Make a plan for your spring and summer gardens during the fall— the previous season’ s learnings will be fresh in your mind and this will allow you to take advantage of Black Friday seed sales!
Wintertime is kale time
As a scientist, I always kept a lab notebook to track my experiments and observations— I strongly encourage gardeners to do the same. Whether on your phone or in a physical notebook, keep simple notes on what you did( at a minimum, what, when, and where in your space you planted) and what worked and what didn’ t for better decision-making next season. Learn what works best under the local conditions of your growing space!
Images by Zoe Davis, Ph. D. and Gilroy • Morgan Hill TODAY
Winter production
Winter’ s greens and root vegetables can be decidedly less exciting / varied than summer’ s bounty as well as take significantly longer to mature in the colder weather and reduced day lengths. Many gardeners take the winter off( when else are you going to go through all of those seed catalogs that have been piling up?!), but USDA zone 9b gardeners can grow yearround. In fact, many root crops( such as carrots, parsnips and beets) taste better when grown in the winter, becoming sweeter as the cold triggers sugar storage.
Vegetables to Plant Now
Alliums:
Green onions, intermediate-day globe onions, leeks, and other alliums. For the biggest bulbs, garlic should typically be in already, but you can still plant them now.
Leafy Greens: Kale, lettuce, chard( all winter) Root Vegetables:
Carrots, beets, radishes, parsnips( variety: Albion)
Brassicas:
Cauliflower, broccoli( try purple and orange varieties for fun colors and extra vitamins!)
Flowers to Plant Now
Orange cauliflower gets its color from the same carotenoids that give sweet potatoes, pumpkins and carrots their orange color. Orange cauliflower originates from a variant found growing in a field in Canada in the 1970s.
Bulbs:
Decorative alliums, Ranunculus corms, tulip bulbs, and daffodils can all go in now.
Winter flowers:
Calendula is your best bet to get cutflower blooms during the winter( beware: calendula produces lots of viable seeds and can spread!). Cool season annuals( snapdragons, larkspur, dianthus, etc.) can be sown outdoors now for production in spring. If you have an indoor seed starting set-up, I find snapdragons to be one of the more challenging flowers to start from seed, wanting to be constantly moist( but not wet!) but needing light( no soil on top!) to germinate. If you don’ t have a good seed-starting set-up, consider buying these as starts in the spring.
If you have chickens and have noticed that their egg production has taken a winter dip, this is normal. In our modern grocery store context, we forget that before artificial lighting, eggs used to be a seasonal item, like peaches or asparagus!!
Chickens require 14-16 hrs of light per day to trigger the hormonal cascade to lay an egg. You can choose to give your hens a winter laying break or use artificial lighting to get winter eggs.
With artificial lighting, your chickens will lay year-round. Whether they let you collect the eggs is a different story altogether …
Note that your lighting should be on a timer( 24 hr lighting is not good for chickens) and you should add light before dawn, not after sunset.
Zoe Davis holds a B. A. in Chemistry, a Ph. D. in Microbiology, and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biochemistry before trading lab benches for garden beds. After years studying microbes in the lab, she moved to Gilroy to work with them in practice— founding Full Circle Farm, a regenerative farm focused on cultivating soil life to grow nutrient-rich produce. The farm uses minimal tillage, cover crops, and lots of mulch to build fertility the natural way. Full Circle Farm offers a CSA with fruit, veggies, eggs, and flowers from April through November and on-farm produce pickups year-round. Learn more at www. fullcirclefarm. eco or follow along on Instagram @ FullCircleFarm _ CA
gmhtoday. com Gilroy • Morgan Hill TODAY Magazine: Go. Make history... WINTER 2026 37