It’s the last Friday of September, a beautiful sunny day, and Master Gardener Autumn Gonzalez is tending to the raised vegetable garden at a client’s home on Monroe Avenue, near downtown Lafayette. Time for these plants, though, is running out.
Pretty weather aside, summer is over, says Autumn, a Lafayette resident and owner of Homegrown, a boutique gardening service that helps clients plan, plant and maintain raised garden beds and other container gardens.
“This is the last week for these,” she says, pointing to the tomato and other vegetable plants. “Most of this is coming out next week.”
Did you plant a vegetable garden this summer?
It would be easy to sit back and bask in the hope that the final green tomatoes on the vine will soon turn red. But that would mean missed opportunity.
Winter, says Autumn, is a perfect time to plant a “salad bowl” garden.
“Instead of letting it go fallow and be bare, in the winter you can have a winter garden,” says Autumn. “Most winter gardens are like a huge salad bowl. So you can have kale, swiss chard, all kinds of fun lettuces, where you can go out daily and cut leaves to make a delicious salad for your family.”
That starts, she says, with clearing out the summer plants and taking stock – how much space do you have and how do you want to use it? The biggest yield is with lettuces, but there are other choices:
“You can plant bigger things like broccoli or cauliflower and you’ll get one head of broccoli or cauliflower with some small side shoots. So, depending on how much space you have — and a lot of us have a lot of space – you can have both.”
Have you noticed how popular container gardens have become? Feeding the family from garden-to-table is increasingly a part of the Lafayette lifestyle dream, and homebuyers are looking for it.
“Most buyers have an area for container gardens on their wish list,” says Dana Green, Lamorinda’s top-producing Realtor. “They dream of growing produce with their families and raised beds provide the perfect contained venue for doing so.”
Good news: We’re seeing many homes come on the market that already have raised gardens. Even when the beds are older or in need of repair, their presence provides a starting footprint for upgraded ones, says Autumn.
This week, two Lafayette homes listed by Dana and currently available in Lafayette have raised beds. The home at 5 Chelton Court, in Orinda, has five, as well as fruit trees and grape vines.
Are you still undecided whether you’ll plant a winter garden this year?
Here’s the trade-off: You can wait another month and eek out a few more red tomatoes and wait for spring to plant again, or you can plan for your winter harvest, pick your remaining vegetables now and search online for recipes that use them. Yes – even the green tomatoes.
Some of us believe you can never eat too much salad, but if you think that your garden will produce more than you’ll be able to eat, consider spreading out the harvest throughout the winter by using “progressive” planting.
Says Autumn: “Plant some lettuces now, and then plant more in a month. That way you’ll have lettuces all through the winter.”
You can control the planting decisions – but not the calendar. If you want to grow your own salad greens this winter, start to ready your containers and raised beds now for that winter harvest.
Just imagine the garden to table winter salad possibilities. Yum.
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