Plan for an El Niño winter, get ahead of peach leaf curl and watch the thermometer inland.
The clocks fell back Sunday, and the after-work hour in the garden went with them. From here to March, most of what gets done out there gets done on weekends.
Plan for a lot of water
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says El Niño keeps getting stronger, and it calls a strong to very strong event likely through the winter. In its Oct. 8 update, it gave 83% odds that October through December comes in stronger than any El Niño since 1950. The center is careful to add that a strong El Niño makes the usual El Niño weather more likely but doesn’t guarantee it.
Get out the map you made in October, the one with the wet spots marked. Those spots are where the water will sit all winter. Don’t put anything there that wants good drainage. If you want to grow vegetables in a soggy corner, build a raised bed and fill it with good soil.
Stay off wet beds. Walking on soaked soil packs it down and squeezes the air out of it, and it can take a season to recover. If you have to cross a bed, lay a board and step on that.
Don’t leave soil bare. Rain carries bare dirt downhill and into the drains. Cover empty beds with straw, leaves, wood chips or a cover crop.
Pull the saucers out from under potted plants that live outside. A pot that sits in a saucer of rainwater all winter rots the roots.
And once the rains settle in, turn off the irrigation timer. It doesn’t know it rained.
Peach leaf curl starts with the tree
If your peach or nectarine came out last spring with red, puckered, curled leaves, that was peach leaf curl. It’s a fungus. It spends the winter on the twigs and buds and gets into the new leaves in a cool, wet spring, and by the time you see it, it’s too late to do anything about it.
The cleanest fix is a tree that doesn’t get it. If you’re planting a peach this winter, UC’s Integrated Pest Management program lists Frost, Indian Free, Muir and Q-1-8 as resistant or partly resistant. Redhaven and most peaches bred from it are tolerant. Kreibich is a resistant nectarine. Frost still needs a fungicide spray for its first two or three years.
For a tree you already have, UC says pruning in the fall cuts down the spores that spend the winter on it.
If the tree got hit hard last spring and you decide to treat it, UC calls copper soap and copper ammonium sprays the least toxic fungicides that work on backyard trees. One spray just after the leaves fall, usually late November in cooler northern parts of the state, generally does it, though UC says a second in late winter is worth considering in a wet year. Cover every twig until it drips. But consider that copper builds up in the soil over years of use and can wash into creeks.
Watch the thermometer inland
In Ukiah, Willits, Laytonville, Anderson Valley and the other inland valleys, November brings the first frosts. The coast gets frost less often, but it does get some.
Citrus is the plant to worry about. UC Cooperative Extension says tender citrus starts taking damage when the temperature sits at 29 degrees for 30 minutes or more. Lemons and limes are the most sensitive. Kumquats and Satsuma mandarins handle cold best.
UC says to clear mulch, weeds and ground cover away from under the tree. Bare, moist soil gives off more heat at night than covered soil, and that heat helps protect the tree. Water the ground before a cold night, too, because damp soil holds heat better than dry.
Wrap the trunks of young trees from the ground to the main branches with cardboard, palm fronds or other insulation. A plastic sheet over the wrapping keeps it dry, but plastic by itself does almost nothing. On a hard-frost night, string holiday lights through the tree. Use the old-style big bulbs. A UC frost handout notes that LED lights don’t give off heat.
If a frost does burn the tree, leave the damage alone until late spring or early summer. By then the new growth shows you what’s dead and what isn’t, and you can cut out the dead wood without taking anything that’s still alive.
Your October map helps here too. Cold air runs downhill and pools in low spots, and the frost pockets you marked are the wrong place for a lemon.
Keep planting
The ground is wet and the sky is doing the watering, so keep going. Garlic and fava beans can still go in if you didn’t get to them in October. So can trees, shrubs and natives. Scatter California poppy and other wildflower seed on bare ground ahead of a rain and let the rain press it in.
Bare-root roses and fruit trees show up at nurseries in winter. Decide now what you want and where it goes, and order early if you want a particular variety.
Leave the leaves
Rake them off the lawn and the paths, where they smother grass and get slick underfoot. Then put them on the beds. A few inches of leaves over bare soil protects it from the rain and feeds it as it breaks down. A pile of leaves left in a corner, wet, turns into leaf mold by next fall, and it’s one of the best things you can dig into a bed.
Clean up fallen fruit and any dried fruit still hanging on the trees, though, and get it out of the garden rather than into the compost.
Slugs and snails
The rain brings them out. Start by taking away the places they hide during the day. UC’s pest note on snails and slugs lists boards, stones, debris, weeds around tree trunks, leafy branches close to the ground and dense ground covers like ivy. Keep the vegetable beds as far from those spots as you can.
Then go out after dark with a flashlight and pick them off. UC suggests watering the area in the late afternoon to draw them out first. A beer trap pulls them in from a few feet around it, as long as it has deep sides and a lid and you refill it every few days.
If you use bait, UC says iron phosphate is safer around children, pets, birds and other wildlife, and some formulations are listed for organic use. Bait alone won’t do the job in a garden full of hiding places.
The rest of the month
Clean, sharpen and oil the pruners and loppers before winter pruning season. Inland, drain the hoses and drip lines before the hard freezes, and bring in terra cotta pots, which crack when wet clay freezes. Watch for gophers. Wet ground is easy digging.
On the coast, the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens in Fort Bragg switches to winter hours in November, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Horticulturist Paul Ruiz-Lopez leads nature walks through the gardens Nov. 7 and 21. Guided walks through the gardens’ mushroom collection start Monday, Nov. 16, and run Mondays through Dec. 21. Admission is free for active-duty military, retirees and veterans Nov. 11 through 13, and the Festival of Lights opens Nov. 27.
The Climate Prediction Center’s next El Niño update is due Nov. 12. Have the gutters clean by then.