With the colder nights and scattered frost about, many of the summer annuals and vegetables in the garden have gone to mush, but that doesn’t mean the planting season is over. 

On Monday mornings from seven to nine you can hear me on air with Paul Ciliberto on Catskills News Talk Radio 92.5 FM, 94.9 FM and WVOS 1240 AM as I now also have a Garden Guru segment that appears on Wednesdays and Fridays as well as just chatting about gardening issues on Mondays. So this past Monday the topic came up about planting items in the fall. Fall is probably the best time to plant trees, shrubs and perennials for several reasons, the first being that they will not go into transplant shock. In the fall plants are going dormant, dropping needles or leaves, or dying back completely like perennials. When this happens the plant is sending all its energy down to the roots to be stored for the winter. 

So when you plant now, the roots get a chance to grow without having to support the top of the plant. By the time spring rolls around your root base will have increased and now it will have a much easier time supporting plenty of top growth. The second big reason for planting in the fall is that your plants are less fussy when they are going dormant. You don’t need to water them, one application of fertilizer four to six weeks after you plant is all they will need until next May or June. You don’t need to spray them with insecticide to keep bugs off. For any trees or shrubs that fruit or flower, the old saying goes, the more root - the more fruit. That goes for flowers too as you can’t get fruit without a flower. By planting before Thanksgiving your plants root base can almost double by the time spring finally rolls around in March and April, so your roots will be able to supply your plants with much more water and nutrients to provide superior growth. Adding a little mycorrhiza in the spring will help this even more. Don’t add mycorrhiza now as it will probably die off over the winter, that is why it is best to add it in the spring when the frost is out of ground. Don’t know what mycorrhiza is? Come in and check out FoxFarm Microbrew and ask any of my staff members about it, it is the magic bullet for beautiful plants. 

 So with all these reasons why planting in fall is the best time of year, why don’t more people do it you might ask? The simple reason is - nobody gets spring fever in October. That’s it, nothing fancy, it is all psychology. It is a psychological phenomenon when the daylight hours start getting longer and the temperatures start to rise in the spring we get more energy and want to get our hands in the dirt and plant. In the fall when daylight is dwindling and the temperatures are colder we go into hibernation mode and want to sit on the couch and watch football. That is why most garden centers like us, have to put their plants on a huge clearance just to move product in the colder months. The only plants that customers are coming in for this time of year are mums, cabbage and kale for fall decorating.

 We have plenty of those as well as pumpkins, corn stalks and straw bales, but our garden center still has plenty of beautiful trees, shrubs and perennials just waiting to find their forever home. Okay, to be fair, most of the perennials are looking a little scrappy as they are starting to die back to the ground this time of year, but our burning bushes are just coming into their full color of vivid scarlet red. So if you are looking to add a plant or two to your landscape, there is still plenty of time right up until the ground freezes which shouldn’t be until December. Of course December is only seven weeks away.