SANTA CRUZ (October 2009) - Fall is a lovely season everywhere on the Central Coast except, perhaps, in the vegetable garden.
Look up, and behold the brilliance of the turning leaves in the slanting autumn light. Look down, and see the blackened remains of your cucumber vines, and a slumping hedgerow of dying tomatoes.
It’s tempting to walk away from this depressing scene, and not return until April. But don’t give in to seasonal slothfulness! A quick garden clean-up before the rains hit will keep the bugs and plant diseases at bay for a healthy spring garden.
And with a bit more effort, you can plant a winter garden with snap peas, lettuce and other cool-loving veggies that thrive in our mild, wet winters.
NEGLECT IS NOT BENIGN
At a minimum, rake up the rotting fruit, cram the diseased vines into the greenwaste bin, and thrown down a layer of mulch over your planting area.
Yes, the hairy tomatoes and squishy cukes will decompose if you leave them where they fell. But they will enrich the soil with the molds and viruses that attacked them in their old age, leaving a legacy of disease for next year’s crop.
The rotting plants will also shelter an army of slugs, snails and sowbugs, who will be waiting hungrily for the emergence of your spring seedlings.
It’s usually better to send your vegetable plants and the leaves of most fruit trees to the city composting facility than to put them in your home compost bin. Professionally composted yard waste reaches temperatures high enough to kill most pathogens, while the heap in your yard may retain live molds and viruses, which return to your vegetable bed with the finished compost.
Once you’ve cleared away the old vegetables and any lingering weeds, there’s a decision to make: do you mulch the beds and leave them till spring, or do you plant a winter garden?
MULCHING IS EASY
There are benefits to both approaches. Mulching is easy, it enriches the soil and protects it from battering rains, and it can be done either with a thick planting of clover or fava beans (a green mulch), or with layers of horse manure, rice straw, shredded redwood bark or finished compost.
My favorite dry mulch is a 4-to 6-inch layer of horse manure covered with a neat-looking blanket of rice straw. The straw-and-manure combo smothers weeds, and attracts lots of earthworms to aerate the soil. It also provides cover for my backyard population of California Slender Salamanders, who like to slither around beneath the straw and burrow into the manure layer.
And, did I mention that it’s easy? One afternoon of work, and you’re done till spring. When it’s time to plant, simply rake aside the straw, (looking carefully for salamanders!), and dig the crumbled manure into the soil.
PLANTING IS PRODUCTIVE
Planting a winter garden, on the other hand, takes advantage of our Mediterranean climate to produce an abundance of cool-weather crops. While a mulched garden bed quietly decomposes, a winter garden can fill your kitchen with lettuce, beets, peas, leeks, green onions, kale, chard, carrots and even potatoes.
Growing winter vegetables is considerably more work than one afternoon of mulching, but it’s less labor-intensive than spring and summer gardening. Plants grow more slowly in winter, and even better, nature takes care of most of the watering.
Because the days are already short, a winter bed needs the best sun exposure possible, as well as protection from high winds. Anchor pea trellises extra firmly. And plan ahead for a cold snap by figuring out how you can quickly cover the bed with an old sheet or other temporary frost protection.
Prepare the bed by cleaning out all scraps of the summer crops, and add finished compost if the soil looks dusty and depleted.
DON'T PLANT SUMMER VEGGIES
Choose your vegetables carefully, and don’t believe everything you read at the garden center. In September I saw tomato starts at a local garden center, with a sign assuring customers that there was “still time” to grow and harvest a tomato crop – a completely bogus claim for anyone without a heated, artificially-lit greenhouse.
Your best bet right now is to plant lettuces, arugula, mustard greens, fava beans and carrots from seed, and peas, kale, chard, leeks and green onions from starts.
Potato sets may be gone from the garden center, but you can cut up and plant organic spuds from the farmers market, which have not been treated with chemicals that prevent sprouting.
Mulch around your vegetable starts with redwood compost or a light layer of straw, and your winter garden is good to go.
Carrots, beets and green onions thrive in cool weather.
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