Are there any seeds you’ve discovered do great when planted before first frost? Sort of like mimicking nature when previous crop drops fruits and you find volunteers coming up in the spring ahead of all your spring sowings, and growing stronger and faster than anything else?
This easily happens with tomatillo, tomatoes, squashes, cilantro, dill, etc. But I wonder if any of you do this routinely, purposefully planting your seed before winter comes.
I call it wintergardening, I do it with lettuce,claytonia, corn salad, rucola/rocket salad, parsnips, brassica, snow peas, favas, rye, wheat, radishes that like it. Mostly all things that won’t die because of frosts. They’re generous seed providers in some cases so can serve as a good cover crop. And yes, volunteers are nature’s perfect reminders of sowing them. I find it to be more relaxing than summer gardening. Things grow slower, but less predators like snails and caterpillars or crazy jumpy bugs.
Sunflowers do very well like this.
One of my goals is to be able to fall plant everything. So far I haven’t tried actual fall planting, but last winter I planted a bunch of stuff in January. Some squashes and watermelons were fine. Beans and corn came up way too early and died.
This year I have extra seeds for melons and watermelons so I’m going to plant them after the first frost. If I can get even one seed to ignore our weird winters and come up in late spring, it’s a step in the right direction.
Maybe I’ll try tomatoes as well, since I have a lot of old seeds.
This is my problem too. We get too much variation in our winter weather to plant in fall. I also wait until jan/feb.
What do you winter plant? Anything consistently successful?
I’ve had some success with tomatoes and squash. My sunflowers just re-seed on their own every year. But I try to strategically place the dead flowerheads where I want them to grow the following year.
We get really wet winters so a lot of stuff just rots if planted too early. I’ve mostly just started planting a few weeks before my last frost date, which is in mid March. So I plant beans, corn, and even okra in early March. The beans have adapted best/fastest to this so far.
I tried melons too but they didn’t do well.
Thank you Hugo, that sounds very joyful and encouraging. I feel like I don’t want the garden season to end, would love to keep it going but we’ll get our first freeze in a week or two.
It is very encouraging to see all of you trying this too. I guess it’s something I have to try out and see what happens for each different plant.
My last frost is mid June! I have a very short growing season… but no more of my complaining, this is what Landracing is for!
Lauren, this sounds exciting. Please do share what results you get. I will definitely try seeding some things once my temps stay more consistently lower. It feels right to mimic nature and have seeds sprout when they will. Although I don’t have wet springs, we do have late frosts, so it may happen the same for me, that the seedlings may sprout and then freeze… I am excited to try and learn!
Thanks everyone for sharing your experiences!
I wish i could plant everything in October. This year I’m planting winter wheat hopefully within the next week, i also plant my garlic in October. Been experimenting with the walking onions and planted a ton of their top setting “bulbils” already, gonna eat the green onions this fall and dig them up next year after they set bulbils again. They are more like a shallot than an onion. Shallots btw you can also plant in October.
I don’t consider it a “head start” to plant seeds in the fall — I consider winter to be my other main growing season. Things grow slower in winter, but it’s also soooooooo much easier to grow winter crops.
First: My summers are hot and arid. My winters are cool, but not terribly cold (nighttime temperatures are usually between 20-40 degrees, daytime temperatures are usually between 50-80 degrees, and it usually drops down to 7 degrees for the coldest one or two nights in February). We get almost all of our water in the winter. So winter crops don’t need to be watered.
Second: Insects hibernate during the winter. So winter crops don’t have any bugs on them.
Third: Bindweed is dormant during the winter. So winter crops don’t need to be weeded.
Fourth: Winter crops taste really sweet and delicious.
The only downside to growing in the winter is that plants grow more slowly. You can speed their growth up by adding some kind of nighttime protection like a hoop house, if you like; I don’t usually bother.
These are the food plants I prefer to plant in fall: my most cold hardy peas (Austrian winter peas are a good place to start), my most cold hardy fava beans, garlic, lettuce, blue mustard, shepherd’s purse, miner’s lettuce, winter wheat, daikon radishes, and every Brassica olerecea, napus, and rapa I can get my hands on. (This includes rutabaga, turnip, canola, cabbage, kale, kohlrabi, perennial kale, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, collard greens — whatever I can find, basically. My plan is to eventually develop a thriving population of delicious perennial forms of all three species that can cross as much as they want to. I do not care what they were originally labeled as — I only care if they’re vigorous, perennial, and tasty. 
)
Lots of biennials are best planted in spring and harvested in winter, such as carrots and beets — but sometimes you can plant them in the fall instead. You won’t get a very big root to dig up and eat, but if what you want is to get them to overwinter and make seeds instead, planting in the fall can work great.
There are also the perennials to eat in winter. My walking onions, chives, black hollyhocks, and common mallow (all entirely edible!) are perennial evergreens that do most of their growing in the winter. My Jerusalem artichokes taste best harvested in December through February (they grow through the summer, and are delightfully drought tolerant, but the food they make tastes best when harvested in winter). The same goes for edible bulbs that make spring flowers (like tulips, brodeia, and camas).
