few handfuls of worm castings to the hole but no other amendments. Fill the hole with water and let it drain.
• plant’s roots (except for
Bougainvillea Romneya coulteri). poppy,
Set the plant into the hole, just barely higher than the plant sat in the pot. Refill the hole with soil that came out of the hole.
Wet the soil and tamp it down as you go along to eliminate air pockets.
•
Water the plant in its pot
Carefully loosen the
When the hole is full, make a moat around the stem or trunk. Set your hose to trickle water into the basin and saturate the soil. Layer 3 or 4 inches of mulch onto to the soil surface, starting at the outer edges of the basin. Cover the entire planting bed.
Irrigation
Update your irrigation to in-line drip irrigation. That kind of irrigation wets the entire root zone around a plant, rather than just spots here and there.
Inline drip keeps water off leaves and is the most efficient irrigation. It gets plants off to the best start and supports them through their lives.
Install a “smart” irrigation controller, then set up a schedule for each irrigation zone based on the type of plant it waters, where your garden is, the type of soil in your garden, the slope, sun or shade, and so on. or Matilija
With the sun lower in the sky, plants slow down and need less water. If you have a smart irrigation controller, check to confirm that it is making seasonal adjustments on its own.
If your controller isn’t “smart,” set it to run less often but don’t alter the run time.
Plants take up water from their roots, so however you water, do so long enough to saturate the soil down to the roots. How do you know if the water has run for long enough?
Use a soil probe to see how wet or dry the soil is from the surface, down to a foot or more. Adjust your watering schedule so water reaches the deep roots every time, and then dries down a bit before it runs again.
Mulch
Renew your garden’s mulch using organic mulch (made from leaves, bark, wood, etc.), for non-succulent plants, rock or decomposed granite mulch for succulents and cactuses.
Organic mulches act like a sponge to hold water; keep moisture in the soil; protect soil from erosion, and, as mulch breaks down, feeds the micro flora and fauna that help build healthy soils to supports plants. Some research shows that mulch protects plants from soil pathogens, too.
While mulch should cover the soil surfaces in your garden, leave several bare spots for native, ground dwelling bees. They are really important garden pollinators and rarely sting.
If you love to garden, please join more than 11,000 of your gardening neighbors in San
Diego Gardener Facebook group. It’s the place to talk local gardening 24/7. www.facebook.com/groups/
SDGardener/.
Catch the new season of my
TV show, “A Growing Passion” on KPBS-TV, Thursday nights at 8:30 p.m., Sundays at 11 a.m., and on KPBS2 on Mondays at 8:30 p.m. If you miss an episode, find it at www.AGrowing
Passion.com. This season, we visit olive groves, meet a plant explorer, learn about dragon fruit and more.