Why November is the Best Time to Shop Your Own Garden

Shopping our own gardens—from collecting seeds to creating holiday displays to botanically-inspired gifts—is rewarding, sustainable, and right at our fingertips in November. Useful garden goods, from leaves as a natural mulch to edible flowers as a garnish, run the spectrum of nourishing the future landscape to decorating the hearth during chilly days and nights.

Some are gifts to reuse in the garden, some are culinary delights, and others bring the outdoors to enliven the winter interiorscape. Often, our own gardens hold the best gifts to share over the season.

Leaves Are Garden Gold

This “shopping” endeavor results in a savings of cost and labor with a nutrient-rich payoff. After enjoying the color-changing autumnal foliage, instead of removing leaves when they drop, let them remain in place or distribute them to benefit trees, shrubs, perennials, flowering bulbs, and overwintering pollinators.

Use fall leaves as natural mulch. They’re a renewable resource, right from the garden, and a mulch, compost, and soil conditioner all in one. Leave them where they drop or lightly rake whole leaves into beds to add insulation for roots as temperatures lower. The leaves decompose over time and eventually add nutrients to the soil as they break down. 

The leaves also add ecological benefits, such as sheltering habitats for nesting, egg-laying, and overwintering creatures like swallowtail butterflies, queen bumblebees, luna moths, and stick insects. Leaving the leaves is a pollinator-friendly practice.

If you have loads of leaves and too many to use at once, let any extras head to compost to become leaf mold for future soil enrichment and mulching. It takes about six months to have completely broken down leaf material, but leaf mold is easy to make and a valuable resource for amending native soils at planting and for topdressing.

Seed Saving

With so many flowering perennials seeding in fall, it’s useful to collect and store them for future seasons. This is especially helpful with late heirloom flowers or food crops, especially if they’re hard to come by or from pass-along selections.

Seed saving is cost-effective and helps promote genetic diversity among our crops. Protecting genetic traits is a benefit of growing heirlooms bred for their fruiting and growth characteristics.

To save seeds, collect them from flowers, fruits, or vegetables. Separate them from plant matter and rinse seeds from food crops if needed. Let them dry out completely. Store seeds in paper bags or envelopes in a cool, dark place.

Expanding the Display Naturally 

There are numerous benefits to allowing flowers to go to seed this time of year (unless you’re working with an aggressive spreader, in which case, continue to remove spent flowers through fall).

Attractive seed pods and bloom structures add aesthetic value and variety to the cool-season landscape. Natural seed drop continues the display in future seasons with plants well-suited to your site’s growing conditions. 

Certain perennials rely on cold winter temperatures for germination. Black-eyed Susan, coneflower, catmint, sedum, milkweed, and beardtongue are seeds that require cold stratification.

Another key benefit of letting plants go to seed is food for songbirds and other wildlife. Persisting seeds provide important forage in the cold season when resources are lean.

Herbs: Fresh, Dried, and For Gifting

With so many herbs that flush in the fall, November is perfect for harvesting and drying the fresh growth. Some herbs, like basil, live in water indefinitely. Stick a few clippings in water on a sunny windowsill for winter use. Or, propagate them from cuttings to grow in an indoor pot over the winter. While basil needs lots of sunlight to thrive, others, like parsley and mint, grow indoors in lower light conditions.

Harvest for fresh eating and dry herbs to add to savory dishes. Hang herbs like sage, parsley, thyme, rosemary, oregano, and mint in a warm, dry, sheltered spot until crisp. Keep the sprigs handy for autumnal and winter dishes.

Dried herbs and blooms in potpourris invigorate the interior with fragrance. Lavender in bundles, wreaths, or sachets brings lasting zest.

Infused Oils

Infused oils offer aromatherapeutic, cosmetic, and culinary uses. Dried herbs in a light carrier oil create a flavorful, scented oil. Depending on the herb, it may have apothecary uses as an emollient and in salves, lotions, and balms.

