Newsletter Articles
Fall is the Best Season for Planting in SoCal
Written by Kelsey W.
The fall is a unique time in Southern California versus other areas of the country because it often feels like we get an endless summer here with only the occasional dip into cooler temperatures until winter rolls along.
However, when the mornings do turn crisp, and we trade our bathing suits and flip-flops for jackets and sneakers, that doesn’t mean we need to turn in and abandon our gardens, too.
In fact, the fall is one of the best seasons for getting things done in the garden, especially when it comes to refreshing your flower beds, adding new plants to your home, and making your plants happy over the winter.
Let’s go over some of the reasons fall is the best season for planting in SoCal, and some of the important tasks you can handle this autumn to ensure the health and longevity of your home’s beautiful greenery.
What Makes Fall a Great Season for Planting?
When the weather cools off, completing gardening tasks just feels easier, but did you know that there are some specific reasons the autumn is a better season for planting than other seasons?
1. Cooler Temperatures Mean Less Stress for Plants
It’s common to bring new plants home in the spring when it feels like everything is about to bloom, which is fine for annuals and some vegetables, but the fall is actually a better time for planting young things, especially when you’re thinking about adding a tree or something small that must create a healthy root system to thrive.
For example, when it comes to the citrus trees for which the Southland is famous, the best time to add a citrus tree to your home is actually in the fall. You can grow an orange, lemon, or grapefruit tree in your yard pretty easily in SoCal, especially when you start their journey in the fall.
The biggest reason to plant your citrus tree in the fall is that your tree will get to enjoy a few seasons of rest before the next summer growing season begins. While you can certainly start your citrus tree from a seed, there’s a good chance you’ll buy a small tree from your local Southern California garden center.
As such, your new baby tree will need to get used to its new surroundings in your yard. If you bring your tree home in the summer when the heat is on, the tree might get stressed, especially as it’s trying to get its root system established and become a healthy tree.
The key is to plant your tree in the fall when it doesn’t need to deal with the searing temperatures of a Southern California summer. The tree can focus on growing long, luxurious roots during the fall and winter without the stress of trying to grow a bunch of leaves to soak up the summer sun.
The fall is also a great time to plant shrubs around your home. The same concept applies to shrubs as it does to citrus trees. Rather than fighting the summer sun to get established as they might in the spring and summer, your shrubs will spend a quiet autumn and winter getting their roots established.
Your new shrub friends will get used to their new surroundings, so they’re well-prepared to greet the next growing season when their stress levels will increase alongside the temperatures of summer. Some excellent options include California lilac, coyote bush, and coffeeberry plants.
2. Fall Planting Takes Less Water to Get Plants Established
The blisteringly hot summers often require us to use extra water to keep our plants alive, especially during periods of excessive heat and dryness. Not only can these conditions cause unnecessary stress for new plants, but it can also take quite a lot of water to keep young plants alive since they might not have established root systems.
After a few years under the sun, most plants that are acclimatized to the conditions of Southern California have roots that help keep the plant hydrated when there isn’t a lot of natural rainfall. New plants don’t have these root systems, which means you might need to use several extra watering cans to keep your young plants alive when you put them in the ground in the middle of the summer.
Getting plants established in the fall may offer a more affordable way to beautify your home because you’ll use less water to keep them alive, as well as a more ecologically friendly way to spruce up your yard with fewer gallons of water used to keep your home green.
3. Fall is a More Comfortable Time for Planting Your Garden
Not only is the fall a better season for getting your plants healthy and established, but it’s also a great time to do yard work without the hot sun overhead. Sure, we do get hot spells throughout the fall, but they also come with cooler nighttime temperatures and gradually decreasing daytime temperatures.
Significant yard projects like planting new trees, redoing the flower beds, and getting all the weeds out from around the bushes take a lot of time and effort, and getting those tasks done when the temperature isn’t crazy hot makes the whole process that much easier.
Sure, we do trade the long summer nights and the extra sun for less daylight in the fall, but there’s still plenty of sunlight to tend to your garden, whether it’s setting up some beautiful fall container plants on your balcony or getting all the old weeds out of the cactus garden.
4. It’s easier to Clean the Weeds Out of Autumn Soil
During the summer, you might notice that weeds have a tendency to take over some parts of your yard, whether it’s the random weeds growing in the middle of your lawn or the surprise weeds crowding your vegetable plants in your garden.
It’s all too easy to avoid the not fun yet necessary job of weeding and cleaning up our yards during the summer when temperatures are high, and the fall is the ideal season to get ahead of all those weeds, especially because they probably won’t return for several months after you pluck them out of the ground.
Weeds that tend to proliferate in the summer will start to wane once they don’t get as much sun in the fall, and they won’t be as strong and thick as they begin to fade with the season. As such, those once-sturdy weeds will be much easier to pull, which can help you make room for any plants you’ve decided to add to your home in the autumn.
5. Autumn Plants Give Pollinators Essential Support
We’ve all heard about the important jobs of pollinators and how urban sprawl has reduced the habitats of essential beings like birds, butterflies, bees, and moths. During the winter months when fewer plants bloom, pollinators may find it difficult to survive, but fall flowers and plants can help with the shortage.
Sure, Southern California does have a milder climate than other areas of the country where snow blankets the earth and virtually every flower disappears for months, but we still do experience seasonal changes here. Adding plants that naturally flower in the fall and into the winter can prove extremely beneficial to local populations of pollinators.
