November Garden Tasks

Start collecting interesting pine cones, seed pods and crispy flower heads for indoor arrangements. Pair them with nice pottery or even a jelly jar. Real materials are infinitely more interesting than artifiical and easier on the environment. I always bring in red or orange rose hips still on their branches for a shot of color.

This is also a good time to plant spring-blooming bulbs for easy spring color! Still decent selections to be found at nurseries and hardware stores.

• Clean up spring and summer annuals; replace with winter-bloomers like violas and cyclamen. Or forget the flowers and go for perennials with interesting leaf color and shape like Heuchera ‘Amethyst Myst.’
• Rake up leaves from ground and especially remove leaves from the top and inside of plants.
• Weed Oxalis and annual blue grass is showing up...keep pulling them up regularly before they bloom!
• Get soil prepared if planting bare-root plants like roses, fruit trees and berries. Better to prepare soil before it gets too wet...bare-root plants go in the ground in a few months when soil might be too wet to work. Mail order companies are taking orders for bare-root plants for winter delivery.
• Still time to plant spring-blooming bulbs...crocus, daffodil, freesia, iris, narcissus and others.
• Sow seeds of spring-blooming annuals such as Clarkia (farewell-to-spring), Nigella (love-in-a-mist) and sweet peas.
• Plant or transplant shrubs, groundcovers and frost-tolerant perennials.
• Still time left to divide perennials like Agapanthus, daylilies and shasta daisies. Pull up plant with shovel or pitchfork, ease roots or bulbs apart. Replant.
• Dig up and divide dahlia tubers if needed.
• Remove spent blossoms on all flowering plants.
• Turn off irrigation once rains begin If a dry winter (no rain for two or three weeks) turn water back on.

Vegetable and Fruit Garden

• Plant bok choy, broccoli, brussels sprout, cabbage, cauliflower, chard, garlic, kale, lettuce and spinach from nursery starts.
• Sow seeds of beet, carrot, onion, pea, radish, swiss chard and turnip.
• Control peach-leaf curl Spray peach and nectarine trees with copper sulfate after leaves fall.
• If not planting a winter garden clean up summer garden,cover with cardboard and add mulch or compost on top. In the spring you will be ready to plant with minimal weeding and soil prep.