What To Plant In November!

This is not a garden plant.

Snow is on the way for many people, limiting what you can plant in November.

You should all move South.  Just for the winter.  You wouldn't like the summers here.

Yesterday I cleared one 4x8 bed of luffa vines.  It must have frosted again on a day when it wasn't expected, because sure as shootin' my basil plant in the garden is all the way dead now.  The basil plants on the porch are ok.  They will be known from now on as the basil plants in the house.

I piled on some old grass clippings and turned it over (the garden, not the basil.)  I dug deeply enough to bring up clay with each shovel full.  

Then I planted...

Volunteer radish gone to seed.

Radishes!  Fresh radishes are sweet and juicy.  If you have had them too spicy to eat, try growing your own and pull them up when they are smaller.  I can't say enough nice thigngs about radishes.  They will grow in rock-hard garden soil with no amendments and no fertilizer.  And they will loosen the garden soil as they grow.  The radishes were a turning point from when I thought I would never get anything to grow.  Then I discovered tasty radish-top soup!  The green plant part is not spicy like the root.

Some old buttercrunch seeds got sprinkled onto the garden bed with the radishes.  I don't expect them to grow.  They are very old seeds so I planted a visible layer of them.  It was a big bag of seeds.

Another bed is in my sights for today because I have sprouted a bunch of beet seeds in a tray.  Beets, like radishes are good at trying to live under the worst garden conditions, but ANYTHING will eat a beet AND it's leaves: deer, rabbits, chickens, people.  These beet plants will need more protection than the tomatoes.  That's IF the birds don't get the seeds first.  They love them more than sunflowers.  Ug. So I sprouted them in a tray first.

All that's left of the arugula after the chickens ate it.

Arugula!  Gardens itself each year: plants itself, chokes out the competing plants, reseeds itself.  It does everything but jump onto my plate!

Collards!  Even if you don't eat them often, New Year's Day is coming and you will need them for money luck!  If you treat these plants badly, they will still grow.  We had neglected collards in a salad one New Year's Day, mixed with our baby lettuce because they were so small.  Worked though!

It's time to plant figs and apples and blueberries and lots of other perennial, fruiting, nutty, woody things.  Peach trees. Plum trees. Pecan trees. 

If you are quick, there is still time to plant strawberries!  They aren't woody, but they are perennial plants and they produce the most fruit after one winter.

Folks call cabbage plants a winter thing here, but I don't get that one.  My cabbage freezes.  But my neighbor's doesn't.  He has a tractor too.  Show off.