9 Vegetables Japanese Mothers Plant in October (Americans Wait Until Spring)

If your beds go bare in October and stay that way until April, I wrote a book about the calendar that keeps them full: https://thesmallgardenbook.com It holds my mother's garden calendar, the one she has never once planned, the vegetable rows, and how to put your county's dates on your own kitchen wall. 379 pages, 88 chapters, every claim sourced. $47 early-bird, 30-day refund. I grew up in a Japanese house. I've now lived in America longer than I lived in Japan. Everyone assumes a Japanese garden gets through winter on patience. It gets through on weather, and on a calendar that puts the planting before the cold instead of after it. I checked every vegetable on my mother's October list against American extension offices. One came off, eight survived, and each comes with the zones it actually fits. The last thing in the video isn't a vegetable and isn't hers, and at the end there's a row of beans I was sure she had killed. America built the better calendar. Her dates were inherited; yours are written for your county by an extension service that knows your frost date and answers the phone. In coastal California you can plant her whole list. In zones 3 to 5, October is garlic and a bag of winter rye, cut down in spring before it sets seed. If favism runs in your family, skip the favas. If you make it to the end, leave one word in the comments: done. And tell me your zone and what went in this month, and if somebody in your family always had something in the ground over winter, what it was. For inside the house — the rooms, the habits, the systems — that's my main channel, Two Houses: @kentsukamoto Sources Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, Fall Vegetable Gardening Guide (2025) Clemson Home & Garden Information Center, This Month in Your Garden: October (2025) University of Maryland Extension, Fall Vegetable Gardening (accessed 2026) Oregon State University Extension, Fava Bean, EM 8697 (1998) Penn State Extension, Mizuna: An Asian Green (accessed 2026) SARE, Managing Cover Crops Profitably, 3rd edition (2007) Chapters 0:00 the beds you emptied too early 0:47 garlic goes in after the first frost 1:29 outside leaves first, middle never 2:06 the one she grows that came off 3:10 the thanksgiving pot from your own ground 4:20 the twenty-day radish 4:59 sky beans for the mildest yards 6:18 the green no extension office dates 6:56 the leaf already in your salad bag 7:31 where america beats her calendar 8:42 the one that isn't hers 9:59 the bean row that looked dead 11:31 one bed, one packet #GrowYourOwn #JapaneseGarden #Gardening #JapanVsAmerica #SmallGarden