Here in western Washington November is when our rainy season really sets in. I don't know about you, but I tend to plan my gardening tasks according to the weather. Is it going to be dry today? Great! Outside I go to do one of the many tasks on my gardening to-do list. Is it going to dump buckets of rain, some of it going sideways? Then today looks like a great day to work on my garden plans for next season, catalog my seeds, drool over seed catalogs online, or read one of the gardening books that I've been meaning to read all summer.
Here is my gardening to-do list for November:
* Plant garlic and over-wintering onions (usually around November 4th, which happens to be my oldest daughter's birthday so it's easy to remember!)
* Prune the grape vines
* Come up with a game plan for pruning the fruit trees (often by staring at them from the warmth & comfort of my dining room table while drinking coffee)
* Plant my pre-sprouted ranunculus and anemones corms.
* Drool over all the dahlia tubers that go on sale and try not to purchase one of every variety!
* Clean out any dead plants from the garden & flower beds; trim back perennials
* Apply a healthy layer of compost to my beds that are done producing. Our daughters raise rabbits as their 4H projects and the rabbits happily produce a lot of manure which is nutrient-packed, but not "hot" (won't burn my plants). Rabbit manure is the primary compost and fertilizer in our garden.
* Put together my seeding plan for vegetables and flowers, go through my seeds (if I haven't already done so) and figure out which ones I'll need more of for the next season
* Keep an eye out for seed catalogs in the mail (and I also order a lot of my seeds in November once the companies release their new seeds)
* Review all the notes that I took during the growing season
This fall I'm trying out four season harvesting, a la Eliot Coleman of Four Season Farms. I have hardy greens growing under floating row cover (think light weight fabric that is lightly laying over the row) and some lettuce under low tunnels. My goal is for us to have greens of some sort all winter long. I also attempted to fall seed cool season flowers and biennials, but discovered that I may have started them too late. Time will tell how well both of these endeavors work!
Growing flowers and food crops is often a lesson in trial and error. My red onions did not bulb well last summer, so I decided to try a few as over wintered onions along with my Walla Walla sweets. At my latitude I plant long-day onions but even the long-day red variety I planted didn't do well. I think that I will purchase my onion seeds from companies whose seed farms are closer to my latitude - they should do well here if they bulb well there, right? A friend also told me a her trick for getting the onions to bulb - once the starts are established, make a well around the plant so it has room to bulb.
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