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Happy March 2023 Gardening, Spring Equinox!

Posted in 2023, Amendment, Aphids, Aspirin, Baking Soda, Bees, Beneficials, Biodiversity, Bolt Resistant/Slow Bolting, Bolting, Bone Meal, Brassicas, Bush, Cabbage, Cabbage Butterfly, Chard, Cilantro, Cold tolerant, Community Garden, Companion, Compost, Cover crop, Cucumber Beetle, day length, Design - Layout, Determinate, Disease, Disease Resistant, Drought Tolerant, Early, Event!, Flea Beetles, Foliar, Fusarium Wilt, Garden, Green Manure, Guano, Harvest, HOT, HOT Pepper, Indeterminate, Interplant, Kale, Leafminer, Living Mulch, Manure, March, Mildew, Mosaic virus, Mulch, Nonfat Powdered Milk, Permaculture, Pests, Photoperiodism, Photoperiodism, Plant, Pollinator, Potato, Radish, Rancheria, Season, Seeds, Short Long Day, Sidedress, Snails & Slugs, SoCal, Soil, Spring, Stratification, Strawberries, Succession, Summer, Summer, Temperature, Tomato, Transplant, Understory, Varieties, Veggies, Verticillium Wilt, Water, Weather, White Fly, Winter, Worm Castings, tagged 2023, Aphid, Aphids, Bolt, Bolt Resistant, Brassica, broccoli, canning, carrots, cilantro, Cold tolerant, Companion, Companion Plant, Compost, Cornell, Cover crop, cucumbers, determinate, Disease Resistant, Early, Early Tomatoes, Earth Day, Garden, Garden Design, Garden Prep, Green Manure, Ground Temp, Harvest, Heirloom Expo, indeterminate, International Permaculture Day, Kale, leafminers, March, mildew, Mulch, NATIONAL HEIRLOOM EXPO, Peas, Pest and Diseases, Photoperiodism, Plant, Pollinator, Pollinators, PreSprout, Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA, seeds, SeedSaving, Short Season, Sidedressing, SoCal, Soil, Soil Prep, Soil Temp, Varieties, Veggies, Watering, weather, weeds, whiteflies, Winter, Worm Castings on March 1, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Across-the-Plot Gardening Tips March 2023!

March Planting, Thoughtful Garden Design & Perfect Veggie Choices!

Last chance to design, make changes to your summer garden layout! March is often first plantings, if not, it is last soil preps before full on April plantings! See about wise Companion Planting for successful combinations!

Day lengths are still short. Feb 28 Soil Temps 10-11 AM were 50° in sun and shade. We want Night air temps steadily above 50 and soil temps 60 to 65 for starting our veggies well. Bell Peppers, especially need these warmer temps. They don’t like cold feet. They do best with nighttime temps above 55°F and soil temps above 65°F. Average March night temps are 46°F to 48°F.

MARCH through June Planting Timing

Start MORE seedlings indoors NOW for late April/early May plantings – eggplant, peppers, and more tomatoes for transplanting into the garden in late April or early May. Also sow cucumbers, squash and sweet potatoes. The beauty of seeds is you can plant exactly what and how many you want! If seeds and tending seedlings aren’t for you, get transplants and pop them in the ground per their right times! Plant Winter squash now so it will have a long enough season to harden for harvest and be done in time for early fall planting.

APRIL is true heat lovers time! Eggplant, limas, melons, bell peppers, pumpkins and squash! Many wait until April, even May or June, to plant tomatoes. Wait until the soil has warmed to 70°F before planting squash and melons.
Wait until MAY for cantaloupe, long red beans. Late May, even early June are best for tropical types like Winged Beans.
Some gardeners wait until JUNE to plant okra. It really likes heat and grows quickly when happy. Choose early varieties like the standard Clemson Spineless, Annie Oakley F1, red Burgundy or Cajun Delight! Try the fabulous Heavy Hitter! Choose faster maturing varieties for cool coastal SoCal. If YOU anticipate a HOT summer, plant a tad earlier, but in Santa Barbara be prepared to deal with it if summer is overcast as often is the case after all.

With our warming temp trends be on the safe side. Get bolt resistant/slow bolt varieties, heat, and especially drought tolerant varieties of everything!

If your seeds that need Cold Stratification didn’t get cold during the winter, here’s what you can do now!

Right now plant bell pepper transplants (at the right temps) and cold tolerant, early varieties if available. If you love your peppers and want some early, or have a short growing season, next year order seeds for ones that mature quickly and are cool weather adapted! Plant those transplants in the ground first and others more heat tolerant soon after to carry the length of the season. For cold tolerant sweet bell peppers, get seed for Ace, Lady Bell or King of the North! Obriy Ukrainian sweet red pepper is both cold and heat tolerant! For hotties that don’t mind cold, order up Early Jalapeno, Hungarian Hot Wax or Anaheim. Rocoto stands some cold but not a hard freeze. Manzano are reported to survive at 20°! The extraordinary feature of these two peppers, Capsicum pubescens (hairy leaves), is they grow into four-meter woody plants relatively quickly, and live up to 15 years! Truly sustainable! Now we need a bell pepper that can do that! If cold weather can happen anytime where you live, grow your peppers in pots; take them inside when it gets cold. Keep them on a cart or put the pots on roller wheels.

Plant determinate quick maturing early varieties of tomatoes – start with small fruited varieties and cherry toms – for soonest tomatoes for your table! The coastal moist soil at Santa Barbara’s community gardens has residues of Verticillium and Fusarium wilts, so some gardeners wait until warmer drier June soil to plant tomatoes and other veggies, like cucumbers that are wilts susceptible – but remember, those fungi are also windborne. You can delay it, make it less, but not prevent or stop it. Cucumbers are especially susceptible and do quickly die from it, so if you love cukes, be prepared to plant 2nd and 3rd rounds, but do these successive rounds in different places! First, choose resistant varieties like Natsu Fushinari longs! See more about how to avoid or slow down wilt and fungi problems! See about using BLEACH! See more about selecting tomatoes!

Outdoors sow or transplant beets, carrots, celery, chard, cilantro, herbs, Jerusalem artichokes, kohlrabi, leeks, green onions, bulb onion seed and sets (be sure to get summer maturing varieties), parsley, peas (be sure to use the right inoculant with your seeds if your soil needs it), peanuts (they do grow here!), potatoes, radishes, shallots, spinach, strawberries, and turnips. Time for heat tolerant, bolt and tipburn resistant lettuces of all kinds! The fabulous Green Star, Sierra, Nevada, Jericho, Black Seeded Simpson are some. Tips for super Successful Transplanting!

This is the LAST MONTH to transplant artichokes, asparagus, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale; also strawberry, blackberry, and raspberry roots so they’ll bear fruit well this year.

PLANT COMPANION PLANTS THAT REPEL PESTS, WARD OFF DISEASE IN ADVANCE SO THEY WILL BE UP AND WORKING WHEN YOUR SEEDLINGS COME UP OR YOU INSTALL YOUR TRANSPLANTS! Those are radish, cilantro, potatoes, Borage. The best kind of biodiversity is companion planting! See Super Spring & Summer Veggies Companion Planting Tips!

Beans, Cukes, Dill, RADISH Combo! Depending on ground temps, tuck in some bean seeds where the peas are finishing, intermingled with cucumber seeds that will grow low along the trellis, below the beans, plus a few dill to go with the cukes! However, ONE healthy long cuke plant like Natsu Fushinari will easily take up a full 4’X7′ trellis all by itself! See more for bean/cuke planting tips. Plant radishes with the cukes to deter the Cucumber beetles. Borage repels tomato hornworm and is especially good with tomatoes, strawberries and squash!
Tomato Tips: La Sumida has the largest tomato selection in the Santa Barbara area! Heirlooms are particularly susceptible to the wilts, Fusarium and Verticillium. Instead, get varieties that have VFN or VF on the tag at the nursery. The V is for Verticillium, the F Fusarium wilt, N nematodes. Ace, Early Girl, Champion, Celebrity, are some that are wilt resistant/tolerant. In drought conditions, consider getting only indeterminates.

See Cornell’s Veggies Disease Resistant List!

Succession planting makes such good sense. Put your seeds and transplants in at the same time. Seedlings will come along 6 to 8 weeks behind your transplants so you have a steady supply of yummy veggies! Otherwise, plant another round as frequently as you need for the table supply you need. But if tending seedlings isn’t your cup of tea, just leave space and put in more transplants in 6 to 8 weeks after your first planting.

It is perfect to put in fast growers like lettuce, beets, turnips, arugula, chard, to hold space until you are ready to plant bigger plants. When it’s time for the bigger ones, clear a space/harvest, pop in your seeds or transplants and let them grow up among the space holders. As the bigger plants start to shade out the littles, remove lower leaves so the littles get light too! The smaller plants act as living mulch under the bigger plants. No need to plant smaller plants separately in rows of their own. Think circles and understory! Plant them around, under, among the bigger plants! If you anticipate a HOT summer, plant heat sensitive littles only on the morning or shady side of larger plants. See Mulching ~ Why, When, With What, How Much?!

Put in borders of slow but low growers like carrots, mini cabbages, in more permanent places, like on what will become the morning side of taller backdrop plants like peppers and eggplant.

Depending on what legumes you choose, figure 3 1/2 +/- months to grow another round of green manure to enrich your soil Nitrogen. In warming weather and longer days, it grows faster. In 6 weeks to two months chop it down and chop up. Give it as close to 2 weeks as you can to decompose on the surface, keeping it moist. Add amendments, turn it all under at once, allow 3 weeks to a month for it to integrate with your soil, and the area will be ready to plant again. Or, dig your planting holes as soon as you turn it under, put in some fine compost, a smidge of manure, your other favorite amendments like worm castings, bone meal, guano high in P of the NPK for late blooming, a mineral mix, and plant! The rest of the area will take care of itself! See much more – Living Mulch/Green Manure!

Bolting, is a common issue when there are quick temp changes, and some plants, like arugula, chard, cilantro and lettuces are famous for bolting. See more about it and what you can do. See also about Photoperiodism, Short Day, Long Day, Day Neutral Plants!

Consider not growing kale or chard over summer. Kale will grow, but really is happiest in Winter. If you harvest a lot of your kale in summer, it often has smaller dry looking leaves growing at the top of a tortured spindly stalk. I’ve seen them over 5′ tall. The leaves get tough, lack robust flavor, and lack that cool weather vibrancy. Fertilizing, watering really don’t do much at this point because the plant is just trying to survive. The trunk has more volume than the leaves. A different strategy is to harvest a lot less early on, let your plant branch and become bushy! Then you can harvest at several points, and the plant provides its own living mulch. Huge difference. Or maybe you need to plant a lot more kales so you don’t over harvest individual plants!

This is ONE kale plant in the image below! It has made all these branches, multiple harvest points, by April at Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden! Look at that abundance! It thrives all summer!

Curly Leaf Kale Branching into Bush form!
Chard suffers in hot summers. It droops from midday heat, recovers, droops, recovers each day. That’s hard on a plant. It doesn’t produce much. Doesn’t seem reasonable to harvest when it is trying to stay alive. If you do choose to grow it, plant it where it will have a little shade in the hottest part of the day in summer or install some shade cloth for it. Give each plant plenty of room so they don’t suffer for lack of water and nutrients. Chard can be a big plant. Their growth is dependent on how much space they have. Plant shallow rooted living mulch plants around it. Keep it evenly moist. Flooding it isn’t what it needs when it droops from heat, and plants can literally drown. Chard is a fast grower. Why not do a final harvest mid to late spring? Plant something that will be more summer happy, then plant chard again in fall when things cool down and it thrives.

Broccoli, on the other hand, depending on the variety, produces side shoots like crazy all summer long! Just be sure to stake them if your plant gets large and top heavy! And feed it now and then. It’s working hard. Starting NOW, deeply mulch brocs you intend to over summer while it’s still cool to keep them cool. Brocs are naturally a winter plant. Or, instead of mulch, encircle them with quick growing shallow rooted living edible mulch plants – lettuce (repels Cabbage butterfly), beets, etc., that won’t interfere with your broccoli’s roots. When you harvest those quick growers, when you have access to the soil, feed your broc, and plant more living mulch! If you are using non living mulch, replenish it regularly – keep it two to three, four inches thick as needed.

Garden Design assures your veggies get the sunlight they need! Plant tall in the North, short South is the general rule. If you area is semi shaded or half day shaded, plant tall on the shady side, short where there is the most sun.

Tall: Indeterminate tomatoes in cages, pole beans in cages or on trellises. Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of culinary dandelions! Tall varieties of broccoli you keep for summer side shoots. Cucumbers are great on the trellis below the pole beans, or if a large variety of cucumbers, on their own trellis. Long beans! Tall varieties of okra.

Middle height: Determinate tomatoes, bush beans, okra, tall peppers like Big Jim Anaheim or Poblanos, zucchini. White potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs. Radish with cukes and squashes to repel cucumber beetles, with cukes, squashes and eggplant to trap flea beetles! Large Winter Squash vines and pumpkins are middle height, while some mini melons would fall to the lower mid height zone. Put in zucchini and vines, sweet potatoes, to take up space if you don’t want to do a lot of tending, but do know, you must keep those zucchini picked! If your zucchini is dense, and you miss seeing it, an unpicked zuke can become a 6″ diameter 2′ long monster in as little as 5 hot days! Grow heat tolerant flat leaf kale like Thousand Headed Kale! It has many growing points instead of just one and self mulches!

Lower plants like eggplant, like a lot of heat. Put them on the sunny side, slightly in front of every other slightly taller plant. Leave a couple kale that will get taller. But, if they are leafless stalks with pom pom tops, they aren’t going to give any shade, nor are they going to produce much – kindly remove them? If you decide to keep them, since they are a winter plant, mulch them deeply or plant lettuces or leafy plants around their base as a living mulch and keep the soil there moist and cooler, and feed them.

Shorties & Littles: A lot of shorties will be in front of or be the understory of taller plants, in some instances a living mulch, so there is no need to allocate, use up separate space just for them. Your plants all help each other. When the bigger plant leaves start shading out the littles below, harvest strategic large lower leaves to allow light and airflow.

Put beets and carrots in the short zone, as an understory, between and among big plants. Bunch onions away from beans, great with other short rooted plants like lettuces that need to be kept moist. Summer small bulbed variety radishes, a super companion plant, give a great spike of hot flavor to a cool summer salad! Some delicious heat lover mini melons are quite small leaved and do best on hot unmulched ground. They are easily trellised, but put that trellis in a sunny hot spot because it is cooler up on a breezy open trellis.

