Tucking the garden in for the winter

I read in a magazine that planting oats in your garden is good for the soil and you can harvest a crop later in the year.

Can anybody tell me how long I will have to wait before the seeds germinate?

 Belatedly beating the garden into shape for the winter.

I need to rethink my management because I had a huge problem with snails. I always have some, but early summer, 2025 was ideal for snails from a rain and humidity standpoint.

I planted oats (actual oat seeds, not the cereal) this year for a cover crop. They winter-kill at about 20 Fahrenheit so they will not take-off and grow in the spring. I will till them under as soon as the ground is workable. My thinking is that the snails won't have any food or cover for most of April and that should knock back the population. 

Seeds

This time of year is a bonanza for seed collection. These are a persimmon variety named Juhl (aka Yates).

Nearly all of the very best Claypool persimmons have this variety as the female parent and some variant of Early Golden (Early Golden, Garretson, George, G1, G2, Killen, Golden Supreme, John Rick, Szukis, F-100) as the pollen parent. My two main trees have a Szukis or F-100 branch grafted into them.

This is an "on" year for Emma K black walnut. The crop on the Sparks 147 and Drake is much lighter. The Emma K is a very early bloomer and the seeds were undoubtedly pollinated by wild, unimproved trees. The Sparks 147 and Drake bloom at almost the same time and are planted close to each other, so it seems likely that many of the nuts are blessed with promising genetics from both sides.