Preparing Your Plants and Garden for Fall in California

Fall is finally here in the Bay Area! The leaves are beginning to change color, temperatures are dropping, and the daylight hours are shorter. Can you feel it? Now is the time to prepare your plants for the cooler months right around the corner. The best practices I want to share with you are perfect for milder climates that experience light (or occasionally hard) frost like we see in California. To set you up for success in the spring, let’s dig into my expert tips for fall garden preparation and planting. 

Preparation For Planting in the Fall

Contrary to popular belief, fall (not spring) is the best time to plant. The season’s shorter daylight hours and cooler evening temperatures coupled with warm, sunny days allow plants to root deeply and grow strong. Then, in just 10 months, the sun will peak and the stresses of summer will be upon us again.

Now that you know it’s the ideal time to prepare your garden for fall, it’s tempting to run to your local garden center and be wowed at every corner. Before you do that, let’s look into how to decide on the best plant varieties to buy for your fall garden.

Fall Plant Selection for Garden Health

If you’re in the Bay Area like myself, I recommend that you choose California and Mediterranean native plants adapted to our summer-dry climate. The benefit of opting for climate-appropriate plants is less maintenance, care, and pest problems… all good things!

Here’s how to choose the perfect ornamental plants for your garden:

  • Do your homework so you can plant the right plant in the right place

  • Match plants to the conditions of the garden to keep them from being stressed and susceptible to pests

  • Match the mature size of the plant to the space available

  • Avoid overcrowding

  • Group plants by the plant’s water and sunlight needs once established

Fall Food Crop Selection for a Bountiful Harvest 

Fall is also a great time to plant food crops in your garden. The evenings are cool yet the days are warm, making it ideal for your plants’ root zones to become established. 

During this time, I suggest sowing:

  • Pea seeds

  • Alliums (garlic, onions, shallots)

  • Brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, bok choy)

  • Leafy greens (chard, kale, lettuce)

  • Leafy herbs (cilantro, parsley, dill)

  • Spring blooming bulbs (iris, lilies, tulips)

  • Deer and gopher-resistant bulbs (allium, crocus, daffodils, grape hyacinth, snowdrops)

For planting calendars based on your area, check local Master Gardener sites or your local garden stores!

Building and Protecting Your Soil

Once you have your plants and crops picked out, it’s time to focus on sowing them correctly so they can build a strong, healthy root zone. When the foundation is strong, your plants can thrive as they mature.

If you have a store-bought plant in a container, take it out and massage the roots. This encourages them to grow out and down instead of within the shape of the container. 

When you go to plant it, dig out the soil only to the depth of the root ball… no deeper! Why? It adds air to the soil and there is the potential for the root ball to settle, which isn’t good for your plant. Next, backfill the hole with native soil mixed with compost. Before you add mulch on top, make sure your plant is slightly above the soil so the mulch doesn’t sit on the base or crown of the plant.

Use Compost to Build

Fall and winter are great times to think about building healthy soil so your plants can thrive in the spring. An essential component of this is compost. 

Add compost to your existing soil to build up your plants’ root zones. You can also top dress around the drip line of your plants with a 1-2 inch layer of compost. This turns your soil into a sponge to encourage rainwater to seep into the ground instead of run off. It also helps your soil hold onto the water between rainstorms.

Use Mulch to Protect

Soil doesn’t like to be bare. It becomes vulnerable to erosion, wind, and hydrophobia. Happy soil is covered soil!

Mulch reduces runoff by slowing water down, aiding in watering infiltration. It also significantly lessens evaporation, soil compaction, and erosion. 

Other benefits of mulch include:

  • Regulates the soil temperature

  • Prevents weed germination

  • Feeds the soil

  • Provides a habitat for beneficial insects

Whether you use wood chips, straw, newspaper, or another organic material, mulch is the ultimate garden hack for healthy plants. 

Consider Growing Cover Crops

Want the best of both worlds? Plant cover crops to build and protect your soil over the winter.

Inexpensive cover crops like fava beans, clovers, or ryegrass are perfect for planting in unused vegetable garden beds. They protect and feed your soil microbes, replenish nitrogen, attract the beneficials, improve soil structure, and enhance water-holding capacity.

Fall Garden Tasks That Help Pollinators

Once the warm temperatures of summer subside, it’s important to provide the beneficial insects with protection. Simple efforts often have the biggest impact.

Leave the Leaves

One of the easiest things to do (or not) for the pollinators is to leave the leaves on the ground. Be a lazy gardener! I recommend this practice because it:

  • Provides a habitat for native insects and wildlife

  • Creates natural mulch for your garden

  • Allows the leaves to break down naturally and feed the soil

Let Plants Complete Lifecycle

As odd as your plants look drying out and going to seed, this is important for your garden’s ecosystem and beyond.

When you wait to prune until early spring, you allow wildlife to survive during the winter off the nuts, seeds, and berries of your dying plants. Certain plants – like Japanese anemones and clematis – also provide nesting materials for birds.

Don’t Fully Prune Hollow Stemmed Plants

If you have plants with hollow stems – such as many perennials like Rudbeckia and Shasta daisies and annuals like sunflowers and zinnias – don’t fully prune them! Instead of pruning back your plants, leave about 18 inches of stalk.

The reason you do this is because many of our native bees lay eggs in the dried-out stems. Then in the spring, they hatch. This is just one way we can each do our part to save the bees.

Ways We Can Grow Together

It’s tempting to want your garden to look picture-perfect. Leaving the leaves and not pruning back plant stalks disrupts that. But I want you to remember that the benefits of (not) doing these things in your garden extend far beyond aesthetics. 

Fall garden preparation requires thoughtfulness and resilience. By carefully selecting the right plants for your garden and building a strong foundation with healthy soil, come spring, it will be beaming with new life!

If you want even more resources to prepare your garden for the cooler California months, dig into the blogs below:

Suzanne Bontempo