Flowers & Seeds! Let arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery go to flower to bring bees, butterflies and beneficial insects – pollinators! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next year’s plantings, to share at the seed swap, give as gifts! Carrots love being with cilantro and chamomile, and chamomile improves the flavor of and helps any neighboring herb. It is called the Plant Dr!

See Smart Garden Design Leads to Excellent Plant & Seed Selection! for more tips!

While you are thinking where to put things, select permanent spots for herbs, gateway points for flowers and edible flowers! Designate a permanent patch for all seasons flower habitat for bees. Cilantro is both tasty and has lovely feathery leaves and flowers, great pollinator food, living mulch. Chamomile is downright heady scented on a warm morning. Comfrey, Knitbone, is both healing (arthritis/bones) and speeds your compost, is high in soil nutrition. Humble white Sweet Alyssum is dainty and attracts smaller beneficial insects like hover flies that eat aphids! Calendula traps aphids, whiteflies, and thrips! Marigolds are brilliant and called the workhorse of pest deterrents! Cosmos is cosmic! Breadseed Poppies will literally have your bees rolling in pollen and supply your baking needs! See Stripes of Wildflowers! See Pollinator Meadow!

Finish your Summer Gardening preparations!

Install a greywater, rain capture system
Install gopher wire protection.
Install pathways, berms.
Waffle Garden, basins & windbreaks, a Water Garden. Excellent drought choices.
Gather cages & trellises
Terrace slopes – capture water runoff, prevent topsoil loss, mulch it, anchor the mulch
Build creative raised beds, Efficient Keyhole Gardens, try Hugelkultur
Get new containers, pallets, boards, tulle, net or wire for bird protection
Organize where you will keep straw bales for summer mulch
Setup compost and worm box areas

Complete your Soil Prep!

Add compost, only 5 to 10%, & other amendments to your soil all at the same time.
Add well aged manure as appropriate. Less in spring because you want fruit production, not leaf, unless it is a plant grown for its leaves, like lettuce, kale or cabbage! None for carrots, peas or beans.
Add 25% worm castings. As little as 10% works. They are potent, help with seedling germination, boost immunities to disease, add water holding capacity.
Bone Meal is a slow release fertilizer that becomes available to your plants over a 3-4 month period. It provides calcium (prevents blossom end rot) and phosphorous for blooms. See all about it!
Adding bird guano high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time helps your plants continue to bloom LATE in the season! Its NPK ratio is 1-10-0.2, takes 4 months to become available to your plants.
Sprinkle with a tad of coffee grounds to reduce wilts fungi. Add only a ½ a % to your soil or compost. A tiny bit goes a long way!
Don’t cover with mulch yet unless you need it for erosion control. Consider planting a living mulch like White Clover instead. Covered soil is cooler. Let your winter cool soil warm up. The exceptions are broccoli, cabbage, chard, and kale! Mulch ASAP because they like/need cooler soil.
Water your prepped areas when you water your veggies. Soil organisms need moist soil to thrive.
Sidedressing! Hard working plants need fuel and water. As broccoli starts to head, give it a fish/kelp tonic! With many varieties, after the main head is cut, your side shoots will flourish!

Pests Reminders and Home Remedies!

Before you put in seeds, sprinkle a bit of Sluggo type stuff around immediately to keep snails and slugs from vanishing upcoming seedlings overnight, making you think they never came up! No, they didn’t let you down. Killing off the creatures ahead of time saves the babies. It stops new transplants from being seriously damaged or entirely eaten while they are small. Do this a few times, to knock off the generations, and there will be no tiny vegetarian predators for quite a while.
Pull away those blotchy sections the leafminers make on chard and beet leaves. Remove whole leaves that are too funky for rescue. Harvest the bigger outer lower leaves more often to stay ahead of the miners. Water a tad less so leaves are less soft and inviting. Plant further apart to decrease spread.
Hose APHIDS off chard, kale, brocs, cabbages. Keep doing it for a few days to catch the ones you missed and new generations. Nearby, plant Calendula as a trap plant, radish to repel them. When you see unnaturally curled leaves, you will likely find aphids. Check both upper and undersides of the leaves and the tiny leaves at the central growth point.For hard to get at places, down the centers of chard, crinkly kale leaves, get out that spray bottle! Treat once, wait a couple days, treat the ones you missed, the ones that got away and newborns.I tried it, it WORKS! The simplest is to spray with 2 Parts alcohol, 2 parts water, 1 part soap. DO NOT use on seedlings, it will kill some of them. Spritz lightly rather than drenching or you may kill your bigger plant too! However. If the infestation is just over the top, with chard you can cut off the whole plant about 1 1/2″ above ground and simply let it regrow, though it may never be as healthy or lush as a newly grown plant. Sometimes it’s just better to start over, and not in the same place. Hose away any reappearing or lingering aphids post haste! Check out the ant situation. Ants like being near water. Water less? Get rid of the ants.
Regularly and immediately remove any yellowing leaves, like from Brassicas, that attract whiteflies.
Gophers You can still put in wire protective baskets or barriers, especially now while the soil is softer after any rains. If you see a fresh mound, trap immediately. Install prevention wire.

Prevention A frustrating typical disease is Powdery mildew. It’s common on Curly Leaf kales, squashes, beans, cucumbers. Select resistant varieties. Plant leaving plenty of space for air circulation. Apply your baking soda mix. Drench under and upper sides of the foliage of young plants to get them off to a great start! Do this the same or next day if transplanting. A super combo is 1 regular Aspirin dissolved, a 1/4 cup nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon liquid dish soap per gallon/watering can. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains. Not only is prevention so much better than after mildew has set in, but this mix stimulates your plant’s growth! See Aspirin Solution.

Do not compost diseased or infested leaves or plants. Bag it and trash it!

Watering & Weeding Wind and sun dry soil quickly and short rooted plants like peas, or seedlings, need to be kept evenly moist. That can mean every day to every other day watering, twice or more a day in summer heat.

Thinning is a form of weeding! Thin plants that need it, like beets and chard whose seeds start in foursomes! Thin plants you intentionally over planted – carrots, beets, turnips, kale, chard, radish, mustard! If you planted too close together, take out shorter, smaller weaker plants. They are all great in your salads along with small tender Brassica leaves. If you don’t thin, plants grown for their roots don’t have room or nutrition to grow that root. They are literally rootbound and starve each other out, are stunted. So thin sooner than later. If you miss the window, thin or not, you won’t get your root – beet, carrot, radish, etc. Keep thinning as they get older. At mature size their leaves shouldn’t touch each other. That helps keep pests and disease from spreading from one to the next.

When you are weeding, remove blooming or seeding plants first!!! When grass has those pretty frilly little green tops, it is blooming and seeding! Remove it ASAP. Better yet is to remove weeds before they seed! If at the seeding stage, gently pull, DO NOT shake the soil loose from the roots spreading seeds all over, and don’t put them in your compost! Bag and trash.

Dust Mulching, cultivation, is perfect to break up the soil surface, especially after a rain! That keeps the water from wicking to the surface and evaporating. If you use a hula hoe you do two things at once! Just a half to one inch depth cuts off weed sprouts. Indeed, it turns the soil a tad, all that’s needed. More weeds will follow, but it’s quick and easy to repeat the process. Two, three times, a few days apart and there will be few weeds after that for a while. Get ’em while they are small and easy to do. Smart gardening.

Keep COMPOSTING! Soil building is the single-most important thing you can do for your garden. Compost keeps your soil aerated, has great water holding capacity, feeds just perfectly! And if you made it, you know what’s in it! Make it HOT, Cold, or In place! Dry is dead, so be sure it is always slightly moist. Giving back to Mama Earth is nature’s natural way! And, like Will Allen says ….there is something very Spiritual about touching the soil, that’s where life begins.

The good work you do now will pay off with abundant summer harvests!

Hooray for the Santa Barbara rains and SNOW! See the wonderful February images at Santa Barbara’s Rancheria Community Garden! Winter gardens have their own special beauty!

Updated annually

Check out the entire March 2023 Newsletter!

Clever Seed Planting Tips for Indoors or Out!
Grow a Pollinator Meadow in Your Veg Garden!
Cucumbers! Personality and Pickles!
Grow Delicious, Amazing, Water Saving Edible Perennials!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

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Here’s to terrific February 2023 Gardening to you!

Posted in 2023, Amendment, Aphids, Aspirin, Bees, Beneficials, Biodiversity, Bolt Resistant/Slow Bolting, Bolting, Bone Meal, Brassicas, Broccoli, Bush, Cabbage, Cabbage Butterfly, canning, Cercospora leaf spot, Chard, Cilantro, Cold tolerant, Community Garden, Companion, Compost, Cover crop, Cucumber Beetle, day length, Desert, Design - Layout, Determinate, Disease, Disease Resistant, Drought Tolerant, Early, Eggplant, Event!, February, Flea Beetles, Frost tolerant, Fusarium Wilt, Garden, Green Manure, Guano, Harvest, HOT, HOT Pepper, Indeterminate, Interplant, January, Kale, Leafminer, Living Mulch, Manure, Mildew, Mosaic virus, Mulch, Pests, Photoperiodism, Photoperiodism, Plant, Pollinator, Potato, PreSprout, Radish, Rancheria, Season, Seed Swap, Seeds, Short Long Day, Sidedress, Snails & Slugs, SoCal, Soil, Spring, Strawberries, Succession, Summer, Temperature, Tomato, Transplant, Understory, Varieties, Veggies, Verticillium Wilt, Water, Weather, White Fly, Wind, Winter, Worm Castings, tagged 2023, Aphid, Aphids, Bolt, Bolt Resistant, Brassica, broccoli, canning, carrots, Cercospora leaf spot, cilantro, Cold tolerant, Companion, Companion Plant, Compost, Cornell, Cover crop, cucumbers, determinate, Disease Resistant, Early, Early Tomatoes, Earth Day, February, Garden, Garden Design, Green Manure, Ground Temp, Harvest, Heirloom Expo, indeterminate, January, Kale, leafminers, mildew, Mulch, Peas, Pest and Diseases, Photoperiodism, Plant, Pollinator, Pollinators, PreSprout, Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA, Seed Swap, seeds, SeedSaving, Short Season, Sidedressing, SoCal, Soil, Soil Prep, Soil Temp, TomatoFest, Varieties, Veggies, Watering, weather, weeds, whiteflies, Winter, Worm Castings on February 1, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Across-the-Plot Gardening Tips February 2023!

Winter Harvests, Soil, Planning Your Spring Garden!

The beauty of planting from seeds is you can get perfect varieties, the rare and unusual! Thanks to TomatoFest for this Cool image!

Hopefully you have gotten your seeds from catalogs, your local nursery and/or Seed Swap, and you are likely itching for the right temps to plant!

Planning now is important because not all spring/summer plants are installed at the same time. Planting in the right places now makes a difference. Companions and biodiversity are key. It’s still chill, but in Santa Barbara we are now beyond the last average frost date and past the less than 10 hours per day photoperiod. Bold Souls will be planting Zucchini, cold tolerant tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and corn! They can be started now from seed, in the ground. *Soil temps 10 AM Feb 1 were 42-45°.* Still chill, but some plants thrive in cooler weather and cool soil. Veggie Seeds Soil Planting Temps! Make sequential plantings every week or two in case of failures. March is a little warmer and early variety plants get a better start. April is most everything – cucumber, pepper, squash, beans, more tomatoes, watermelon. May is the true heat lovers, cantaloupe, okra (June may be better yet), long beans, eggplant. Some gardeners wait to plant tomatoes and cucumbers until May and June to avoid the more moist soil fungi and pests of earlier months. At least you can plant a second round in case of early losses. I hold that space by planting something temporary there in March. In long summer areas June is especially good for okra, eggplant, long beans and tropical plants like Japanese Urizun Winged Beans!

Summer garden planning tips emphasize needing less water!

PLANT COMPANION PLANTS THAT REPEL PESTS, or enhance your plant’s growth, IN ADVANCE SO THEY WILL BE UP AND WORKING WHEN YOUR SEEDLINGS COME UP OR YOU INSTALL YOUR TRANSPLANTS! Whenever you select seeds or transplants, automatically think companions, for many good reasons! See Super Spring/Summer Companion Planting Tips!

If you are not going to be canning, indeterminate tomatoes are the excellent choice! These are the vining tomatoes that produce all summer! This saves time and water because determinate, bush tomatoes produce quickly, all at once – great for canning, then you have to replant and wait another two months for more production. However, determinate toms do produce sooner, so for earlier table production, plant them to hold you until your indeterminates are producing. Plant 1 or 2 rounds for until your indeterminates start producing. For earliest treats, plant cherry tomatoes! Yum! Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of dandelions! The beautiful herb Borage repels Tomato Hornworms!

Select varieties that will grow well in your location per the time you have available and your photoperiodism latitude!

Early, short season varieties can assure you have enough time for your veggies to mature in time for a harvest.
Choose more prolific plants and drought/heat tolerant varieties so you get more production for less water.
Importantly, select Disease/Pest resistant-tolerant varieties. Some pests, like aphids and cucumber beetles, vector fatal diseases. Strong resistance to mildews may be essential for normal continued production. The Cornell University lists are very helpful. They don’t have all the varieties, but will get you started. Disease Resistant Vegetable Varieties Lists When researching, always look at the post date or update date to get current information.

1) Plant tall plants to the North unless you anticipate a scorching summer. If you think it will be HOT, plant tall to the west to shade shorter plants, keep your soil cooler, use less water.

Cukes & Beans! Plan to put cucumbers up on trellises to save space, keep them disease and pest free, clean, and so they ripen evenly all the way around. Co-plant with beans! Beans above, cukes below. If you will want a lot of each, plant them on separate trellises! Japanese Long cukes give a generous supply per water used, need a lot of space! So no cukes on their trellis. Natsu Fushinari and many Asian varieties have exceptional powdery mildew resistance!

2) Next, intermingle mid height plants, bush beans, determinate tomatoes, tall peppers like Big Jim Anaheim or Poblanos. Potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs. Plant Radish ahead of cukes & zukes to repel cucumber beetles. Eat a few radishes, but let several grow up by and through the plants you are protecting. Let them bloom for pollinators and produce seed pods for your next crops.

