November Veggie Gardening Tips Sacramento
November Veggie Gardening Tips Sacramento
(Zone 9b Sacramento, CA – Prepare for winter Garden and Review Garden Journal, Cleaning Up Summer Garden)
In November, it is time to prepare your garden for the winter. You may have a fall garden going on, but a lot of your garden is probably going to be fallow during the very coldest months – as it should be. Sacramento, CA (Zone 9b) is very warm compared to much of the rest of the country, but it is still liable to freeze once or twice during the season. Unless you have a greenhouse, only a few kinds of plants will survive through the winter. The most effective thing you can do right now is mulch, compost, and feed the soil with nutrients so it will be ready to grow again in the spring. Check out this blog post on winter gardening in Sacramento, it might give you a few ideas on what exactly you can plant.
Garden Compost
Almost all the plant material in your garden can go to feed the compost. It will decompose and turn into gorgeous nutrition for your garden in the next few months. Notice, however, that we said almost all plant material can be composted. There is one super important rule to keep in mind: don’t compost anything you don’t want to see again. This means that you need to avoid putting diseased plants in the compost, as well as weed seeds.
The Composting Process
The composting process includes the decomposing plants putting off a lot of heat, which gets the inside of the compost pile very hot. However, it might still not be hot enough to kill off pathogens or weed seeds. It is safest to burn weeds that have gone to seed, or to bag them up and send them off with your trash service.
DO NOT PUT SEEDS IN YOUR COMPOST!
Even with plants that you do want to see again, be careful of putting seeds in your compost. They are likely to show up as volunteers all over your garden next year. This is especially true of tomatoes. They are hardy and prolific and wonderful, and if you throw a couple rotten tomatoes in your compost during your harvest season you are almost guaranteed to have tomato volunteers in places in your garden where you definitely did not plan on growing tomatoes.