And do I even need to mention garlic? Garlic cloves are always planted in fall, because they grow through the winter, and they are usually harvested in June. Or . . . if you’re lazy . . . you can just leave them in the ground and let them turn into a great big colony of garlic instead. Garlic’s a perennial! You can just leave it in the ground if you want to — it’ll come back bigger the next year!
I usually plant my least hardy peas and fava beans in January or February, and they start growing by around mid-February. I have separate winter and spring landraces for both species right now. But I’m trying to nudge them towards eventually having just one landrace per species, which is planted in fall. 
I’m going to be trying lentils, garbanzo beans, mache, chickweed, and maca for the first time this year. It would be nice if they take and produce well, but if they don’t, no biggie. I have enough winter crops to grow plenty of food with the species I’m using already.
In general, if you want ideas for more winter crops to plant in fall, these terms are each a gigantic clue:
a) “cover crop”
b) “winter annual”
In general, anything edible with one of those labels will probably make a good winter crop.
And be sure to look around your neighborhood at everything that grows as a weed in the winter. Look up what it is. Find out if it’s edible. If it is, give it a taste and see if you like it. Three of my favorite winter crops (common mallow, blue mustard, and shepherd’s purse) originally volunteered in my yard as winter annual weeds. Now I grow them on purpose. Yay!
Oh, yeah, and don’t forget that fall is also the time to plant seeds of anything that needs cold stratification and will come up in spring! Most temperate fruit trees and fruit bushes are like that. Many biennial Apiaceae seeds (such as carrots) also benefit from cold stratification.
I prefer to direct sow; I have the most success that way. I have several beautiful two-year-old peach and apple seedlings now. They were direct sown and have never been transplanted, and they never will be. That means they have intact tap roots, which means they will be far healthier long-term, as well as significantly more drought tolerant, which is something I need. Yay! 
Wow Emily! Thank you for all these ideas! The only clear thought I had in my mind when I started this thread was that I needed to replant my garlic in a few weeks, and continue watching over my lettuce. You’ve given me so much food for thought and plans for action!
We are getting a green house, perhaps 16x20 to start seeds in the spring. I would love to grow all sorts of greens in there throughout the winter.
Kept debating about getting a hoop house for tomatoes, peppers, melons, etc. But as I learn more about landracing, I think I should let the crops struggle and see who survives, keeping things simple and staying happy and hopeful with whatever results I get. What a mind shift! And what a glorious one!
Perhaps a simple low tunnel would allow me to continue things outside… will have to experiment and see!
I am sold on easier winter gardening with no pests… though I wonder if the chipmunks and squirrels may sleep completely….we’ll see!
Me, I’m currently building a large greenhouse for a tropical tree sanctuary . . . But I started out a few years ago with a very small, simple 6-square-foot mini greenhouse. I was thrilled by how well the fava beans and kohlrabi did in there. This quickly morphed into me stroking my chin and going, “Sooooooo, if I build a greenhouse properly, could I manage to keep zone 10a trees alive without any active heat sources except compost?” (I live in zone 7b, so that would mean a 27 degree difference in temperature, at least.) Hopefully it will work! I know of someone about an hour north of me who does exactly that to grow oranges in zone 6a, so the idea seems really promising.
By the way, in case you’re curious, that “someone” is Chad Midgley, and he has a YouTube channel:
Very worth checking out if you want explore greenhouse ideas for winter gardening. 
By the way, unfortunately deer don’t hibernate in winter. 
They are, in fact, very enthusiastic about strolling into gardens to eat everything in winter. Including the bark off your fruit trees. So do be aware that you may still have some hungry mammalian visitors! 
Yes! You are right, also bunnies - they exactly chewed the bark of my fruit trees two years ago. They are protected now. Need to fence the vegetable garden, and hopefully that and the cloth cover I plan on having on the winter greens be enough deterrent.
I am going to try planting mache, purslane, more lettuces, sorrel and spinach right now. It’s late (could have our first frost anytime) but that’s how I’ll learn how each grows.
Still need to research about frost tolerant pea varieties.
Last year I had a couple of years of corn that got buried under my five or six inches of wood chips and I got two clumps with two plants each managing survive and come through the wood chips tonight and it produced ears of corn last week card that’s it say it’s still corn I think this year I’m going to try putting corn seeds in place under my wood chips and see if any come up that way next spring
Wow, that’s great!
I’ve had a similar experience with pepo squashes. In 2023, I gave up on a squash that I had saved for seed because it got rotten before I could be bothered to open it, and I didn’t want to open up all that sliminess to get at the seeds. So I just buried it, figuring at least it could be compost. I got two volunteer plants from it last year, both of which had particularly delicious fruits. Then I got another four volunteer plants this year! I guess I did manage to plant those seeds, after all.
Id love it if you could elaborate on the beans and corn please! I plan on direct sowing all/most of my seeds but was intimidated by beans and corn because beans are always said to rot in cold damp soil and I have yet to actually attempt growing corn so I’m just totally inexperienced with that all together. Do you plant deeper than usual to accomodate the seeds? Or just proceed as you normally would in warmer weather? Also, do you add extra seeds when sowing to ensure germination? Thanks 