Leave a winter broccoli or two for summer salad side shoots. Mulch deeply under your brocs right now! We want to keep these cool loving plants cool. If you don’t have enough trellis space, plant cukes with your brocs! Broccoli helps repel cucumber beetles, so push the mulch back on the sunny side, make your special cucumber planting mound/basin and plant cucumbers underneath those brocs! Besides keeping the soil cool, the mulch keeps the cukes off the soil, clean and insect free above the bug zone! Straw mulch encourages spiders that prey on the beetles.
Leave a couple of winter kale to provide over summer greens. Heat tolerant 1000Head Kale is a prolific choice that harbors less aphids on its FLAT leaves. And, it is HUGE! Generously plant lettuces on the sunny side under your brocs and kale to repel cabbage butterflies.
Eggplant likes it hot and moist! Radishes with eggplants and cucumbers. Radishes are a trap plant for flea beetles. If your area is a little cool and short seasoned like ours, plant the long skinny Ichiban Japanese eggplants rather than the bulbous Black Beauties. Ichiban’s are prolific and quite tasty.
Indeterminate tomatoes might be your tallest plant in a 6′ cage. Okra can get tall too, and both are super susceptible to soil diseases wilts. Hot Pepper’s roots help prevent the wilt. Eggplant releases Potassium tomatoes have a high requirement for and okra needs too. Interplant the four of them in a zig zag style with the shorter plants on the sunny side of the taller plants. If you have space, do a keyhole style with the tallest plant, needing the most protection, in the center.

3) Lowest are the ‘littles’ or fillers! Being mindful of companions, scatter beets and carrots, lettuce, radish, here and there among, alongside, under larger plants on their sunny sides. Bunch onions away from beans. Some littles will be done before the bigger plants leaf out to full size. For those still growing, remove or harvest lower leaves of the big plant when they start shading the littles. There isn’t really a need to allot separate space for littles except strawberries! They need full sun and a separate patch to keep them healthy and be prolific producers!

If you love cabbages, plant a few more, but they take up a fair footprint for what they produce and they take a long time to do it. In spring and summer choose quick maturing mini varieties or forego planting them.
SEED SAVING SPACE! Leave room for some arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery to go to flower to bring bees and beneficial insects! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next plantings. Carrots love being with cilantro, marigold and chamomile. Chamomile is a true super plant! It improves the flavor of any neighboring herb, the flowers make a lovely scent, the tea is sweet, and it is called the Plant Doctor – heals nearby plants! Plant it asap to help vulnerable plants before they get in trouble.
Pumpkin, melon, winter squash vines require some thoughtfulness. Pumpkin and winter squash vine leaves get as huge as healthy zucchini leaves, easily a foot wide! Mini melons have dainty 2″ wide little leaves, can be trellised, but they may do much better on bare hot ground rather than up in cool breezy airs. A healthy winter squash vine can easily be 3′ to 4′ wide, 30′ long plus side vines, and produce a major supply of squash! You can use them as a border, as a backdrop along a fence line. In SoCal, unless you are a squash lover, or won’t be gardening in winter, there is question as to why you would grow winter squash at all. Greens of all kinds grow prolifically here all winter long, giving a fresh and beautiful supply of Vitamin A for less calories and no storage space!

Super use of your space! As winter plants finish, that space might be planted right away. Other space may need to be held for later. For example if you plan to plant okra in June, 1) grow quick prolific producers there until it’s the right time to plant those heat lovers! Leafy plants produce continuously, and can be harvested whole body when you want the space. You will have lush harvests while you are waiting. Think of kales, chard, lettuce, beets, even mini dwarf cabbages. Perhaps you will leave some of them as understory plants and plant taller peppers like Poblanos or Big Jim Anaheims, and tomatoes among them. When the larger plants overtake the understory, either harvest the smaller plants, or remove or harvest lower leaves of larger plants to let the smaller plants get enough sun to keep producing abundantly. 2) Or you could grow mini vines like melons or cucumbers – move them aside to install the okra. 3) And you can always plant a quick growing legume, green manure, aka living mulch, to feed your soil! In early spring and late summer you can plant White Clover. It brings pollinators too!

Hardly anyone can resist planting early tomatoes! Choose early cold tolerant varieties. In SoCal toms with northern names like Oregon Spring, or Siberian do well. Stupice from Czechoslovakia is very early! Bellstar, from Ontario Canada, is larger and earlier than other plum tomatoes. Early Girl is a favorite! And SunGold cherry tomatoes are almost always a winner! Cherry toms are small and will ripen when larger tomatoes just stay green until the 4th of July! See more!

One strategy is to 1) plant determinate early cherry varieties. 2) When the big summer toms come in, have any remaining cherries for snackers while you are enjoying magnificent beefsteaks! 3) Before the big toms start slowing down, plant early determinate faster producing cherry toms again as days shorten, temps get cooler – just what those early varieties like!

For now, in this early cooler time, plant your lettuce leafies to the sunny side of where the toms will be planted. Pop your tomato seeds in when soil temps are good, or put your transplants in as you get them. That way you have table food soonest and your heart is happy too! Here are a couple tips from James M Stephens at Florida University Extension: Tomato plants 4–5 weeks old grow and yield better than older transplants.

He also says when setting your transplant into the soil, do not compress the soil around the roots. √ Gently pour water into the hole to settle the soil around the roots. After the transplanting water has dried a bit, cover the wet spot with dry soil to reduce evaporation. √

See Tomatoes at Cornell! Here are special instructions for planting and tending tomatoes and cucumbers where the soil is known to have verticillium or fusarium wilts fungi. Both our remaining Santa Barbara City’s community gardens have them. Some gardeners plant toms in May or June to avoid the fungi of moist soils.

Soil temp/Day length matters. Though the soil may become fairly warm quickly in days to come, day length is still important. No matter how early you plant some plants, they still won’t produce fruit until they have enough hours of sun, and for some, warmth including day and/or night and/or ground temps. If they miss their window, they may never produce at all…better to pull and replant. Keep growing those leafy producers – lettuce, chard, kale – in that space and plant the right plants at the right good time! Choose Day Neutral varieties when possible. See Best Soil Temps Photoperiodism

Start seedlings indoors now for March/April plantings. If seeds and tending seedlings aren’t for you, just wait, get transplants and pop them right in the ground per their right times! Presprout!

Right now, from seed in the ground, sow beets, caraway, celery, carrots, chard, chervil, chives, collards, cilantro (coriander), dill, endive, fennel, garlic, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuces, mustards, green onions, bulb onion sets, flat-leafed parsley, late peas – mildew resistant varieties, white potatoes, radishes, shallots, spinach, and turnips. Get bolt resistant/slow bolt Cilantro varieties, and especially heat and drought tolerant varieties. Bolting aka Running to Seed! Causes and Prevention!

Along with deciding plant locations, get ready for Summer Gardening!

Install gopher barriers.
Get summer weight garden fabric, netting or bendable wire like aviary wire for bird protection.
Install or repair pathways, berms. Lay in straw, boards, pallets, stepping stones.
Waffle Garden, basins & windbreaks, a Water Garden. Excellent drought choices.
Gather cages for toms, peppers, eggplant & trellises for beans and cukes
Terrace slopes to prevent water runoff and topsoil loss.
Mulch, secure the mulch. Straw mulch for cucumbers. Plant with living mulch.
Build raised beds, Hugelkultur (see lower part of page)
Get new containers, replace tired soil in them and raised beds.
Setup Compost areas – enclosures, area to compost in place. Worm box.
Organize where you will keep straw bales for summer mulch, compost layers, pathways

Spring planting soil prep! Save time by adding all your amendments at the same time! See more

Compost! The amount of compost to use varies, depending on your soil’s condition, plant selection, compost quality, and availability. A guideline offered by Cornell University. (Veggies – bottom of Pg 4) says use 3 inches over the surface worked into the top 3-6 inches of soil!
Add well aged manure as appropriate. Less in spring because you want fruit production, not leaf, unless it is a plant grown for its leaves, like lettuce, kale or cabbage! Generally, none for carrots, peas or beans.
Add 25% worm castings. As little as 10% works. They are potent – increase germination, speed seedling growth, help with plant immunities to disease, increase water holding capacity.
Add bone meal for 3 months later blooming.
Add guanos high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time helps your plants continued bloom four months later! The middle number needs to be high: 1-10-0.2.
Sprinkle with a tad of coffee grounds to reduce fungal rots and wilts!! Grounds are more potent than they have a right to be! 0.5%, that’s 1/2 a %, or less is all that is needed or wanted!
If your area is cool, don’t cover with mulch unless you need it for erosion control. Covered soil is cooler. Let your cool winter soil warm up for earlier spring planting. Do mulch deeply under broccoli and kale you will be keeping over summer. They do best with cool conditions.
Water your prepped areas when you water your other veggies. Moist, not flooded, soil is rampant with soil organisms enriching your soil for free!

Keep COMPOSTING! You are going to need it for summer plants! Soil building is the single-most important thing you can do for your garden. Compost keeps your soil aerated, has great water holding capacity, soil organisms flourish, it’s nutrients are slowly released in perfect natural timing! And if you made it, you know what’s in it! Make it HOT, Cold, or In Place! Dry is dead, so be sure it is always slightly moist. See more

One more round of green manure is doable where you will plant late April, May, June. Grow it where you will grow heavy summer feeders like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, okra, chilis, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and corn; hungry stalk vegetables like celery, fennel, rhubarb, and artichokes; or continually producing green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard. Green manure can be beautiful favas, bell beans, and/or a legume mix to boost soil Nitrogen, plus oats to aerate your soil, make channels for soil organisms, roots and water absorption. Favas are big and you get a lot of green manure per square foot. With our warming weather, longer days, your green manure will grow quickly! As soon as the bell beans begin to flower, whack them down, chop into small bits. It’s more tender to chop while it’s smaller. Taller is not better. Let it lay on the soil 2 weeks, add any other amendments you want, then turn it all under at once. Wait two to four weeks then plant, plant, plant! Depending on which plants you choose, the process takes about 3 1/2 months.

Sidedressing! Hard working plants need fuel and water. As broccoli starts to head, give it a fish/kelp tonic or compost/casting/manure tea! After the main head is cut, your side shoots will flourish!

PESTS!

BEFORE you put in seeds, sprinkle a bit of Sluggo type stuff around a couple of times, to kill the generations, to keep snails and slugs from vanishing upcoming seedlings overnight, making you think they never came up! No, they didn’t let you down. Killing off the creatures ahead of time saves the babies. It stops new transplants from being seriously damaged or entirely mowed while they are small. When, if, later you see more slimy predator’s trails, sprinkle that stuff a couple times again.

Pull away those blotchy sections the leafminers make on chard and beet leaves. Remove whole leaves that are too funky for rescue. Harvest the bigger outer lower leaves sooner (while still healthy) and more often to stay ahead of the miners. I believe sometimes the leafminers come when the leaves have reached peak and need to be harvested, when the foliage is just past prime and softening. Rather than row planting, letting the leafminers go from plant to plant, interplant, a few here, a few there, plant with more space between them. Water and fertilize a tad less so leaves are less soft and inviting.

Aphids Watch for leaves unnaturally curled along the length of the leaf, particularly broccolis, cauliflowers, kale, cabbages. Check at the center where the tiny new leaves are beginning. Hose aphids off chard, kale and brocs. Keep doing it for a few days to catch the children or ones you missed. After that, water and feed them a little less.

I tried it, it WORKS! The simplest is to spray with 2 Parts alcohol, 2 parts water, 1 part soap. DO NOT use on seedlings, it will kill some of them. Spritz lightly rather than drenching or you may kill your bigger plant too!
For hard to get at places, down the centers of chard, crinkly kale leaves, get out that spray bottle! Treat once, wait a couple days, treat again for the ones that got away and newborns.
Ants nest near water and don’t like cinnamon. Sprinkle cinnamon around the base of your plant but not on the stem. Repeat if necessary after watering.

Whiteflies Flush away, especially under leaves. Remove any yellowing leaves, especially on your Brassicas, that attract whiteflies. Again, a little less water and food.

I like what this gardener said online! Sadly I didn’t record the name, so if you find the source, let me know please so I can thank and credit them!

Aphids and thrips are indications of plant stress. Before running out to buy an insecticidal soap or other chemical solution begin to solve the problem by trying to figure what the stressors are and dealing with them. Are the plants over- or under-watered? What fertilizer is being used? Is it a balanced organic fertilizer?
Predatory insects will be attracted to the site and will benefit greatly by an interplanting of Sweet Alyssum, dill, or cilantro. Our Crimson and Dutch White Clover planted along pathways between rows is excellent for attracting beneficial insects too. Place shallow dishes of water with small protruding rocks in amongst the cucumbers for beneficial insects to stop and have a drink. They’ll lay more eggs, eat more pests, and be more effective if you provide for their needs right where the problem occurs in the garden. Instead of thinking that the solution is to remove the problem, think about what can be done to aid nature in creating a balance.
Cutworms can be handpicked during the day if small pieces of wood or cardboard are laid out near the cucumbers for them to hide under. All the better to find them. Keeping chickens or ducks works too. [But be careful with the birds. They can do damage very quickly! Learn more about them BEFORE you use them!]

DISEASES

After making excellent soil, the most important choice is selecting Disease and Pest Resistant/Tolerant Varieties! Many pests, especially aphids and cucumber beetles, carry fatal diseases like the wilts that affect and can kill tomatoes and other plants; that’s why resistance to those diseases is essential. Cornell University has Disease Resistant Vegetable Varieties Lists! The lists are alphabetical. Not all varieties are listed, but this will give you a great start. Check on local university recommendations, cooperative extension, what Master Gardeners in your locality have to say. See what the nurseries near you carry or what the farmers market farmers are growing successfully. When researching, always look at the post date or update date to get current information.

Prevention A frustrating typical disease is Powdery mildew. It’s common on Curly Leaf kales, peas, cucumber, zucchini, beans. Plant leaving plenty of space for air circulation. Apply your baking soda mix. Drench under and upper sides of the foliage of young plants to get them off to a great start! Do this the same or day after transplanting. A super combo is 1 regular Aspirin crushed and dissolved, a 1/4 cup nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon liquid dish soap per gallon/watering can. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains. Not only is prevention so much better than after mildew has set in, but this mix stimulates your plant’s immunities and growth! See Aspirin Solution.

