I love the fall, this beautiful weather we are having is my favorite time.  The rains have given us back some of the green, things feel less dusty and dry.  Yet it is warm enough to ripen the last of the peppers and tomatoes and give us one more batch of pesto.

I have had several people in the last month tell me that they thought their soil was poor quality and that they should buy soil to garden in.   I had to convince them that they had really nice soil that just needed to be amended and compost added.  It made me realize how little faith people have in dirt, and how we are more comfortable with buying something.  My experience is that I have had lots of problems with bought soil mixes, and always trust my soil more than what I can buy.  Now if you are using raised beds to protect your plants from gophers, you will need to buy a soil mix but make sure that the roots of the plants can get down to the soil below.  Gardening in pots means you need to buy potting soil, because of the need for great drainage.  But most of us have pretty good soil to work with, there can be some problems but I have seen few places where the local soil is not worth gardening in.  (That is one of the reasons I hate gophers so much is it makes it difficult to garden in the earth and we have to put so much money into raised beds.)

Wendy mentioned planting garlic in her last blog and I will reiterate it is a great time to plant garlic, really until the first week of November.  There are lots of great varieties to play with.  Know that there are soft necks and hard necks.  The hardnecks send out flowers so they get a hard stem in the core, they tend to have larger cloves.  Some people think hardnecks have more flavor.   Softnecks you can braid and are the more common to be found in the store, they tend to last longer.  Plant them 6 to 8 inches apart, in fairly good soil, with good drainage.   Just break up the head of garlic and plant the largest cloves (small cloves produce small garlic). You want to make sure the pointy end is up.  The main thing to do over the winter is to keep them weeded.  I let them get up about 3 inches and then mulch them with straw.   I also plant the small cloves of garlic for a spring green garlic patch.  I plant them about 2 inches a part and harvest them in the spring before they form a bulb. 

The other thing to plant this late in the season is fava beans.   They are great in that you can eat the fresh beans in May, or let them dry and use them as a dried bean.  The flower and leaf is edible, and they fix nitrogen in the soil so if you want to compost them or turn them under in the spring they are your cover crop. They also are great at hosting beneficial insects in the spring. 

Areas that you are not going to have in winter crops are worth giving a little attention now so the spring is not so hard.   Everything you do now makes spring easier.   I approach my unused winter beds in two ways.  I either cover crop or sheet mulch.  Cover crops are plants you grow that feed the soil.  We are blessed in our mild climate to be able to grow them during the winter months.   The most common cover crops are a mix of legumes (peas and beans).   The legume family works with bacteria in the soil that fix nitrogen from the air into little nitrogen nodules on the roots of the legume plants.  On a farm scale they usually till in the cover crop in the spring.  In your garden, you can turn it under by hand or with a rototiller, or you can compost it.  

 Sheet mulch is really easy.  I take whatever compost or manure or old plants I have and spread it over the area.  I then put a layer of cardboard, mostly brown, as the inks can have toxins.  On top of the cardboard I put straw.  Make sure you overlap the edges of the cardboard so weeds don’t grow through.  In the spring you have a nice weed free area to plant into.  

Hope you have enjoyed your fall harvests!