By Dan Weintritt and Friends
(Created for use by the Louisiana Native Plant Society with the Acadiana Native Plant Project
Made in the style of Dan Gill's Month by Month Gardening in Louisiana, Cool Springs Press, Copyright 1999, 2006)
 November should be the peak fall month for the garden. The days are short and beginning to cool, the plants are relaxed, refreshed, and getting ready for winter hibernation, and wildlife should be busily feeding away to be ready for the dormant season. Rainfall should be picking up by now, but continue to care for newly planted or transplanted plants.
This is a great month to plant new, containerized plants, and everything you have worked so hard to keep alive this summer. Established perennials can be lifted and divided or moved now, or you can wait until the first freeze puts them into dormancy. If you are going to be re-working your beds this winter, now is the time to mark where plants are in the areas you will be working, as they may not be visible after they die back. You wouldn't want to plant something new right on top of your prized Hibiscus because you forgot it was there!
Even if you trimmed back tall perennials this summer, they might benefit from a trim if they are finished blooming, or staking or caging if they have not. Avoid trimming spent plants to the ground; insects like fireflies and bees will be overwintering as larvae in the base of hollow stems of perennials. Trimming spent stalks to about 24" is fine.
Gather leaves of deciduous trees and shrubs to mulch your beds. Weeds do not take the winter off. Many of our cool-season volunteers are spring annuals from Northern Europe, brought over either accidentally or intentionally from early settlers to the Americas. Make sure you are not bringing weeds into the garden along with the leaves!
Even though some plants could continue blooming until Christmas, frosts and freezes will begin to knock back the tender, fresh growth of some in bloom, truncating the garden season. You may choose to cover your blooming plants before a freeze; this author likes to mist the foliage the evening before freezing conditions are predicted to occur. The moisture will act as a mild insulator and prevent damage from dessication that causes tissues to brown and die off. A sprinkler set on a timer to go off at 2am is perfect, as the frost damage usually occurs in those final few hours before dawn.
Make sure that seeds requiring cold stratification are labelled and in the freezer. Some require dry storage, others moist storage. A lightly soaked paper towel inside a food storage bag is a great way to provide seeds with required moisture. Jan Midgley's Native Plant Propagation is an excellent, comprehensive resource for propagation instructions, and the only one that this author knows of! It is a self-published book by a native plant nursery owner with 40 years of experience; this publication should be available for purchase online.
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