Beets, Chard and Spinach get Cercospora leaf spot – like the Chard at left. Sadly, no resistant cultivars of table beet are known. Late fall or early spring plantings are most likely to be affected. Late summer when conditions are favorable (high temperatures 75-85˚F, high humidity, long leaf wetness periods at night) is the worst. Beet roots fail to grow to full size when disease is severe. Successive plantings made close together can allow disease to move from one planting into the next. It grows on infected crop residues, so immediately remove leaves that collapse on the ground. It is spread by rain splash, wind, irrigation water, insects, gardeners, and equipment. This is one case where AM watering really makes sense to reduce humidity. UMASS Amherst recommends to ‘Avoid overhead irrigation if it will result in prolonged leaf wetness periods (e.g., through the night); irrigate mid-day when leaves will dry fully or use drip irrigation.’ If all that fails, use foliar fungicides. Plant less densely for more airflow, thinnings are tasty! In general, harvest more frequently so leaves don’t surpass their prime health, start to soften, become vulnerable. If you have little garden space, planting only every 3 years in the same spot isn’t possible so cultivating, turning and drying the soil between plantings is good. If possible adding a tiny bit of coffee grounds, a half a %, would help kill off the Spot. Too much coffee grounds can kill your plant, make your soil acidic. See more about Cercospora Leaf Spot

Do not compost diseased or infested leaves or plants. Bag them and put them in the trash, not green waste.

Soil Checks! Especially after recent rains, check your root crops – beets, carrots, radish, potatoes, turnips, in general, for low soil. Soil naturally compacts with watering. Some of these veggies naturally push right up above ground as they grow. Planting their seeds deeper doesn’t compensate. It’s the nature of the veggie! Never hurts to put a handy little pile of extra soil near where you plant them. Cover their exposed shoulders to keep them from drying, getting tough, sometimes bitter, needing peeling, losing the nutrients in their skins. Uncovered carrot shoulders don’t ripen but stay green. Same with potatoes.

Watering & Weeding

Watering can be important after rains. Winds dry soil quickly and roots of short rooted plants like peas, or seedlings need to be kept moist. Some rains wet only 1/4″ deep or less. Poke your finger into the soil and see if it is moist enough where the roots of your plants are.

Dust Mulching, cultivation, breaks up the soil surface, keeps water from wicking to the surface and evaporating. If you use a hula hoe you do two things at once! Just a half to one inch depth cuts off weed sprouts. Indeed, it turns the soil a tad, all that’s needed. More weeds will follow, but it’s quick and easy to repeat the process. Two, three times, a few days apart, and there will be few weeds after that for a while. Get ’em while they are small and easy to do. Smart gardening.

Thinning is a form of weeding! Thin plants that need it, like beets whose seeds start in foursomes! Thin plants you intentionally over planted – carrots, beets, turnips, kale, chard, radish, mustard! If you planted too close together, take out shorter, smaller weaker plants. Eat ’em on the spot, or they are all great in your salads along with small tender Brassica leaves. If you don’t thin, plants grown for their roots don’t have room or nutrition to grow that root. They are literally rootbound and starve each other out, stunted. So thin sooner than later. If you miss the window, thin or not, you won’t get your root – beet, carrot, radish, etc. Keep thinning as they get older. At mature size their leaves shouldn’t touch each other, except maybe for carrots. They seem to be fine unless they are left in the ground a long time, get old and weak. Thinning helps keep pests and disease from spreading from one to the next.

When you are weeding, remove blooming or seeding plants first!!! When grass has those pretty frilly little green tops, it is blooming and seeding! Remove it ASAP. Better yet is to remove weeds before they seed! If at the seeding stage, gently pull, do not shake the soil loose from the roots spreading seeds all over, and don’t put them in your compost! Bag and trash.
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Happy February Gardening, first spring plantings!

Hooray for the Santa Barbara rains! See the wonderful January images at Santa Barbara’s Rancheria Community Garden! Winter gardens have their own special beauty!

Updated annually

Check out the entire February 2023 Newsletter!

Super Spring & Summer Companion Planting Tips!
Tomato Varieties! Humble to Humongous & More!
Updated! Squashes! Prolific and Indomitable!
Wilts & Cucumber Beetles, Tomatoes & Cukes!
Borage, StarFlower, is Such a Winter Spring Beauty!

Upcoming Gardener Events! Feb 11 the tasty 76th Annual Holtville Carrot Festival, Santa Cruz Permaculture 2023 Design Permaculture Course April-Sep, April 29-20CEC’s 53rd Santa Barbara Earth Day Celebration! ADVANCE NOTICE NATIONAL HEIRLOOM EXPO Sep 2023!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

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A Happy New Year of Delicious Gardening to you!

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Across-the-Plot Gardening Tips January 2023!

Winter Harvests, Soil, Planning Your Spring Garden!

Elegant, nutritious Nero di Toscana Lacinato Kale aka Tuscan, Black or Dinosaur.

Delicious winter garden harvests continue! You may not feel like eating as many salads in this cooler time, but veggie soups and stews are super nutritious and great for sharing!

Keep an eye on weather reports! We are still in the frost – freeze time in Santa Barbara until the last average frost date January 22 – measured at the airport. Have old sheets, light blankets, old towels handy. If a freeze is predicted, for small plants, like tender lettuces, just lay tomato cages on their sides and put your coverings over them. Secure coverings well so wind doesn’t blow them around and damage your plants or leave them uncovered. Remove them when the sun comes out! No cooking your plants before their time! Dates vary from the coastal areas to the foothills, and our climate is changing generally to warmer, so these dates may not be viable guides much longer, if even now. Find out the frost dates for your Zip Code! See the details – Protect Your Veggies from Freezing!

Be sure your plants are secure before and after winds and rains. Stake top heavy plants that may need support. Tie pole plants like peas to their trellis. Level up any low places, check that berms are in good condition. Install trenches to capture or direct rainwater. Mulch to prevent erosion and soil splash on leafy greens. If damage occurs, harvest what can’t be saved, compost what remains.

After a rain, it’s time to add soil on exposed carrot, turnip and beet shoulders and potatoes. Do the finger-in-the-soil check to be sure your plants got enough water. A light rain may not be nearly enough… See Rainy Day Tactics for Spectacular Veggies!

After rains there are weeds! It’s time for that Hula hoe! Weed, weed, weed! If the soil sticks to your shovel, wait to do any digging, but don’t delay either. Soft soil is so much easier to weed. Do it before the roots get bigger and you lose soil clinging to them when you pull them out. Weed before taproots get deep and hard to remove. Get those clover roots out all the way down and before grass makes its frilly little seed heads. FIRST, remove any weed that is flowering, soon to make seeds! Anything that is not seeding, healthy and not pest infested may be trenched in or cold composted, or you can use them as mulch where there is bare ground not in your veg garden.

Once the weeds are out, if the area is clear, you have choices to make. Plant very last rounds of favorite winter plants or start prepping soil for spring planting!

January Plantings If you love your winter crops, and aren’t necessarily in a rush to do spring/summer, amend your soil immediately and plant one more round, from transplants if you can get them or the starts you have begun on your own, seeds if you must. Choose smaller/early varieties, varieties that produce in fewer days, bush or patio dwarf types that produce more quickly. See December for more tips on what to plant. In cooler January weather, plantings will start slowly, but they will mature faster than usual as days get longer unless they are affected by the less than 10 hour days. Most January plantings will be coming in March, April, that’s still in good time for soil preps in April for April/May plantings. With warmer dryer soil in April/May there is less fungi in the soil, so plants that are fungi susceptible get a better start, live well and longer – mainly that would be wilt susceptible tomatoes and cucumbers.

Photoperiodism! December and January Santa Barbara is in a period of days less than 10 hours long. We are at a turning point now that we are past Winter Solstice, now in longer days than night. Consider whether to plant right away, or wait. Some plants don’t grow when days are less than 10 hours. They may take a break and resume in February. What we plant now depends on whether it is a long day plant, long season Broccoli, onions or a bulbing plant. It also affects our seed choices. Some plants, some varieties, won’t grow or produce if the light isn’t right. See which and ‘when to plant’ tips – Photoperiodism.

Plant MORE of these delicious morsels now! Arugula, beets like Cylindra, brocs, Brussels sprouts if you get enough winter chill (there are some new purple ones on the market called BrusselBerries!!!), bunch onions, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, chard, culinary dandelions, garden purslane, kale, kohlrabi, head and leaf lettuces, Mesclun, parsnips, peas, potatoes, radishes – especially the long Daikons, and turnips! Scatter your Breadseed Poppy seeds for gorgeous April, May blooms! Select a place to plant a bee bringing Borage – maybe right in the center of a circle of plants so it can serve them all! Give it plenty of room and place it so it won’t shade out shorter spring plants you will be growing.

If you would like some tender little snacking carrots, quick growers to show the kids, or minis for your pup, try early Adelaides from Johnny’s Selected Seeds! They say ‘True baby carrots. Unlike most “baby carrots,” which are harvested at an immature stage before properly filling out, Adelaide is a true baby, meaning it has an early maturity and forms a blunt root tip at 3–4″ long.’ Only 50 days! See all about Carrots!

For us SoCal gardeners, besides beautiful bareroot roses, this month is bareroot veggies time! They don’t have soil on their roots, so plant immediately or keep them moist! Grape vines; artichokes; short-day (sweet) globe onions; strawberries; cane berries such as raspberries (get low-chill types); low-chill blueberries; and rhubarb, asparagus, and horseradish. Bare root planting is strictly a JANUARY thing. They generally aren’t available in February. Many bareroot veggies are highly sought after, so keep checking their arrival date, then when they arrive, drop everything and go get them!

Continue to make the most of winter companion planting! Carrots enhance peas, onion family stunts peas. Cilantro enhances Brassicas and repels aphids on them! Lettuce repels Cabbage moths. Onions, leeks and chives help repel the carrot root fly. Carrots thrive when Cilantro, Chamomile, Marigold are planted with them. Companion planting is also a size strategy. Keep planting smaller plants, especially lettuce, on the sunny under sides of Brassicas! Take off a couple lower leaves to let more sunlight in. Under Brassicas, plant lettuce from transplants, not seeds, since Brassicas are allelopathic, makes biochemicals that inhibit small seeds like lettuce from germinating.

Planting summer crops early isn’t always a gain. Even if the plant lives, some won’t produce fruit until they have enough hours of sun, and for some, warmth including day/night and/or ground temps. And some plants set in too early will never produce. That waiting time for enough sun, enough warmth, interrupts the plant’s natural growth cycle and the production window is lost. If you take that chance and it doesn’t work, pull, compost, replant. No amount of waiting will do the job. To be on the safe side, plant successively! Plant every week, or every two weeks or month to get the right window, especially when weather is likely to be variable.

Peppers are a classic example. For some gardeners peppers take forever…………. For others the standard couple of weeks and seeds are seedlings! If you have experience, you probably know which it is for you. If you change varieties, plant successively until you learn that plant. A lot of Latinos start their peppers in January and let them grow slowly until April. If you plant from transplants, I would not try for an early start. Peppers just don’t like cold feet. Whenever you start, plant two rounds, two to three weeks apart. That way you have a better chance of hitting the magic window! Soil Temps are critical for root function. Peppers need 60 degrees + for happiness. A gardeners’ soil thermometer is an inexpensive valuable little tool to own.

You can use area that becomes open for temporary plants. To hold space, put in quickie leaf crops like lettuces, arugula, bok choy, spinach, chard, kale, until it’s the right time to plant heat lovers. These quickie plants can be removed at any time and you still shall have had lush harvests. Hardly anyone can resist planting early tomatoes, February, March! Another strategy is plant your leafies to one side, leaving room to plant your toms where the toms would be planted if the leafy plants weren’t there. Plant tomatoes ‘behind’ the leafies so the baby transplants/seedlings, get plenty of sun for a good start! When your big plants get big enough, remove lower leaves that shade your leafies. That way you have table food and your heart is happy too! Depending on how big your open area is, you can also plant your leafies in zig zags then add the permanent heat lovers inside the ‘V’ areas. As soon as possible, plant companion plants for the heat lovers you will be growing in each area.

Choose early cold tolerant tomato varieties. Bush types with northern names come in earliest. In SoCal that could be Oregon Spring, or Siberian. Stupice from Czechoslovakia is very early! Bellstar, from Ontario Canada, is larger and earlier than other plum tomatoes. Early Girl is a favorite! And SunGold cherry tomatoes are almost always a winner! Cherry toms are small and will ripen when other tomatoes just stay green for the longest!

Umami Glutamate in Ripening Tomato Graph

1999 All-America Selections winner mini Roma grape tomato, hybrid Juliet, gets rave reviews! Bonnie Plants says ‘The wonderfully sweet fruit are crack resistant and remain in good condition on the vine longer than most cherry tomatoes. The fruit are as soft and juicy as cherry tomatoes, they hold up well in salads, even leftovers, and they have a longer shelf life so you can keep them on hand without picking every day. The vigorous vines set lots of fruit on long trusses and keep setting fruit throughout the summer. Quite heat tolerant. Vines are long and vigorous, so give the plant room to tumble over its cage. One of the longest-lasting tomatoes in the garden. Hybrid. Resistant to early blight (AB). Tolerant to late blight (LB).’ One of our gardeners got abundant crop through October!

Their taste is described as Umami, the taste imparted by monosodium glutamate, which now stands alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter as one of the five recognized basic tastes. Cheese and ham flavors also increase the same way as they mature. Bountiful Gardener says you can ‘sun dry Juliets into little tomato-raisin umami bombs of flavor!’

Summer Garden Design is important right now! You can do diagrams on paper or just give it a good think to see if there are any changes this year, and carry it in your head. That layout is what you need to make your seed list! Seeds from catalogs and Seed Swaps! Seed Swaps are free, fun and random, a good way to try plants you might have never considered, and they are adapted to your area! Catalogs give you the best selection and of plants your nursery doesn’t carry or isn’t able to get. Check for drought and heat tolerant, bolt resistant, mildew resistant varieties or look in dry or humid southern states that match your eco niche or world areas that have heat tolerant desert low-water-needs plants and order up! The seeds of these types may need to be planted deeper and earlier than more local plants for moisture they need. They may mature earlier. Be prepared to do second plantings if needed and use a little water. See Choosing Seeds: Catalogs to Seed Swaps! Smart Design for Your Spring & Summer Garden, Seed Selection! See also some of the bigger long term choices planning and designing your garden.

Before you opt out of planting tomatoes and/or cucumbers due to Fusarium and Verticillium wilts, see more wilt prevention tips! See also Wilts & Cucumber Beetles, Tomatoes & Cukes! for special planting details for successful results! Another choice is to plant later, like mid May or June when the soil is dryer.

