November In-Season Harvest Picks and Gardening Guide

When a fall harvest comes after an unusually long warm season, you will often see a few summer fruits and vegetables still around including eggplant, tomato and strawberries. Common vegetables in any fall harvest include parsnips, onions and brussels sprouts, and the market for gourds, squashes and pumpkins will be flooded with beautiful specimens. Head down to your local farmers market for the best, since they usually sell the first pick.

Keep the smashing pumpkin hoodlums away to you can make sure you get your pumpkins in from your Halloween Jack-O-Lanterns so they can be turned into luscious pumpkin pie.

Gardening in November: Grow Indoors or Prepare for Frost

Gardening in November may be nearly nonexistent, depending on your location. Outdoor garden activities in November can range from protecting existing plants from the coming frost to planting native plants that are hardy through the winter to fill in your landscaping in the coming growing season of spring.

Avid gardeners who have switched to an indoor setup during the cold season to keep their green thumb polished will continue to see a great deal of growth in their indoor container gardens. Because many climates are too cold for any new plants to survive the chill and frost in fall, you either need to have a protected greenhouse or indoor container garden to grow any veggies during this season. Areas where winter is mild and weather is temperate may be able to do some gardening.

One big thing to watch out for in the November fall indoor garden scene is a lack of light in your window-lit gardens. Whereas you were able to rely on window light during the bright season of winter, the fading length of days in the fall will mean that you likely need to supplement natural light with a simple incandescent or fluorescent light setup.

A supplemental fluorescent light setup can be as simple as a few full-spectrum light bulbs placed about 6 inches to a foot from the plant, depending on how bright and hot the light gets and how delicate the plant is in reaction to close lighting. This will provide enough extra light to keep the plant healthy through the winter, as long as it has a natural light source, but a plant lighting setup that is all artificial light must be intense and tailored closely to keep plants from reacting badly to the lack of real sunlight.

For planting and harvest information for other months in the fall, check out the September In-Season Vegetable Planting and Harvest Guide or October Harvest Calendar and Gardening Guide.

Resources:
Figs, Bay and Wine
Vegetable Garden Calendar