One of the easiest ways to welcome pollinators to your home in the fall is to plant some chrysanthemums since you’ll enjoy their blooms all season. There are some native and social-friendly plants that are also excellent for pollinators.
For example, Copper Canyon daisies and Mexican sage are ideal for planting in the early fall to bring out the beautiful color in your garden, as well as give those essential pollinators some enjoyment. Fragrant herbs like lavender, sage, and oregano are also a welcome sight for pollinators.
6. Cooler Soil is Better for Young Plants
You’re probably aware that freezing soil temperatures can prevent the growth of healthy plants. After all, there aren’t a lot of big green bushy plants growing in the arctic tundra, right? Well, the same is true for soil that’s too hot.
If the soil around your plants heats up too much, the temperature can cause an imbalance of the beneficial soil organisms underground. Plants can get stressed with hot soil just as much as when the soil is too cold.
Having the correct soil temperature is critical for seed germination, but even if you’re not growing your plants from seeds, it’s important to make sure you’re planting when the soil temperature is at a beneficial level, which is often during the fall in Southern California.
When you put a new, young plant into the ground, one of your goals is to ensure healthy root growth. When the soil is too hot, the root growth might actually slow down, just as it would if the soil was too cold. Therefore, planting in the fall with cooler soil temperatures can mean stronger root growth versus the summer when root growth could slow down because of heat, stress, and hot soil.
Fall Project Ideas for Autumn Gardening
Do you want to take advantage of the fall planting season this year? Here are some ideas for your autumn planting and gardening projects.
Make Your Yard Smell Amazing with Herbs
A fragrant herb garden sounds very much like something you’d read about in a novel about the 19th century, where someone might step outside their kitchen and choose a few fragrant herbs to add to their family’s meal in the evening.
You definitely don’t need to live in a past century to have a fragrant herb garden outside your home. Not only can you grow some amazing herbs in SoCal for use in your cooking recipes, but the fall is an ideal time to get those plants established around your home.
You can actually plant herbs in the spring, too, but if your home is in one of the milder areas of SoCal and you don’t get frosts during the winter, the fall is the perfect time to get these beautifully fragrant plants growing. Options include lavender, rosemary, and chives, all of which grow beautifully in Southern California.
The great thing about an herb garden is that you can enjoy it whether you have a balcony, a porch, or a huge yard. Herbs grow wonderfully in pots, as well as in small patches of garden on the side of your home. As long as it’s a mild fall, you can start your herbs at any time in the autumn.
Do You Have an Avocado Tree? Pay Attention in the Fall!
If you’re one of the lucky Southern California residents with an avocado tree in your yard, fall is an important time to make sure that your avocado tree remains happy and in good shape. Your avo tree may drop a few extra leaves in the fall, but that’s no reason to become alarmed.
You should expect a few extra leaves on the ground from your tree as September and October roll on. If your avocado tree is just reaching the point where it’s starting to produce fruit, remember that the fruit will not ripen when they’re attached to the tree. You need to pluck them off the tree and let them ripen on your counters inside.
To keep your avocado tree healthy over the winter, autumn is the ideal time to make sure the roots are protected with a nice layer of mulch. The difficult part of keeping your tree happy is making sure the roots don’t get too hot (with the mulch) but also making sure that the ground isn’t soggy either.
It’s a bit of a balance, but a happy avo tree is a bountiful tree and well worth the time it takes to keep it happy!
The fall is also a good time to pay some attention to your fig trees, should you have one or more of them around your home. These popular SoCal trees need some trimming in the fall after you’ve harvested their final fruits of the season. If you don’t have a fig tree, fall is a great time to bring one home.
Continue Your Family’s Vegetable Garden in the Fall
If you’ve spent the summer enjoying your vegetable garden, don’t assume that the fun is over once the fall arrives and the winter is on its way. With the mild temperatures throughout the Southwest and especially near the coast, the fall is the ideal time to get that second season of vegetables growing.
The theme of your fall garden will most likely be leafy vegetables, since just about any sort of lettuce, kale, or cruciferous vegetable will love the cool Southern California weather as our season turns from the hot summer into the cool autumn.
Maybe you can time your leafy greens to appear right when everyone makes their New Year’s resolutions to eat healthily! If you want to enjoy fresh green salads throughout the fall, try growing a combination of romaine lettuce, spinach, and iceberg lettuce. These three work wonderfully together, especially with a second crop of tomatoes
(Your tomato plants will probably produce a second harvest in the fall if you had them planted in the summer)
Just make sure that you’re not harvesting the entire plant when you’re making a salad. You never want to cut off more than about a third of the leaves, since the plant needs those leaves for photosynthesis and growing more leaves.
Wait to pick leaves until your leafy green plant has enough leafy goodness that you can leave behind each time you harvest more leaves. This goes for any sort of leafy green, whether it’s kale or romaine. Also, make sure you plant them where they’ll get a lot of sun.
It’s important to consider the position of the sun in the fall and into the winter. Do you have a north-facing wall? It might not get enough sun in the winter to support your vegetable garden. Try an east- or west-facing wall for your fall vegetable garden so your plants will get enough sun. A southern-facing wall is great, too, for maximum fall and winter sun exposure.
Celebrate Autumn with Green Thumb Nursery
Now that summer vacation is over and all our fall favorites are arriving, the time is ripe for having fun sprucing up the yard, your porch, or your balcony. Take a trip to your local Green Thumb Nursery in Southern California for all the fall-themed garden fun you can handle. We can help you update your yard, beautify your garden, or get started on updating your home’s beautiful plants.
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