Later January is time to sow seeds indoors for mid to late March early plantings. If you will be doing succession plantings, sow your seeds in succession, like every 2, 3, 4 weeks depending on which plant it is and how many you need. If those fail, it’s to the nursery you go for transplants! Avoid box stores that bring plants from elsewhere that may not be timely for your area, may be infested or sick. If you do buy there, check them carefully. This is very important in a community garden where pests and diseases can spread quickly. Select local nurseries that order conscientiously for local timing, that try to get quality plants for us. You may pay a tad more, but it is worth it not to lose a plant or infest/infect others. Local people live here and they have your interests at heart since they want your repeat business. Also, they can answer your questions. Establish a good relationship. At the Farmers Market, check with local farmers to see what they plant when and where they grow their veggies, here or somewhere else. Some feed stores are agriculturally inclined.

Check out Seed Soaking/Presprouting Tips & Ideas! If seeds and tending seedlings aren’t for you, wait and get transplants and pop them right in the ground per their right times! No fuss, no muss.

Prevention A typical disease is Powdery mildew. Plant leaving plenty of space for air circulation. Apply your baking soda mix. Drench under and upper sides of the foliage of young plants to get them off to a great start! Do this the same or next day if transplanting. A super combo is 1 regular Aspirin dissolved, a 1/4 cup nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon liquid dish soap per gallon/watering can. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains. Prevention is so much better than after mildew has set in. See Aspirin Solution. See IPM

Standard Winter Garden Veggie Predators Keep a keen watch for pests, and diseases, and take quick action!

Gophers Put in wire protective baskets or barriers, especially now while the soil is softer after the rains. If you see a fresh mound, trap immediately.
Aphids Watch for leaves unnaturally curled along the length of the leaf, particularly broccolis, cauliflowers, kale, cabbages. Squish or wash any or the colony away immediately, and keep doing it for a few days to catch the ones you missed. Check the new growth tiny leaves at center top. Power spray to remove any aphids there. If that doesn’t work to your satisfaction, get in there with a spray bottle of your favorite kill ’em mix. I use half and half water and alcohol plus wee bit of liquid dish soap as a surfactant. Remove hopelessly infested leaves. After that, water less and give less food so plant leaves will be less tender and inviting. Plant more Cilantro among your plants!
White flies Flush away, especially under the leaves. They are attracted to yellow, so keep those Brassica yellowing, yellowed leaves removed pronto. Again, a little less water and food. Gently and shallowly dig in an inch or so of worm castings in a ‘V’ shape from the stem out to the drip line, the point of the ‘V’ at the stem. Disturb as few of the surface area feeder roots as possible. Protect the plant from raccoons; they love worms.
Leafminers Keep watch on your chard and beet leaves. Pull away those blotchy sections the leafminers make; immediately remove whole leaves that are too funky for rescue. Harvest the bigger outer lower leaves more often to stay ahead of the miners. Harvest sooner than later! When your plant starts to lose vitality, integrity, these hungry little miners have easy pickins. See Leafminers IPM
Slugs, Snails BEFORE you put in new transplants or seeds, sprinkle a bit of Sluggo type stuff around to keep snails and slugs from seriously damaging or disappearing tiny seedlings or transplants while they are small. Do it twice to kill off the generations. That keeps the creatures from mowing seedlings overnight, making you think they never came up! If you notice tiny children snails or slime trails, lay down another couple rounds.

If you need more robust soil, do something absolutely yummy with it! This is perfect timing to put in some green manure aka cover crop for April plantings. Depending on the type of plants you choose for your green manure, allow +/- 3.5 months for the process. If you want the earliest planting time for spring, plant ASAP! See Living Mulch! Put it where you will plant heavy summer feeders – tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, chilies, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and corn; hungry stalk vegetables like celery, fennel, rhubarb, and artichokes; or continually producing green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard. Or you can ‘rest’ an area by covering it with a good 6 to 18″ deep mulch/manure/straw/compost mix and any other amendments that will help the plants you will grow there! Keep it moist and it will flatten down, make a great low raised bed, in no time at all! Simply let the herds of soil organisms do their work over winter. That’s called sheet composting, sheet mulching or composting in place – no turning or having to move it when it’s finished. If you are vermicomposting, have worms, add a few handfuls to speed up and enrich the process. Continue to keep it moist, and come spring you will have rich nutritious soil for no work at all!

COMPOST always! Soil building is the single-most important thing you can do for your garden. Compost is easy to make, and if you make it, you know what’s in it, 100% organic! Added to your soil, made or purchased, it increases water holding capacity, is nutritious, soil organisms flourish, it helps with immunity, your soil lives and breathes! It feeds slowly, just perfectly! Make it HOT, Cold, or In place! Full sun is best, most active and quick! Dry is dead, so be sure it is always slightly moist. If you don’t have bark type materials to add, and are in a dry area like some of SoCal, it is good to supplement it with purchased compost that has bark bits in it for water holding capacity.

Sidedressing Hardworking leaf producers and big bodied Brassicas, may need a feeding now. Heading is your cue to help them along. If they slow down, or just don’t look perky, slip them a liquid feed that quickly waters into the root zone. Get your nozzle under low cabbage leaves and feed/water out to the drip line. Lettuces love manures. Compost and manure teas, fish emulsion (when there are no digging predators like raccoons, skunks), pretty powdered box ferts, are all good, easy for your plants to take up in cooler weather. Use ½ the strength of your summer feedings. Slow release alfalfa pellets are a wise consideration. Worm castings, though not food, work, wonders! Also, be careful of ‘too much’ fertilizer, too much water, that makes for an aphid tasty soft plant. That said, another way to get goodness to the roots is push in a spade fork vertically about 6″ or less deep, wiggle it back and forth, remove the fork, pour your foods into the holes, close ’em back up. Soil organisms will get right to work, your plant will stay healthy and be quite productive!

Especially feed your cabbages, lightly, time to time, because they are making leaf after leaf, dense heads, working hard. I often see kales lose their perk. You would too if someone kept pulling your leaves off and never fed you. Feed them too, please, while feeding your cabbages.

It’s a New Year! Some of you will make serious gardening resolutions, others will take it as it comes, one day at a time as usual. But I do recommend you secure your seeds for the year ahead before they are sold out! Some are now less plentiful with droughts, fires and floods, GMO threats, new laws. Recently much needed seed banks, libraries have sprung up. We want to use our seeds with reverence and seed save our best as they adapt to different climate change conditions, assure their goodness for future generations. At Seed Swaps, take only what you need. If many people grow them, there will be more adapted to our localities. Before there were seed shops, seeds were often used as money. They are as precious today as they have always been, maybe even more so.

Happy New Year Gardening and Feasting!

For your Winter pleasure! December images at Rancheria Community Garden! After many rainy days, Hooray!, the plants have fresh vitality, birds feasting! Raindrops are adorning their leaves and petals. More rain coming, and weeding, LOL! We are Sowing the Future!

Updated annually

Check out the entire January 2023 Newsletter!

Cilantro Repels Aphids, Attracts Bees & Beneficial Insects!
Short Day, Long Day, Day Neutral Plants – Photoperiodism!
Soil for Seed Starting! In the Ground, DIY, Pre-made
Make Soil for Spring Planting – Amendments, Castings, Teas!
Save the Date! Santa Barbara Annual SEED SWAP!

Upcoming Gardener Events! US Composting Council’s 31st Annual Conference & Tradeshow Jan 24-27, Jan 30 FREE 15th Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap is ON! Feb 11 the tasty 76th Annual Holtville Carrot Festival, Santa Cruz Permaculture 2023 Design Permaculture Course April-Sep, ADVANCE NOTICE NATIONAL HEIRLOOM EXPO Sep 2023!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

Growing Super Veggies in HOT, Drought, Desert Areas!

Posted in August, Biodiversity, Chaya Tree Spinach, Cold tolerant, Companion, Desert, Drought, Drought Tolerant, Food Forest, Freeze, Frost, Frost tolerant, Garden, Heat Tolerant, HOT, Hugelkultur, July, Permaculture, Straw Bale, Succession, Summer, Temperature, Varieties, Veggies, Waffle Garden, Water, Weather, Wind, Winter, tagged Bioswales, Bryce Richard, Companion Plant, Desert, Desert Varieties, Drought, Frost Free Days, Gary Guzman, High Desert, HOT, Hugelkultur, John Kohler, Las Aventuras, Las Cruces, Laura Miller, Low Desert, Maureen Gilmer, Melissa Willis, Nevada, Noelle Johnson, Palm Springs, Phoenix, Rock Rose Desert Botanical Garden, Santa Fe, shade, Shrubs, SoCal, South America, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Straw Bales, subsurface drip systems, succession, Texas, trees, trench, Tucson, UNReno, UV shields, Veggie Gardening, Water, Wind, windbreak, Xeriscape, Zimbabwe, Zuni Waffle Garden on June 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

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AZ Plant Lady, Noelle Johnson, is a horticulturist, landscape consultant, and garden writer and you can see why! Now imagine this space planted to abundant veggies…

Why am I, a coastal low lander, writing this?! Because we are experiencing drought, using desalinated water, and it’s time to learn from the experts who have always had drought! Part of what we do will help drought conditions be less extreme. If the principles are applied on a larger scale, perhaps we will become heroes who remediate conditions and even prevent drought! At the very least we can grow more veggies in spite of our current conditions! As a footnote, our Santa Barbara CA foothills here are hot and plenty dry every summer.

At a whopping 479′ elevation in the Sonoran Desert, Palm Springs Ca is hot. They close their City community gardens in the summer. Their garden population is mainly seniors and many seniors don’t do well in the heat. First, take care of yourself! Appropriate clothing, headgear – be prepared for sudden weather changes. Stay hydrated. Work a shorter time earlier in the day or work in the evening, even at night! Make a rule for yourself! This is Sheila Custer’s: ’10 minutes outside or IF you feel dizzy or lightheaded ~ GET INSIDE NOW where it’s cool, drink cool (not icy) water, apply cool damp cloths. Heat prostration is no joke.’

In low desert, even Palm Springs, and high desert, intrepid knowledgeable gardeners carry on, learning as they go. Some have successful fruit trees – date palms, apples, pear, beautiful fast growing Red Baron Peaches, Santa Rosa Plums, figs, mulberries and pomegranates – they plant in spring! Have nut trees like pistachio, almond, for protein! Check out Peach Trees In Tucson – Las Aventuras Chris recommends low profile dwarfs that need less water and are easy picking height, can be covered to protect from wind! He gives other excellent tips from experience – be sure to scan the comments! Trees are important because they are the long term immovable anchor plants for your garden design.

Some of Sheila’s unique desert tree lessons are often learned the hard way.

Do know that a brutal desert wind can ‘thin’ your tree of plums! What was on your tree in the evening is on the ground in the morning.
Dang squirrels ate ALL except 5 peaches off Red Baron tree, and a couple weeks back I was SO EXCITED because there was over a hundred peaches on that tree, grrr…my fault, I forgot to replace the pinwheels beneath the fruit trees ~ they scare the squirrels, rabbits and birds away ~ shiny metallic pinwheels from the dollar store.
Borers are my biggest problem with trees.
There is a canker apple trees suffer from when in proximity to Cypress trees.

You see the details you learn? It may be wise to find some local mentors before you plant long term plants like trees. Combinations, companions, placement really do matter!

You take your chances! ‘Zero apricots this year due to a very hard freeze right as they flowered. Frozen blossoms. No bees = No fruit. I have lived in the high desert 22 years now. This was the ONLY year the freeze was so low that NO fruit grew. Other times, I worried, but fruit always appeared. Not this year.’

As soon as possible, for the long term, plant more trees like fast grower legume trees that feed the soil and cool the Earth or quick growing food source trees. Fast growth is good because the plant has better survival chances once it is mature. Plant them in Bioswales that hold moisture. The trees make shade, hold even more moisture, secure the soil with their roots. If possible, start where there is an initial water supply, but plant NO TREES 100′ of a well! Protect them from desert animals. Be sure mature trees won’t shade your garden.

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‘Vegetable Gardens in Unexpected Places’ like downtown Phoenix front yards! Noelle Johnson teaches you how!

Well before planting time, prepare your land for water capturing, holding moisture.

Hugelkultur - Sepp Holzer's Method

This image combines the use of Hugelkultur and bioswales! It can be modified to suit your needs!

For water retention, install Bioswales, terracing for slopes and hillsides for zero water loss. These can be graceful and attractive.

You can use Hugelkultur techniques for water retention. The Hugelkultur that most people are familiar with are the great above ground humps, but the humps are not necessary at all! You can dig down, install the logs and leave it all level or choose mounds! The logs still decay and build soil, hold water. The decaying logs produce a little heat that can keep your plants warmer at night, lengthen your growing season in cooling weather, and in spring you can plant a little earlier. Hugelkultur is also touted as water saving because after the first two years, it is self watering. In the desert you don’t have that luxury; you still need to keep watering but it may need less water! And over time, it still builds soil! Getting the logs and getting them to your site is the toughest part!

Beautiful graceful design of Hugelkultur style compost!

Hugelkultur is the long term sustainable choice. It can be a simple huge pile or an elegant graceful design like this one. Could be right in your front yard! Be creative! See more!

Windbreak Effectiveness Diagram Porous

Microburst desert winds can flatten your garden in seconds. Install permeable windbreaks to slow or move the wind to save your plants and direct it away from where you want the land to stay moist. Some desert gardeners say wind is worse than the dry. Hot, or cold, the wind sweeps moisture out of the leaves ‘faster than the roots can replace it.’ Many desert gardeners get started with a perimeter of straw bales on their sides then plant right beside them in the lee of the wind. In their dry climate the bales last for years.

However, a permeable windbreak allows some airflow through and extends its wind protection a greater distance. With a dense windbreak a downwind draws the wind back to the ground quicker, drying soil and cutting the distance it throws the wind. Gradually grow in permeable windbreaks. Food producing trees interplanted with food producing shrubs takes time to establish, but so worth it! As it matures you can add taller vegetable plants. This kind of windbreak does triple duty ~ slows and diverts wind, your soil retains more moisture, and you get food!

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Maureen Gilmer’s Straw bales and Field fencing tomato cages. Notice she is planting short type determinate tomatoes, not tall determinate tomatoes in tall cages that would topple in the SoCal high desert winds. In a bed like this, decide which plants will get morning sun, which can tolerate afternoon sun.

Maureen recommends installing pest prevention wire around your garden. Desert animals are thirsty and hungry.

