What Can I Plant This Season?

As the temp drops and it really is time to get those scraggly tomato plants out of the ground, it’s time to look forward to the second season.  Fall is the ideal time to start the next round of food in the ground.

If you’re like me and didn’t start any seedlings in July, head to your local nursery and pick up some starts for some of your favorite foods.  Gardening for me is always about the food. When looking at the array of greens available at nurseries I visualize the stirfrys and bowls of steamed vegetables.  I try to stick to stuff I know my family will eat, but I also like to throw in something new.

In the East Bay we have the best of all worlds.  Our summers are ideal for sub tropical annuals like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and corn.  Our winters are like the spring of the north and are perfect for cole crops like broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, spinach and chard as well as root crops like carrots, beets, onions, garlic, turnips and parsnips.  If you take a moment to think about the origins of the food you want to eat you can tell what time of year you can grow it here.

Another way to think about which plants should go in the ground is to look at the way the plant is designed. Fall is a perfect time to plant foods that put most of their energy into their roots away from damaging frost, or have flexible rubbery leaves whose cells expand instead bursting. All of the cole crops have that type of leaf, tomatoes and other nightshades do not.

Before I plant my garden I concentrate on what I want out of it. If I want lots of kale chips, green salads and soup, I actually label the beds with those foods.  Being even more specific with what kind of soup I’m planting, I might label the bed, borsht, minestrone, and broccoli soup which would all look very different from my summer garden which is full of salsas, pizza, and corn dishes.  

Kids often ask how can you grow pizza or soup?  I find it’s a great lesson connecting the foods they eat with their origins. “Why can’t we grow pepperoni and cheese?”  is almost always the next question. It amazes me how disconnected we are from our food.  

When everything we eat comes from far away, neatly cleaned, trimmed and wrapped in plastic, it’s easy to see how the disconnect happens, but it astounds me just how deep that disconnect can be for some people.  One middle school girl when seeing me pull a potato out of bag to wash and grate for a latke shrieked, “Ewww! What’s that brown thing and why does it have dirt on it!?”  She had never seen a whole potato that wasn’t a fry, tater tot, or instant mashed.  Her disconnect was just a step further than most who have never seen an entire potato plant and can’t imagine what a potato flower looks like. If you don’t either, check out this article and picture of potato flowers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato  
You might think that since potatoes are a root crop (or rather we think of them as such, even though we eat the tubers, not the roots) and that they should be planted now. Unfortunately, they are also a nightshade and need to wait until spring to get in the ground, because their leaves and stems have cells that burst in the frost.  Saint Patrick’s day is a good time to plant those here.

I always hesitate pulling the last of the squash and tomatoes with some false hope that I could possibly get some more ripe ones. Then I remember the bursting cells and know that leaving them out there just delays getting the kale in the ground.  I also happily remember that now is the perfect time for fried green tomatoes! Slice, dip in a beaten egg, roll in crushed corn flakes or crushed crackers and fry ‘em up. Mouthwateringly delicious.