October Gardening Chores For The Pacific Northwest

This is a great month to order bare root fruit trees and shrubs! I like Raintree for stuff like this.

If you didn’t get a garlic order in or save your own seed cloves, hit up your local farmer’s market and try to buy some hardneck garlic to plant now. My favorite variety is Music because the cloves are huge, but most of the hardnecks have great flavor.

Using low tunnels or cloches can extend your harvest of cool season tolerant crops for weeks or months. If you don’t have cloches, buy or scrounge up the stuff you need to make them. We use PVC pipe hoops and greenhouse-quality plastic for 6-8 week season extension and year-round weather protection.

Read more: The Keep It Simple Guide To Cloches

Don’t want to invest in greenhouse plastic? The 4 or 6 mil painter’s plastic at your local big box is pretty effective but you’ll get, at best, 2 to 3 years from it before the UV degrades it into uselessness.

Another great way to keep your garden in better shape over winter is with mulch. In the Maritime Northwest, most of our soil compaction happens in the winter, when pounding rain drives the soil into a dense, waterlogged mess.

Cover any open soil in your garden with almost anything – straw or leaves or cardboard or a nice cool weather cover crop – and you’ll help protect your precious, precious soil structure. Trust me, when you go in to plant your spring crops, you’ll be glad you did.

Plant Outside

At this time of year, nearly everything you sow directly outside is an overwintering gamble. I’m not saying this to discourage you – there is much to be said for direct sowing in the cool of fall and harvesting earlier than anyone else in your neighborhood next spring. 

But overwintering is a technique for the patient. Do not assume that you can sow carrots now and harvest them in 60 days, no matter what the seed package might suggest. That’s just not how cool weather gardening works. But if you want a shot at garden fresh carrots in, say, May, overwintering is the technique for you.

• Garlic – The sooner you sow it, the bigger the cloves will get.
  
• Legumes – Overwintering peas and favas. In a mild winter they’ll start blooming very early in spring. In a cold winter, they can be killed back.
  
• Late and overwintering greens – if you are using cloches, greenhouses or other season extension techniques, you can put in a direct-sown crop of fast-growing greens like winter lettuce, mache, arugula, mustard greens, spinach etc. and expect to harvest late this year. Without season extension, much of what you sow out may not really grow a whole lot this year, but may size up beautifully very early next spring, before anything spring-sown could possibly mature.
  
• Overwintering root crops – you can also experiment with overwintering carrots, beets and other root crops. I’ve found October sown root crops are generally harvestable around May of the next year. Bonus! You’ll avoid peak times for root maggots and other pests.

Transplant Out

It’s a bit late, but if you have any lingering starts kicking around – chard, kale, broccoli, lettuces, etc. – and you have a spot for them, why not stick them in the ground and see how they do? Get them under a cloche and they’ll probably be ok.

Harvest

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m super happy to be in the slower, less urgent days of fall harvest. But that doesn’t mean we lack for stuff to pick! Here’s what you might reasonably be harvesting in October:

• Asian Greens
• Broccoli & Cauliflower
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Chard
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Lettuce and Greens
• Peppers
• Potatoes
• Radishes
• Tomatoes
• Winter Squash
• Apples
• Pears
• Late plums
• Fall Raspberries

Maintenance

There’s this song parents sing to their young toddlers: “Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere. Clean up, clean up, everybody do your share.”

This time of year when I look out at the squash vines, cucumbers and the tomatoes on the verge of collapse, that pre-school song runs through my head. It’s clean-up time!

• Weed – focus limited time and attention on yanking creeping perennials like bindweed or horsetail. These types of weeds are totally unphased by our winter, and will come up in spring stronger than ever. After that, yank annuals that are about to spread their seed (literally!) all over your garden.
• Prune and pull – Anything past its seasonal prime, like squash vines, tomato vines, or corn stalks, and anything that looks sick (mildew on leaves, dark blotches on stems, signs of rot, unmanageable insect pressure or damage….anything like that needs to go.)
• Water – At this point, even though the big rains aren’t back, it’s so cool and there is enough ground moisture that I don’t need to water. If you have a lot of your garden in pots or under cover, keep up with watering.
• Start a new compost pile if needed to handle the end-of-season debris.
• Cover crop (at this point select a very fast germinating option) or deep mulch to protect soil structure through the winter.
• As you wind the garden down, think about what worked and what didn’t. What do you want to change for next year? What was easy and rewarding? What was hard or just a big flop? What do you want to change for next year?
• Consider soil preparation you can do now that will make it easier next spring. If you have chickens, rotate them into beds that finish producing and you’ll benefit from the chicken triple threat of insect and weed reduction, nitrogen addition, and soil loosening. If you don’t have chickens – think about loosening your soil gently with a garden fork or a thick overwintering sowing of daikon radish in addition to fall mulching.
• If you’ve sown a fall and winter crop of veg, set up your cloche or season extension systems now.

How is your fall garden looking?