Furrows, trenches, are like mini bioswales. Plant IN deep wide bottom furrows, where the moisture settles. The reason I say wide is because plants take up moisture and nutrients from surface feeder roots* and we need room for those roots! Install trenches crosswise to the Sun’s arc so the plants’ root areas will be shaded by the depth of the furrow in early AM and late afternoon. If you make the sides of your trenches low slopes, and water carefully under your plants’ leaves, your furrows won’t degrade as much or as quickly from water washing the trench walls away and you don’t want to uncover the feeder roots. Nor will seeds or plants’ stems be buried too deeply.
*What do surface feeder roots do? Their main job is to absorb water and minerals. Near the soil surface, they have access to water, nutrients, and oxygen. [This is important because] These elements are more abundant near the soil surface than deep within the soil. (from Gardening Know How)
Plants grown in thoughtfully made trenches need far less waterings and for less time. As the plants grow, they also self mulch and need even less water and less frequent waterings. Trench planting is akin to the New Mexico Zuni waffle gardens, the ultimate planting system for sparse water areas for three reasons! 1) The waffle technique is ingenious in that the berms shelter each planting area from every direction. A trench can be a wind channel. Not so in a waffle layout! The berms cause drying winds to rise over the waffle and it stays more moist inside. 2) The basins can be flexible sizes, allowing the feeder roots ample growing and feeding room. If you look at some of the old images of waffle gardens, the waffles varied in size in the same garden to accommodate different plants’ needs. 3) Plants are separate enough that they don’t have to compete for water or soil. That equals more production. Similar sunken beds for growing food with less water have been used globally in arid regions, arising independently by Indigenous farmers. See more

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Curtis Quam’s waffle garden, which he tends with his family at Zuni Pueblo, NM = less water used, food security – by Greta Moran. Photo by Curtis Quam.

Greenhouse Walipini Pit Interior Depending on your soil conditions, whether you have shifting dunes or stable banks, you can install a Walipini Pit Greenhouse! If it isn’t at a low point and no storm water flows near or at the location, simplest and cheapest is to set up an underground greenhouse to equalize seasonal temps. Dig it right into the side of a hill or slope if possible. You want that shade and shelter for both you and the plants. You can live in it! Check out the Pros and cons of building bank barns? It can be improvised to suit your particular needs. Make it the right size, open to the right direction, etc.

Here is a University of Arizona Hoop House in action! From freezing winter nights to blazing summer days, hoop houses are terrific and less work and less expensive than most greenhouses! From a row cover to whatever size you need, they are flexible to make! Cover with shade cloth having the perfect shade % density you need, usually 50%. Cover the entire house or part of it – front or back, just on top or one side, roll it up as needed. Change things per season, add or completely remove per season! Have both hoop houses and outside gardens. The University of Nevada Reno uses fifty percent shade cloth on the outside of the hoop house in the spring, summer and early fall. Six mil plastic is used on the outside in the winter months, and is rolled up on the sides to allow for ventilation. Per XtremeHorticulture of the Desert: #1 TIP! Greenhouses in the hot desert should be as tall as possible to get the heat off of the crop. Temps in small ‘hobby’ greenhouses are hard to manage. See several other great tips there!

PREPARE YOUR SOIL

If you will be gardening in a new area, a soil test may save you a lot of heartache. You can easily do it yourself. Soil test kits are inexpensive. Get good with your soil from the get go! If your garden is slowing down, maybe something is used up, now missing. Check it and get growing again!

Desert soil is mostly sand and gravel that water drains through while you stand there, and clay. For water holding capacity, add a powerful lot of compost, organic material, garden soil, worm castings. Add more every year. Compost your kitchen scraps. They are gold!

Las Cruces NM nursery owner Gary Guzman says while the city, and maybe others, offer compost for free, he recommends buying bagged compost. I’m with him. You get a complete compost, read the ingredients, with water holding capacity often better than the compost you make yourself! I give my kitchen gatherings to my worms, don’t have access to brown ingredients, straw takes too long, so I combine my 100% fresh worm castings and nursery bought compost!

If your soil is really dry, has clay-type sand, and shows no sign of natural moisture, you might choose to use raised beds and adjust your windbreaks accordingly.

GATHER YOUR SYSTEMS, INSTALL IN TIME TO TEST THEM IN PLACE BEFORE PLANTING

As a home or community garden gardener, there are many techniques you can use. As a farmer you would likely use well secured shade cloth covered hoop houses. Many commercial grower techniques can be scaled down to your home garden. Use row covers when appropriate. Use flexible systems to be able to adjust quickly to changing weather conditions.

Desert simple overhead shade structure for taller plants Desert Structure Covered with plastic open weave material keeps animals birds out

Left above: At your home you may make a simple overhead shade structure for taller plants. Shade cloth is draped to one side to protect from afternoon sun. Right above: Covered with plastic open weave material that can be secured to keep animals and birds out. Can be draped with shade cloth as needed. Below: Sliding Shade Canopy at Rock Rose Desert Botanical Garden can be opened fully, moved side to side as needed during the day.

Shade Sliding Canopy, used by permision from RockRose Blog! At Desert Botanical Garden.

PLANTING CHOICES

Plant low water needing trees, like various fast growing Australian legume trees, that feed your soil so your soil is restored and neighboring plants will be fed too, right on the spot! Plant them at their right time of year so they will have enough water to get started. Some of these trees produce food and are grown for a fire wood source for those cold desert winters. For our purposes here, let them be the perimeter of the beginning of your Food Forest. Plant shrubs to fill in the spaces between trees, to keep the tree roots shaded, cooled, moisture retained, leaves to fall to become mulch. The shrubs provide a natural permeable windbreak that slows the wind, reduces drying and soil erosion. A food producing shrub is even better!

Food Forest - Forest Garden 7 Level Design

Mediterranean Understory & Guild Plants for Food Forests This link is not written for Desert or Drought conditions, but here to give you an idea what can be done in the desert too! Select your guild plants accordingly. In addition to planting levels, another kind of desert companion planting is to plant more delicate plants below taller hardier plants. One gardener puts her chard and kale in the center of a pole bean teepee!

In your off season, weather permitting, grow a soil feeding cover crop! Living Mulch! When, Which and Why?! This link is not written for Desert or Drought conditions. Select the right soil feeding cover for your area. See your local farmers, farmers market, nurseries, cooperative extension, nearest university.

VARIETIES OF VEGGIES

The University of Nevada, Reno, did some studies about growing veggies from 3 to 6,000′, from ‘warm’ to cold. When we think about HOT we forget that also means Cold! Select heat, drought tolerant food producing trees and food plant varieties that can also withstand cold desert nights! They advise: Varieties that develop produce quickly, less chance of weather damage, may perform better than crops with more days to maturity, especially in higher, desert locations.

Heat lovers are nightshade or Solanaceae (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) and squash or Cucurbitaceae (cucumbers, melons, summer and winter squash) plus corn and beans. Heat tolerant varieties of basil thrive in the hottest desert summers. Perennial herb Thai Basil is slow to bolt.

Laura Miller has a great post on growing herbs in Texas where summer temp highs average 90°F! See her varieties recommendations! She says: resist the urge to plant Texas summer herbs in containers. Pots and planters dry out too quickly in 90°F (32 C.) heat. Instead, plant outside herbs for Texas gardens directly in the ground. If you must container garden, keep the herbs inside the air-conditioned house where they can enjoy the sun from a bright window.

But depending on your location…this in Palm Springs CA:

Desert Grow winter greens in pots grow boxes Maureen Gilmer

Maureen Gilmer, in Special To the Desert Sun, says ‘Virtually all winter greens can be easily grown in pots or grow boxes!’

Per UNReno studies with farmers in mind! And remember, these are in Nevada. Check your area for any differences, local champion varieties well adapted to your area!

Tomatoes! Varieties such as Early Girl, Better Boy and some cherry types performed more consistently. Tomatoes have been shown to perform better when provided a protective cover of shade cloth. Field trials had New Girl tomatoes yield 78 to 84 percent higher under shade cloth covered hoop houses than the same tomatoes in the field without cover. Heirloom tomatoes required more care because many are prone to disease.

Peppers! Jalapeños, Poblano (when dried called ancho) and sweet banana peppers provided high quality and good yields. Peppers vary in whether yield and quality improve under protection from shade cloth. Jalapenos yielded better in full sun. Sweet banana peppers have been shown to be heavier and higher quality when grown under shade cloth. In desert regions at around 4,000 feet of elevation, sweet bell peppers often fail to develop a thick fleshy wall, especially upon ripening, and their quality can be poorer than store-bought bells. Specialty peppers (hot or sweet) of different varieties should be tested in your region to determine how well they do.

Eggplants grow well in the open desert. Studies showed a disadvantage to using shade cloth over eggplant. It is best to pick varieties that remain fleshy on the inside with few seeds. Avoid varieties that will quickly set a large amount of tough seeds on the inside (a slender green and small striped plump variety). Some chefs prefer small, slender, fleshy and flavorful Japanese types (variety – Magnum).

All types of summer squash tested grew well in the desert. Chefs preferred fruit with amazing color, nice texture, and consistency throughout the fruit. Consumers favor golden zucchini (variety – Golden Dawn III) over yellow crookneck due to a firmer texture and more flavor after cooking. Squash blossoms are a great add on crop that is highly specialized and sought out by chefs and food lovers. It was estimated that a third of the male blossoms could be harvested without impacting pollination and full female blossoms with a tiny squash attached are premium priced. Golden zucchini can yield 4.5 pounds of fruit per square foot in addition to yields of one blossom per square foot per week for the 15-week harvest period. Squash bug infestations are the major production problem that needs to be controlled for all summer squash, regardless of the variety. Control with several pesticide applications can be achieved if started early. Organic control systems are not consistently effective. Vacuuming them off the plants, covering with row cover, and diatomaceous earth has been recommended as having some benefit in controlling them.

Desert grown Brilliant Golden Dawn III zucchini fruits Desert grown Squash Blossom

Brilliant Golden Dawn III zucchini fruits and squash blossom

Of the winter squashes, butternut and pumpkin consistently produce a crop whereas some others grew slowly and would lose quality and yield due to immaturity with fall frost.

Melons, cantaloupes and some watermelons performed well, whereas Crenshaw, casaba and honeydews were less reliable. Often the shorter season types and varieties produced higher yields and better quality product reliably such as Ambrosia cantaloupe. Melons require a LOT of water.

Cucumber advice! Cucumbers can be inconsistent in quality because of gaps forming inside by the seeds and different viruses invading crops. Variety selection for disease resistance and consistent watering can help to address these problems.

Greens! Southern Exposure Seed Exchange strongly recommends Red Malabar summer spinach to anyone who hasn’t tried growing it yet. The crisp, slightly succulent leaves stay mild in high heat and maintain healthy growth all summer. The gorgeous red vines need to be trellised or caged, keeping the leaves clean. They’re excellent as cooking greens and in salad mixes.

Blueberries and strawberries are not generally favored, sigh. One gardener says strawberries will grow in early spring but MUST be protected from the wind, they like northern exposure. Strawberries maybe if in a container… And, some gardeners say their area does work for blueberries! Talk with locals to see if they have had success.

In cold weather, growing in greenhouses, a plastic covered hoop house or plastic covered low tunnels is a game changer! Leaf and root crops are doable! Cold-tolerant crops grow even when temperatures fall well below freezing. If you are doing this kind of growing, research your options online!

Cool weather crops are the most suited for spring and fall production but due to extreme temps and periods of temps remaining for too many days, they are a challenge. Hoop houses, low tunnels and frost blankets can help. It’s important to choose varieties with shorter days to maturity (50 to 60 days to maturity) that can achieve more harvests. Ironically, though harvests may be small, they have high quality due to less disease and good flavor. UNReno says ‘Experienced producers commonly adjust estimated yields like those published in Johnnie’s seed catalog by reducing them by one half.’ That gives you an idea of your challenge. Remember, the farmers are looking at salable produce. Home gardeners don’t always need to have that commercial top quality.

Use cool spring and fall weather to plant beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, lettuce, onion, pea, potato, radish, spinach, turnips!

Succession and Variety! ‘Crops can be selected to achieve the broadest possible range of harvest dates to provide produce all year long rather than huge crops a few times. A steady stream of harvests can be achieved by utilizing a variety of crops or different varieties of the same crop that differ in the number of days to maturity. In many areas, growers recommend planting seeds every week or two to spread out the harvest. The local desert research shows harvest dates are poorly related to seeding date and the harvesting date of many crops were more dependent on temperature. The crops matured faster if they did not spend too much time in too cold or too hot of temperatures compared to that plant’s optimal range. In the desert, spreading the harvest is best achieved through varying the crops and varieties.’

Famed Las Vegas gardener John Kohler’s favorites are Thai basil but grows several basils, okra, eggplant, dinosaur kale, red Malabar spinach, Swiss chard (in the shade), purple perennial tree collards! Perennials are always a winner because they don’t need to be planted/started over and over again, needing more start up water and waiting time for production. Many perennials can be harvested all year long! See more drought tolerant perennials at Grow Delicious and Amazing Edible Perennials! John’s Video

One of the things we are learning is to see what is growing successfully in other desert regions and grow them here! South American Chaya Tree Spinach is now being gratefully grown in Zimbabwe! The Maya ate legumes, including beans, which have fairly high protein content — 19.4% to 24.8%. Chaya leaves, on the other hand, have about 30%, higher than any other plant food known for the Maya and comparable to the protein content of animal flesh!

Definitely, information found in desert area publications from Universities, seed catalogs and from local successful growers can help narrow down and improve the choice of crops.

PLANTING TECHNIQUES IN THE DESERT!

The laws of nature shift when you change to desert territory!

LOVE these babies! Image by Rock Bottom Ranch, Basalt CO, elevation 6,611′. Note they are double planted.

As always, start seeds indoors for an earlier start, but your timing is different. Frost free days are key, and that can vary year to year, location to location. Check what they are at your place. Plant two or more rounds of seeds just in case!

Make first plantings near the warm house maybe in side-of-the-house mini greenhouses. Use buildings to buffer cold, and heat! Grow early heat lovers like basil, herbs, tomatoes near your house! Plant lettuces in the afternoon shade area.

Plant veggies with more space between them, usually about 18 inches. Planting in crowded rows doesn’t work. Your plants ‘starve’ for water. Give them room to survive. It’s like being root bound in a different way.

Planting depth becomes deeper so seeds will survive drying topsoil. Plant 4X deeper than the diameter of the seed. Put markers, sticks, a rock, where you plant your seeds so you know right where to keep that soil moist.

In general water lightly every 2 to 3 days or as needed in exceptional heat or high winds. When your seedlings get their 2nd, 3rd true leaves, let the soil dry out between heavy waterings to encourage deep root growth. This will make your plants more able to survive low water availability.

MAINTENANCE

If there is no wind, to help plants through midday heat, protect them with a fabric grow cover, especially young plants. Lay it on when temps soar, remove it mid to late afternoon. You can also use well anchored fabric cover to make a more humid environment, hold moisture in the soil.

