What does El Niño mean for your garden?

Fox - 13 News
14 followers
Nov 12, 2026
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Smell it. Smell the onion. Smell the onion.
Hey, we're out in the Good Day Gardening
with David Whitwam from Whitwam Organics.
Dave, you were just talking about the El Nino pattern,
and it is apparently driving the Good Day Gardener quite crazy
trying to anticipate what this winter is going to be like.
Going bananas.
Yeah, so you don't know how to eat.
It's hard to plan, you were telling me, right?
It's very hard to plan. I would say normally,
I mean, our winters are weird.
To begin with, it all usually depends on which way the wind's blowing,
cold front coming down or
air coming from the Gulf or from the South.
But I would say typically right now in November,
I would be planting more toward colder weather.
And maybe Dave can clear this up, but I keep
hearing not just wetter, but also a colder winter. Okay.
I'm interpreting that as the average, not colder than last winter.
Yeah. For the extreme lows.
But what I am worried about
is a yo-yo like we're what we're seeing right now like this,
the colder weather this weekend, warming right back up.
That's going to be really hard on
the cold weather crops.
So they'll get a few cold nights and then if it warms right back up,
they're going to be stressing
and then warm weather crops for the wintertime.
They're going to be stressing on the colder nights. So when we
When we're getting a colder winter,
but it's based on a bigger average, but we're getting
a lot of warm days with colder nights or whatever,
however it works out, that can be really hard
to figure out what to put in.
And wetter.
But the thing I'm most concerned about,
it's not the water, it's not the warm versus cold
nights, it's this right here.
Lack of sun.
Lack of sun.
I mean, if we're growing a full-tilt boogie garden November,
December, January on a good
day, the day is shorter.
The sun is lower in the sky,
so the sun we're getting is less intense anyway.
Okay, so we have less than a minute now.
Yeah.
What are you gonna plant to try and work your way around this?
I'll tell you what I'm really gonna lean hard into is a lot of
Heat, and I talk about these all the time, heat-tolerant winter greens.
So these plants can take the cold,
but they can also handle the warmer weather.
So this would be your kale, collards, broccoli,
so any of the kales or brassicas, right?
So a lot of types of bok choy and lettuce
and things that need it colder, or spinach.
I'm not going to say I'm not going to plant,
but I'm going to steer away from it.
And then the stuff that likes the warmer weather,
like I have some squash and I'm putting in some cucumbers,
that kind of stuff, if we do get freezes
or it stays consistently cold,
where the soil actually cools off,
that stuff's gonna suffer too.
But what everybody's gonna really suffer from
is no sunlight.
Okay, so here we are talking about
I never thought I'd be saying these words, the El Nino Garden.
And it's making you crazy, right?
It is making me crazy.
I just, I really don't know.
I mean, winters are hard enough as it is,
kind of trying to predict what to plant.
But usually I can hedge my bets toward the colder stuff
and do pretty good no matter what it does.
So this year I'm going 50-50.
50-50.
That way, no matter where it lands, I can maybe win a spin.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Black and red.
We'll be watching this.
We'll be watching it out here.
David, good to see you.
Good to see you too.
Laura, back to you.
I had your back.
It's so funny, too, because this is exactly what we
were talking to Dave about this morning
before all this.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Crazy El Nino that comes.
All right.
