Fruit trees.This is the best time of year to plant fruit trees. If you choose to benefit from the advantages of fall planting, please make sure you use tree guards on your trunks. With the explosion of urban wildlife, I have seen the bark of my fruit trees scraped by nocturnal critters and have resorted to tree guards, readily available online, to avoid such depredations. Tree guards are also useful, especially on young trees with thin bark, to prevent sunburn, particularly on the side of the trunk that faces southwest.
Vegetables. Egyptian walking onions (Allium x proliferum) are a horticultural curiosity that no garden should be without. They grow with the greatest of ease and will keep you company forever in a most unique way. This onion produces bulbils or baby onions above ground on their shoots. The bulbils fall and take root and spread until you will think the plant has walked its ways through your garden. Egyptian onions are widely and inexpensively available through Internet vendors and worth planting just to see how much your kids will enjoy them. This onion is not just for fun since its bulbs and shoots (scallions) can also be consumed like those of another edible onion.
Herbs. African blue basil (Ocimum kilimandscharicum x basilicum 'Dark Opal') is a perennial that is worthy of every gardener's attention. While it blooms heavily in the fall, it seems to flower in just about every other season, too. A relative of common culinary basil, this distinctively aromatic bush is not recommended as a spicy cooking enhancement due to its high camphor content, but strictly for its cleansing fragrance. As a garden ornamental, the advantage of African blue basil is its toughness, as it demonstrates an ability to grow in limited sunlight and with a bare minimum of water. Common basil, by contrast, needs excellent light exposure and daily watering in hot weather to thrive.
Consider purple ornamental kale, which is also seen in pink and white, for your fall garden. This ruffled plant, growing into a rosette up to two feet tall and wide, looks like a frilly decoration the first time you see it, and hardly like a live plant. Although edible, ornamental kale leaves are more bitter than the type that is customarily eaten. Ornamental kale is planted both en masse, often with similarly colored ornamental cabbage, or as edging for a bed of tall woody perennials.
Removal of fallen leaves from planter beds, whether by blower or rake, is ill-advised. There is no better mulch and fertilizer than fallen leaves. Most leaves will decompose completely within four months. Yet certain leaves, such as those from magnolia and loquat trees, are quite slow to decompose unless they are shredded first. Palm fronds should be put in the green waste bin because they take forever to decompose and their fibers will disable ordinary backyard shredders. In their natural surroundings, plant roots grow under a layer of leaf litter that, as it decomposes, provides a constant source of slow-release fertilizer, in addition to keeping water in the soil and smothering weeds. Beneficial fungi known as mycorrhizae live in association with plant roots beneath this leaf litter. Mycorrhizae are of crucial importance to plant health, easing the uptake of water and minerals, another good reason to surround your plants with fallen leaves.