High summer July/August UV shields Maureen Gilmer says: During the summer this exposure soars to such an extent that some plants just can’t take it. I use wire field fencing rolled into tubes in lieu of tomato towers. They’re perfect for another solution, using shade cloth attached with clothes pins to the west side of each wire tube. This helps plants during July and August when very hot afternoons can be tough on food plants.

Melissa Willis from Santa Fe, New Mexico says: I’ve found that Summer and Winter Squash benefit greatly from a bit of shade at the hottest time of day! You can achieve this by simply inserting PVC pipes in your beds as you would when creating a hoop house or low tunnel and then securing your shade only over the very top of the PVC pipes using small clamps so your plants get some sun, just not the hottest sun of the day.

WATER IN THE EARLY MORNING OR LATE EVENING TO LESSEN WATER EVAPORATION. Often there is a predawn lull in the wind, easier to water, soaks in better before it dries. A consistent watering regimen is key. In Santa Barbara CA’s droughty hot summers we water before 10:30 AM and after 4 PM as possible. I imagine in the desert those hours are much earlier and later in the day…

Our high desert gardener Sheila advises: ‘I find that watering before sun up is best for both plants and trees as it prevents mold, scalding (if one waters during heat of day, sun can scald leaves from water droplets) and water attracts rodents, of which rabbits do a number on anything less than an inch thick. I rinse leaves occasionally because they get covered with dusty dirt. Mold and insects are drawn to damp dark ground, not so good for plants overnight. Early morning watering is best. However, I do water more before full moon, always makes a big difference in growth.’

Her Tree watering tip! Trees will tend to grow out toward side they are watered. If the prevailing wind causes them to bend toward the northeast, watering them on the southwest side has them righting and sending branches toward that side more heavily watered, in effect balancing the tree.

Sprinkler systems lose a lot of water to evaporation. For extensive areas use subsurface drip systems. For smaller quickly changing gardens an easily movable soaker hose can be best. Plants get the majority of their nutrition from subsurface feeder roots! They need water to uptake the nutrients they are looking for. So, put water where your plant takes it up, at the roots to the drip line. Rather than a straight row line, only along the stems, circle your plants. If drip systems aren’t for you, watering by hand is the most efficient especially if you have a small garden or are doing a waffle garden. See how: Hand Watering Veggies During Drought? Big Yes!

Our high desert gardener gives these tips as well: ‘Soaker hose is great as long as squirrels or other rodents don’t chew on them. Sun and heat is hard on them here in the desert. Lines, hoses, must be checked to insure water flow often. Irrigation ditches help. Bathwater using only Ivory soap helps reduce aphids and won’t kill praying mantis on roses and vegetables.’

Cultivating lightly after rains disturbs the soil surface and stops water from wicking up and evaporating. Dry farmers use this technique.

Melissa from Ever Growing Farm also recommends ‘Water catchment, in the form of rain barrels, can be a life saver (if it is legal in your state). Allowing the rain water to be diverted from your roof and into large barrels or cisterns on your property can help offset your water costs (or alleviate some of the stress on your well) when used to spot water plants that require a bit more water than others. Alternatively, you can set up your rain barrels with hoses and a gravity feed or a timer to water your plants.’

Mulch, mulch, mulch! Heavily mulching gives your soil a chance to absorb water. Big wood chips, that won’t blow away, prevent light germinating weed seeds from sprouting, protects your top soil and the base of your plants from the elements, helps keep soil temperatures low and retains soil moisture. Use crushed tree leaves as mulch. Do regular checks and keep the mulch thick.

Impressively, Bryce Richard of Pata Viva Farm near Las Cruces NM, clay soil, says “What’s underneath the woodchips will still be moist three or four days later and the stuff that’s 3 or 4 inches away from where the woodchips are will have cracks in it!” He says: “An average vegetable crop tends to use about 30 to 35 inches of water in a season, a mature plant getting about an inch to an inch and a half a week, let the soil dry out half an inch to an inch down before watering again. Put mulch on top of the soaker hose to stop it from breaking and getting brittle in the sun.” The voice of experience!

Remove weeds around trees, veggies. Weeds compete with them for moisture. Instead, if your soil supports it, grow living mulch, a shorter level of plants under the trees, larger plants or if the under story plants need more sun, plant around the perimeter of your tree, larger veggies.

I’m quoting Maureen Gilmer because she lives in the high desert. She speaks from experience. ‘May 1st is the most universal date of the last frost, then the growing season is fast for the first month or two, until it slows down in the depths of summer. During August your plants may rest in the heat, then take off again in September growing rapidly until frost. Be sure to feed your garden at summer’s end with a tomato and vegetable fertilizer to help them flourish in this “second season”.’

So, you see, it’s doable! Adjust your land and soil, you’re gardening techniques. Get the right plants and the right varieties being particularly mindful of the days to maturity. If these stalwart desert gardeners, always in drought conditions, can do it, so can we! Modify to suit your needs!

A xeriscape type veg garden is the ultimate! Start converting and use these clever desert tips NOW!

Updated 4.27.23

Many thanks to high desert gardener Sheila Custer for generously sharing multiple tips of her 22 years of expertise!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

The Green Bean Connection started as correspondence for the Santa Barbara CA USA Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden. Both of Santa Barbara City’s remaining community gardens are very coastal. During late spring/summer we are often in a fog belt/marine layer most years, locally referred to as the May grays, June glooms and August fogusts. Keep that in mind compared to the microclimate niche where your veggie garden is.

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April 2022 Oh, Yes, Time for Those Luscious Heat Lovers!

Posted in 2022, April, Aspirin, Baking Soda, Bell Pepper, Biodiversity, Bolt Resistant/Slow Bolting, Bolting, Bone Meal, Brassicas, Cantaloupe, Cold tolerant, Companion, Compost, Cover crop, Cucumber Beetle, Design - Layout, Determinate, Disease, Drought, Drought Tolerant, Feed, Flea Beetles, Foliar, Fusarium Wilt, Garden, Green Manure, Guano, Heat Tolerant, HOT, Indeterminate, June, Kale, Leafminer, Living Mulch, Manure, May, Mildew, Mulch, Nonfat Powdered Milk, Okra, Pests, Plant, Pollinator, Radish, Seeds, SoCal, Soil, Spring, Strawberries, Succession, Summer, Summer, Temperature, Temperature, Tomato, Understory, Varieties, Veggies, Verticillium Wilt, VFN, Waffle Garden, Water, Weather, Worm Castings, tagged 2022, April, Bell Peppers, biodiversity, cantaloupe, Companion, Compost, Cover crop, Curtis Quam, day length, DeannaCat, Design, determinate, Drought Tolerant, Early, Early Varieties, fusarium, Garden, Garden Design, Green Manure, Greta Moran, Heat Lovers, heat tolerant, indeterminate, June, Kale, La Sumida, leafminers, Living Mulch, may, mildew, Mulch, Night temps, okra, Pests, Plant, prevention, Repel Pests, Santa Barbara, Sidedressing, SoCal, Soil, Soil Prep, Soil Temp, Spring, Spring Planting, succession, Summer, tomatoes, Veggies, verticillium, Water, weather, Will Allen, Zuni Pueblo on April 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Happy Earth Day April 22, in Santa Barbara it will be celebrated April 23 at Arlington Theatre! The 150th Arbor Day is Friday April 29! Please plant trees, lots of trees!

On the 30th day of March at Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA the 9 AM soil temps were 59-60°. 60° to 65° are what we are looking for. April night temps for the next 10 days are predicted to be as low as 46°, the majority by far in the 50s! Day temps 62 – 81°. Keep a close watch on those hot days. BELL PEPPERS especially need warmer temps, nighttime temps steadily above 55°F and soil temps above 65°F. We’re almost there! If planted too soon, sometimes they miss their natural growth sequence and never produce. Check out the Quick Guide to Summer Veggie Soil & Temp Preferences!

APRIL through JUNE Planting Timing

APRIL is true heat lovers time! Start MORE seedlings indoors NOW for successive June plantings. Sow seeds right in the ground! If seeds and tending seedlings aren’t for you, get transplants and pop them in the ground per their right times! April 1 or as close to it as you can, start your Jicama seeds! Winter squash for sure. It needs time to grow big and harden for winter storage. MAY for cantaloupe, peppers, pumpkins and squash! Wait until the soil has warmed to 70°F before planting squash and melons. Many wait until May, some even June, to plant tomatoes to avoid soil fungi. Some gardeners wait until JUNE to plant okra. Okra really likes heat and grows quickly when happy. Choose faster maturing varieties like hybrid Annie Oakley F1 for coastal SoCal. Plus, it is said to produce almost double the pods of standard okra cultivars! Heavy Hitter is a phenomenal producer – you may need only 1 or 2 plants! Some Long beans and Asian tropical veggies need warm temps to start from seeds. If YOU anticipate a HOT summer, plant a tad earlier and be prepared to plant second rounds as plants finish early! Also be prepared to deal with it if summer is overcast as often is the case after all.

Keep COMPOSTING! Soil building is the single-most important thing you can do for your garden. Compost keeps your soil aerated, has great water holding capacity, feeds slowly just perfectly! And if you made it, you know what’s in it! Make it HOT, Cold, or In Place! In place takes the least time, is the most efficient, is a worm buffet! Move the top 6″+ of soil, put in your ingredients, chop fine with your shovel, sprinkle with well aged composted manure, mix in some soil so the chopped bits don’t form an impervious mat, cover with the soil you removed. Give it 1 to 3 weeks and you are ready to plant! Dry is dead, so be sure it is always slightly moist. Giving back to Mama Earth is nature’s natural way! And, like Will Allen says ….there is something very Spiritual about touching the soil, that’s where life begins.

Put in last minute amendments, soil preps for May plantings of cantaloupe, okra, more tomatoes. About Manures

Tomatoes! Heirlooms are particularly susceptible to the wilts, Fusarium and Verticillium. Instead, get hybrid varieties that have VFN or VF on the tag at the nursery. The V is for Verticillium, the F Fusarium wilt, N nematodes. Ace, Early Girl, Champion, Celebrity, are some that are wilt resistant/tolerant. In Santa Barbara area continual drought conditions, consider getting only indeterminates. In the Mother Earth News tomato survey, they found gardeners chose heirlooms over hybrids if their soil is wilt/blight free. Otherwise, the longer the gardener has gardened, they more they chose wilt resistant hybrid toms if their soil has fungi. La Sumida has the largest tomato selection in the Santa Barbara area! See Special Planting and growing tips for your Tomatoes and Cucumbers!

Alyssum, in the image above left, is a great old fashioned pretty border plant, an understory living mulch. And white Alyssum repels the cabbage butterfly and feeds mini beneficial pest predators like hoverflies whose primary food source is aphids!

Basil repels several unwanted insects, is great near tomatoes but not in the basin with the tom. The tom needs less water.
Beans, Cukes, Dill, Radish Combo! Cukes and Beans are great on one big trellis, one high, one low unless you are growing long cuke varieties. They can fill a trellis all by themselves! Dill to go with pickling cukes. Radishes to deter Cucumber beetles.
WHITE Potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs.
Radish with eggplant, cukes & zukes as trap plants for flea beetles and to repel cucumber beetles.
Carrots love being with cilantro and chamomile, and chamomile improves the flavor of any neighboring herb! Plus, it helps neighboring plants – called the Plant Dr!
Hot peppers emit a chemical from the plant roots that helps prevent Fusarium wilt, root rot, and a wide range of other plant diseases!
Calendula traps aphids, whiteflies, and thrips!
Marigolds are brilliant and called the workhorse of pest deterrents!
Lettuce and carrots make a great understory below larger plants like peppers, eggplant. They act as living mulch! If you already have enough lettuce, beets and carrots, scatter a living mulch, soil feeding legume seed mix under those plants. At the end of the season you can turn it all under – aka Green Manure. Or remove the larger plants, open up spots and put in winter plants! See much more – Living Mulch/Green Manure!
Plant whole sets of companion plants as in the image above right! Very efficient use of space!See more at Super Spring & Summer Veggies Companion Planting Tips!

Put in borders of slow but low growers like carrots, mini cabbages, in more permanent placements, like on what will become the morning side of taller backdrop plants like peppers and eggplant. Let your Alyssum ramble. Add some Marigolds. Plant purple favorites for bumble bees – rosemary, scabiosa, lavender, chives. Bumble bees pollinate tomatoes, the nightshade family; honey bees don’t! See Pollination: Honeybees, Squash Bees & Bumblebees!

Natural Disease & Pest Prevention!

Be wise and pick the right plant varieties for your temps and conditions! Get heat tolerant, bolt resistant, drought tolerant, disease tolerant/resistant. If you are just starting, just start! You will learn as you go. Our climate is changing, so we are all adjusting and new plants are being hybridized, and hybridize naturally, for new climates. We can get varieties from other areas that are already used to conditions we will be having. Together we will do this. Locally, save seeds from plants that do the best with the heat and share some of those seeds at the Seed Swap and with other gardeners.
Think biodiversity! Religiously plant companion plants that naturally repel pests – no pesticides needed, enhance each other’s growth so they are strong and pest and disease resistant. Mix it up! Less planting in rows, more understories and interplanting. Split up groups so pests won’t go from one plant to the next, and the next. Allow enough room for air space between, no leaves of mature plants touching each other. That breaks up micro pest and disease habitats.
Make top notch soil!
In planting holes
– Add worm castings for your plants’ excellent health. 25% is best; 10% will do if that’s all you’ve got.
– Add a tad more tasty properly aged composted manure mixes where manure lovers will be planted.
– Add non-fat powdered milk for immediate immune system support at planting time
– Put in a finely ground bone meal for 2 months later uptake when your plant gets to flowering time.
– Add bird guano high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time. It helps your plants continue to bloom LATE in the season! Choose an NPK ratio like 1-10-0.2, takes 3-4 months to become available to your plants.
– Add an eency tad of coffee grounds (a 1/2 of a %) if you have wilts in your soil
– Sprinkle mycorrhizae fungi directly on transplant roots and pat it on, all but Brassicas, at planting time to increase their uptake of nutrients and water.
– Use acidic compost in strawberry patches and work in a little where you will be planting celery and string beans.
Immediately drench your transplants, foliar feed, with a non-fat powdered milk, baking soda, aspirin, soap mix to jazz up their immune systems. Specially give your peppers an Epsom salt and soap mix foliar bath for a taste of sulfur. More details and all the recipes.
Thin baby plants you have deliberately or not overplanted! Many are great tiny salad greens. Most of all plants need space for their roots, or they struggle for soil food (can literally be rootbound in place), are weak and disease/pest susceptible, are not able to reach their full productive size. See this terrific post on Thinning Seedlings by DeannaCat!
Maintenance! Keep your plants strong while they are working hard! Be ready to do a little cultivating composts and manures in during the season (called sidedressing), or adding fish/kelp emulsion mixes if you don’t have predator pests like skunks! Keep your plants watered and vibrant, but not so much as to make their leaves soft and inviting to munching insect pests like aphids. Trap gophers immediately if you are able.
Harvest promptly. Insects and diseases know when plants are softening and losing strength as they age. Insects are nature’s cleaner uppers, and they and disease organisms are hungry! If leaves are yellowing or not looking up to par, remove them and don’t leave them lying on the ground. Whiteflies are attracted to yellow.
Prevention A frustrating typical spring disease is Powdery mildew. It’s common on late peas, Curly Leaf kales, broccoli, cucumbers and zucchini. Plant leaving plenty of space for air circulation. Apply your baking soda mix. Drench under and upper sides of the foliage of young plants to get them off to a great start! Do this the same or next day if transplanting. A super combo is 1 regular Aspirin dissolved, a 1/4 cup nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon liquid dish soap per gallon/watering can. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains. Not only is prevention so much better than after mildew has set in, but this mix stimulates your plant’s growth! See Aspirin Solution!

