Autumn garden planting season hits Sonoma County

With our Mediterranean climate and 300-day growing season, we can harvest fresh food from our gardens all year around. But only if we plan and plant a fall and winter garden, and the time to do that is right now.

Just as April and May are the right months to plant your spring and summer garden, now is the time to plan and plant your fall and winter garden. Crops for the spring and summer garden take advantage of the heat and intense sunlight of June through August, but crops for the fall and winter garden are those that like cool weather, long nights, and even a kiss of frost.

Whenever possible, adopt a cut-and-come-again policy toward harvesting fall garden crops. So if you grow lettuce, pick off a couple of individual leaves from each plant to make your salad, rather than harvest the whole plant. Do this with other green, leafy plants like kale, collards and spinach. That way, the root and crown stay alive and continue to grow more leaves over a long period of time.

Some crops “sweeten up” as the weather turns cold. Cabbage family members like kale, collards and Chinese greens convert some of their starches into sugars when frosts nip them. Some root crops do, too, especially parsnips.

And when winter frosts arrive, use fallen leaves to cover lettuce beds and the plants will weather the frosts under the mulch.

For goodness sake, don’t throw away fallen leaves. Rake them up and store them dry in big plastic leaf and lawn bags. They are “pennies from heaven,” full of nutrients, ready to be used as mulch to protect tender food and ornamental plants over the winter, and a great ingredient in a compost pile.

Some crops don’t need to be pulled and stored in the house or shed.

They will store perfectly fine right in the ground. Carrots, turnips, rutabagas, and even beets will store in the garden, although beets will benefit from a mulch of leaves in December and January.

A fall garden plan begins with your own taste. What do you like to eat? What are you willing to grow, because gardening takes time and effort (but the rewards are great)? Keep the garden to a manageable size.

You can grow a lot of food in an area 10 by 10 feet. That’s 100 square feet, meaning you could pack 100 plants into that space.

Double that for two adults and kids.

If you live where the deer roam, you’ll need to enclose the garden with deer fencing.

Raised beds made of a wooden frame with hardware cloth tacked to the bottom will keep out the gophers, or dig a trench and line it with hardware cloth that protrudes on both sides of the trench at least six inches above the soil level, then fill it with compost.

And if your garden is invaded by wild turkeys, they might scratch up your beds hunting for worms, so if they are a problem, keep them out with bird netting.

We’re blessed with a wide variety of wildlife here, but your garden resembles a smorgasbord to many of them.

Be aware that some crops for fall and winter use have to be sown in the early spring to early summer.

These include winter squash like butternut, delicata and acorn; long-season cabbage family crops like Brussels sprouts, cabbage heads and cauliflower, as well as storage onions.

When it comes to finding ?nonGMO, heirloom seeds, head down to Petaluma, and at the intersection of Washington Street and Petaluma Boulevard North, you’ll find The Seed Bank in the old 1920s-era bank building, brimming with 1,800 of Baker Creek Seed Co.’s heirloom varieties.

Visit them online at http://www.rareseeds.com/get-to-know-baker-creek/petaluma-seed-bank/.

Or peruse seeds from Territorial Seed Co., a firm that carries varieties expressly chosen for coastal Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.

You can visit them online at www.TerritorialSeed.com, or call 800-626-0866 and ask to get on the mailing list for their seed catalogs.

Use the accompanying chart to select varieties for your fall and winter garden.