There are guidelines to make infused oils safely for cooking, dressings, and fresh dipping. Use dried herbs to flavor a light oil (fresh herb oils have a short shelf life of a few days; strained, dry herbs can last in the refrigerator for three months). Dried herbs and sterilized containers make the process free of bacteria. Popular herbs include basil, rosemary, oregano, cilantro, thyme, chives, and mint. Follow a recipe you trust, and when gifting, add a “refrigerate and use by” date for the recipient.

Oils for aromatherapy, home fragrance, and cosmetics follow a similar recipe. Dried herbs soaked in the oil and removed weeks later to make a complete infusion. Make a rosemary oil to enjoy its scent and skin-soothing reinvigoration in the chilly months ahead.

Teas

There’s little more soothing than herbal teas on cold days, even more rewarding with plants from your own garden. Chamomile, lemon balm, peppermint, roses, and so many more hold their flavor when dried and suffused in filtered hot water. 

You may get hooked on the notion and consider a tea garden in the spring. Tea favorites are easy to tuck into the perennial border or herb bed for their ornamental and culinary uses.

Body Cream

Gifts from the garden include luscious herbal creams to soothe hardworking hands. Calendula, lavender, and rosemary, in combination with coconut oil and vitamin E (or other preferred carriers), create a rich moisturizer to nourish against winter weather. Make your own radiance cream with staple herbs for yearlong use.

Natural Decor

The garden has many gifts to offer in November and at Thanksgiving. Look for unique seedpods, twigs, leaves, flowerheads, and natural elements to incorporate into container arrangements and florals.

Autumn motifs are made more fall-ish with items characteristic of the season. Fresh harvests, nuts, gourds, fallen leaves, and twigs highlight the theme. Natural containers like wood and baskets lend themselves to the transitioning season, and rustic accessories complement the naturalistic, elevated feel.

Fresh Greenery

Usher in the holiday season with welcoming evergreen boughs. Cuttings from conifers, hollies, eucalyptus, magnolia, and boxwood are handsome in a container, wreath, garland, or tabletop arrangement.  

Use greenery on its own or combine it with potted winter blooms and foliar interest. Fill gaps in potted arrangements with live greens, or display them around stems and branches like white paper birch and red twig dogwood that give height and visual interest. 

Branches in interesting forms or colors become the focal point among filler evergreen boughs and spilling clippings of holly and boxwood. Add natural elements like pinecones and berries to punctuate the display. 

Florals, Fresh and Dried

Late blooming flowers like chrysanthemum, black-eyed Susan, aster, dahlia, and amaranth make exceptional cut flowers for autumnal displays. Employ them in the vase or as a bouquet for the Thanksgiving host.

Edible fall flowers are a fun addition to garnish seasonal dishes. These include pansies and violas, calendula, nasturtium, snapdragons, and marigolds.

Dried Flowers 

If you’re not ready to part with fall’s colors, many perennials and flowering shrubs produce blooms that dry beautifully for long-lasting floral arrangements. Press the blooms with a flower press or dry them for preservation.

Clip fresh blooms early in the day, after the morning dew dries. Once cut, remove leaves and bundle stems in small groups. Tie the stems with soft twine and suspend them upside down in a dry, dim space. Flowers may take a few weeks to dry completely. When they do, they’ll have stiff blooms and crisp stems that snap easily.

Hydrangeas make lovely autumnal decor in soft, antique shades. By early fall, the blooms become papery and stiff. They’re perfect for clipping as their color transitions to dusky pink and green. Use them to fill in containers and tabletop designs.

Harvest Centerpiece

A modern cornucopia is easy to achieve with a bounty plucked fresh from the garden. Any autumnal vegetable or fruit is lovely in tabletop arrangements, especially at Thanksgiving. And it’s multifunctional – the harvest is the garden’s biggest gift.

Pumpkins, gourds, and other squashes reflect the long-awaited yield. Apples, pears, cranberries, nuts, and even heirloom tomatoes added to the bunch create an abundant fall theme.

Propagate Houseplants

The houseplant jungle gets extra love this time of year as we move tender perennials, annuals, and tropicals indoors to overwinter. This increases our biophilic benefits by bringing nature inside.