What To Plant In October!

Plant some LETTUCE already!

CILANTRO!

Lettuce plant some cilantro and dill.  Lettuce plant some broccoli and turnips.  Lettuce plant some royal oak leaf lettuce, tatsoi, mizuna and red romaine. (Red romaine will happily grow in the lawn.  Ask me how I know.)  Lettuce plant some Lola Rosa Lettuce! Lettuce! Lettuce!  Plant some already!

It's such a great time of year to plant.  You can go out in the sun without becoming a crispy critter.  It rains often enough that watering is minimal.  Even if you just go out into the rain and throw seeds onto the garden, they will usually come up.  We'll get back to that in a minute.


It's also a great time to find free organic matter to add to your garden.  Leaves are THE BEST.  If you suck them up with the lawn mower, they will be chopped into smaller pieces.  Smaller pieces mean faster composting.  I just dump them straight unto to garden and turn them under.  Ain't Nobody Got Time For That composting stuff.


There is one sneaky vegetable that...
jumps ship into the lawn.  It's the kind of vegetable that appears so docile and friendly, but is constantly giving my trouble: That wascally carrot.  For some reason the seeds wash out of the garden and into the grass where they have too much competition to make carrots and only ever look stringy and weak.  This happens more often when I have top dressed with mulch.  Seems like that would keep them down, but no.  Beware the wandering carrot.  The silver lining is: if it has come up in the lawn, some probably came up in the garden too.  This year I emptied an old seed packet onto a mound of clay I had just turned over while burying some grass clippings.  I went back to plant the bed and saw little stringy things all over it - carrots.  These seeds were o-l-d. 

Sneaky Carrots

Did the same with some parsley ( same family.)  The seeds were 6 years old.  I had tried sprouting them with all the professional tricks and they had not sprouted so when I saw the sprouts I thought some composted plant had come back from the dead.  Then there were more so I thought maybe I had thrown some rotten tomatoes in that bed.  They have pointy seedling leaves too.  But I've said it a thousand times: Rain will make things sprout like nothing else can.  And it sure did.  Right in the bed with all the fire ants.  

How many years have I been doing this?  And still I go out to the garden and try to figure out what I planted.