What to Plant in November in Zone 10

A season with almost no real cold to plan around

This month opens the single planting window for garlic, fava bean, and shallot, matching the timing of colder zones just to the north but with one real twist: bulb formation here almost never sees an actual freeze, which tips the scale toward softneck varieties suited to mild winters rather than hardneck types that need a longer, colder rest to divide well.

Break the bulb into cloves right before planting rather than ahead of time, tuck each one root end down roughly 2 finger widths beneath the surface, and leave 4 to 6 inches between cloves so each has room to bulk up into a full head across the mild months to come.

The tail end of direct sowing

Cilantro, lettuce, spinach, arugula, and radish are making a final appearance this month, and because zone 10's first frost rarely arrives before the middle of December, these crops have noticeably more runway here than in a zone where frost lands weeks earlier, so a sowing in the first half of November still has a realistic shot at a full harvest.

Bok choy, tatsoi, and mizuna share this same closing window and are quick enough, generally 30 to 45 days to a usable size, that even a start pushed toward the end of the month can still produce before growth slows in the coolest weeks of the year. Daikon radish shares the window but not the pace; give it 8 to 10 weeks to size up a usable root, so a planting this late is really banking on a mild December to finish rather than counting on typical late-fall growth.

Pests are still active, unlike colder gardens

Aphids and whiteflies remain active on fall greens through November here, since zone 10 has no hard freeze to knock populations back the way a colder garden's first frost would, so keep checking leaf undersides weekly rather than assuming cooler weather alone will handle the problem, and treat any colony as soon as it is spotted rather than waiting for it to spread across a whole row.