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Little rain this year. Please start your Water Wise Practices!

Please water before 10:30 AM and after 4 PM as possible. Use a watering sprinkler head or wand with a shutoff valve. Berms need to go just beyond the dripline of your plant so tiny subsurface feeder roots can fully supply your plant with water and nutrients as it needs.

Choose heat and drought tolerant varieties! They need less water! Some will keep producing at 85° and above!
How much should you water? General rule is 1″/week. May take two, three waterings a day in extreme hot weather. Seeds and seedlings must be KEPT moist. On very hot days frequent waterings during the day may be needed. Some of your plants may need shade covers.
Trenches or waffles?! To save water consider planting IN furrows, where moisture settles and drying wind crosses overhead. Plant crosswise to the prevailing wind so wind isn’t funneled down the trench, and, if possible, also to the Sun’s arc so the plants’ root areas will be slightly shaded by the depth of the furrow in early AM and late afternoon. If you still want your plants on top of the furrow, make the raised part of your furrows wide enough that you can put a mini trench on top of it! That holds the water up at your plants’ surface feeder roots area. If you make the sides of your trenches low slopes, and water carefully, your furrows won’t seriously degrade from water washing the sides away. Nor will seeds or plants be buried too deeply. But some maintenance will be required.Plants grown in thoughtfully made trenches need far less waterings and for less time. As the plants grow, they also self mulch and need even less water and less frequent waterings.
Trench planting is akin to the New Mexico Zuni waffle gardens. The advantage of waffle gardens is, you can see, the wind and sun arc directions don’t matter to waffle gardens! The wind can change direction and it’s no problem! Berms cover all four sides. You can save the making and maintenance of berms by simply digging down! Zuni climate is hot and dry, sometimes windy. The berms/sides that shelter each waffle space cause hot drying winds to rise/cross over the waffle and it stays more moist inside. Be sure to mulch your waffles after the soil gets warm and before temps get hot. At that point you want to keep your soil moist and cool. The early Zunis used gravel from the nearby riverbeds. Similar sunken beds for growing food with less water have been used globally in arid regions, arising independently by Indigenous farmers. See moreCurtis Quam’s waffle garden, which he tends with his family at Zuni Pueblo, NM = less water used, food security. By Greta Moran, photo by Curtis Quam.

Please always be building compost. Compost increases your soil’s water holding capacity.
Make mounds with basins on top. For virus sensitive plants like toms and cukes, make sure the bottom of the basin is higher than the level of the surrounding soil level. Rather than losing water to evaporation from overhead watering, put the water right where it will do the most good and nowhere else. Make the mound to the dripline of your plant so small surface feeder roots get moisture for food uptake. For larger leaved plants like squashes, put a stake in the center of the basin so you know where to water when the leaves get big. With a long watering wand you can water under the leaves rather than on them ~ unless they need a bath to remove dust. Fuzzy leaved plants like tomatoes and eggplant don’t like wet leaves. Water at ground level.
Once your soil is heated up, PLEASE MULCH! Straw, Self Mulching, a living mulch of understory plants like lettuce, or plant soil feeding living mulch legumes! It keeps your soil cooler, more moist, less water needed. And it stops light germinating weed seeds from germinating! Super heat lovers like melons and winter squash may be the exception. See Mulching right for each plant!Straw is dead, but has its advantages. It is organic and does decompose in time. It gets fruits up off the ground and keeps soil from splashing up on lettuce leaves! If not too deep, straw can shade but allow airflow. Your soil is cool but if has fungi it is best to let the soil dry a bit. Straw mulch can help reduce cucumber beetles 3+ different ways. 1) Mulch might directly slow beetle movement from one plant to another. 2) The mulch provides refuge for wolf spiders, daddy long legs and other predators from hot and dry conditions, helping predator conservation. 3) The straw mulch is food for springtails and other insects that eat decaying plant material; these decomposers are important non-pest prey for spiders, helping to further build spider numbers! In addition, laid on an inch or less thick, it lets airflow dry out wilts fungi in soil. That’s why straw is good to use under tomatoes and cucumbers. With other plants, lay it on 3-6″ deep!Living Mulch, Self mulching, planting closely enough so your plants self shade, is a tasty and efficient use of your soil nutrients. It’s doubly efficient space use when you plant smaller companion plants under, beside, among, around larger plants!Soil feeding Living Mulch You can up the amps by tossing a mix of legume seeds under your plants to feed your soil as well! You may decide to do both. Plant the small plants you need, grow legumes under the rest along with the right companion plants per the crop there.
Sprinkle and pat on Mycorrhiza fungi right on the roots of your transplants when you put them in the ground. It increases uptake of nutrients, water, and phosphorus that helps roots and flowers grow and develop. Ask for it bulk at Island Seed & Feed in Goleta. (Brassicas don’t connect with it, so your over summering kale doesn’t need it.)
Dust Mulching, cultivation, weeding, is perfect to break up exposed soil surface. That keeps the water from wicking to the surface and evaporating. Do it especially after rains. If you use a hula hoe you do two things at once! Just a half to one inch depth cuts off weed sprouts that use water. Indeed, it turns the soil a tad, all that’s needed. More weeds will follow, but it’s quick and easy to repeat the process. Two, three times, a few days apart, and there will be few weeds after that for a while. Get ’em while they are small and easy to do. Smart gardening.

Plant Pollinator Food, Herbs and Flowers! Sow or transplant basil, borage, chervil, chamomile, chives, cilantro, comfrey, dill, fennel, lavender, marjoram, mint, oregano, rosemary, sage, savory, tarragon, and thyme. PURPLE is best, blue next! Be mindful where you plant them… Mediterranean herbs from southern France, like lavender, marjoram, rosemary, sage, savory, and thyme, do well in hot summer sun and poor but well-drained soil with minimal fertilizer. On the other hand, basil, chives, coriander (cilantro), and parsley thrive in richer soil with more frequent watering. Wise planting puts chives by your broccoli, kale, but away from peas if you are still growing some. Cilantro, a carrot family workhorse, discourages harmful insects such as aphids, potato beetles and spider mites, attracts beneficial insects when in bloom. Dill is a natural right next to the cucumbers since you will use the dill if you make pickles. They mature about the same time. Let some of your arugula, carrots, lettuces, cilantro bloom! Bees, pollinators and insect eating birds and beneficial insects love them and you will get some seeds – some for the birds, some for you, some to take to the seed swap! Grow beauty – cosmos, marigolds, white sweet alyssum – all benefit your garden in their own way! See Grow a Pollinator Meadow at Home! Here are some special considerations – Courting Solitary Bees!

May your crops be abundant and your Spirit blessed!

Oh, and please see more in February’s Newsletter, especially about Tomatoes!

Updated 4.2.22

Merry March images at Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA! We had many hot days and cool nights, a couple of heavy frosts, but most of our plants did beautifully! A fair rain ended the month and very shortly now, night temps will be consistently in the 50s! Let’s plant!

Check out the entire April 2022 Newsletter!

Designing Your Spring/Summer Veggie Garden!
Quick Guide to Summer Veggie Soil & Temp Preferences!
Seed Soaking/Presprouting Tips & Ideas! Part 1
Hand Watering Veggies During Drought? Big Yes!

Upcoming Gardener Events! 52nd Santa Barbara EARTH DAY at the historic Arlington Theatre! Santa Cruz Permaculture Design Certificate Courses for gardeners and educators! May 1 International Permaculture Day!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

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March 2022 Planting, Thoughtful Garden Design & Perfect Veggie Choices!

Posted in 2022, Aphids, April, Aspirin, Baking Soda, Bell Pepper, Biodiversity, Bolt Resistant/Slow Bolting, Bolting, Bone Meal, Brassicas, Broccoli, Cabbage Butterfly, Cantaloupe, Cold tolerant, Companion, Compost, Cover crop, Cucumber Beetle, Design - Layout, Determinate, Disease, Disease Resistant, Drought Tolerant, Fusarium Wilt, Garden, Green Manure, Guano, Heat Tolerant, HOT, Indeterminate, June, Leafminer, Living Mulch, Manure, March, May, Mildew, Mulch, Nonfat Powdered Milk, Okra, Pests, Photoperiodism, Plant, Pollinator, PreSprout, Radish, Seeds, SoCal, Soil, Spring, Stratification, Succession, Summer, Summer, Temperature, Temperature, Tomato, Understory, Varieties, Veggies, Verticillium Wilt, VFN, Water, Weather, Wind, Worm Castings, tagged 2022, Aphids, April, Bell Peppers, biodiversity, Bolt Resistant, broccoli, cantaloupe, Cold Stratification, Cold tolerant, community, Companion, Compost, Cover crop, day length, Design, determinate, Drought Tolerant, Early, Early Varieties, fusarium, Garden, Garden Design, Green Manure, Heat Lovers, heat tolerant, indeterminate, June, Kale, La Sumida, leafminers, Living Mulch, March, may, mildew, Mulch, Night temps, okra, Peas, Pests, Photoperiod, Plant, prevention, Rains, Repel Pests, Santa Barbara, seeds, Sidedressing, SoCal, Soil, Soil Prep, Soil Temp, Spring Planting, succession, Thinning, Thousand Headed Kale, tomatoes, Veggies, verticillium, weather, Will Allen, Winter on March 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Design Your Beautiful Summer Garden!

Last chance to design, make changes to your summer garden layout! March is often first plantings, if not, it is last soil preps before full on April plantings!

Day lengths are still short. We want Night air temps steadily above 50 and soil temps 60 to 65 for starting our veggies well. Bell Peppers, especially need these warmer temps. They don’t like cold feet. They do best with nighttime temps above 55°F and soil temps above 65°F. Average March night temps are right about 50°F.

MARCH through June Planting Timing

APRIL is true heat lovers time! Eggplant, limas, melons (wait until MAY for cantaloupe), bell peppers, pumpkins and squash! Many wait until April, even May or June, to plant tomatoes. Wait until the soil has warmed to 70°F before planting squash and melons.
Some gardeners wait until JUNE to plant okra. It really likes heat and grows quickly when happy. Choose early varieties like the standard Clemson Spineless, Annie Oakley F1, red Burgundy or Cajun Delight! Try the fabulous Heavy Hitter! Choose faster maturing varieties for cool coastal SoCal. If YOU anticipate a HOT summer, plant a tad earlier, but in Santa Barbara be prepared to deal with it if summer is overcast as often is the case after all.

With our warming temp trends be on the safe side. Get bolt resistant/slow bolt varieties, heat, and especially drought tolerant varieties of everything!

Cold Stratification for Some of Your Seeds

Beans, Cukes, Dill, RADISH Combo! Depending on ground temps, tuck in some bean seeds where the peas are finishing, intermingled with cucumber seeds that will grow low along the trellis, below the beans, plus a few dill to go with the cukes! However, ONE healthy long cuke plant like Natsu Fushinari will easily take up a full 4’X7′ trellis all by itself! See more for bean/cuke planting tips. Plant radishes with the cukes to deter the Cucumber beetles. Borage repels tomato hornworm and is especially good with tomatoes, strawberries and squash!
Tomato Tips: La Sumida has the largest tomato selection in the Santa Barbara area! Heirlooms are particularly susceptible to the wilts, Fusarium and Verticillium. Instead, get varieties that have VFN or VF on the tag at the nursery. The V is for Verticillium, the F Fusarium wilt, N nematodes. Ace, Early Girl, Champion, Celebrity, are some that are wilt resistant/tolerant. In drought conditions, consider getting only indeterminates.

Put in borders of slow but low growers like carrots, mini cabbages, in more permanent places, like on what will become the morning side of taller backdrop plants like peppers and eggplant.

Depending on what legumes you choose, figure 3 1/2 +/- months to grow another round of green manure to enrich your soil Nitrogen. In warming weather and longer days, it grows faster. In 6 weeks to two months chop it down and chop up. Give it as close to 2 weeks as you can to decompose on the surface, keeping it moist. Add amendments, turn it all under, allow 3 weeks to a month for it to integrate with your soil, and the area will be ready to plant again. Or, dig your planting holes as soon as you turn it under, put in some fine compost, a smidge of manure, your other favorite amendments like worm castings, bone meal, Jamaican guano, a mineral mix, and plant! The rest of the area will take care of itself! See much more – Living Mulch/Green Manure!

Bolting, is a common issue when there are quick temp changes, and some plants, like arugula, chard, cilantro and lettuces are famous for bolting. See more about it and what you can do. See also about photoperiodism, Short Day, Long Day, Day Neutral Plants!

This is one kale plant in the image below! It has made all these branches, multiple harvest points, by April at Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden! Look at that abundance! It thrives all summer!

Curly Leaf Kale Branching into Bush form!

Chard suffers in hot summers. It droops from midday heat, recovers, droops, recovers each day. That’s hard on a plant. It doesn’t produce much. Doesn’t seem reasonable to harvest when it is trying to stay alive. If you do choose to grow it, plant it where it will have a little shade in the hottest part of the day in summer or install some shade cloth for it. Plant shallow rooted living mulch plants around it. Keep it evenly moist. Flooding it isn’t what it needs when it droops from heat, and plants can literally drown. Chard is a fast grower. Why not do a final harvest mid to late spring? Plant something that will be more summer happy, then plant chard again in fall when things cool down.

Tall: Indeterminate tomatoes in cages, pole beans in cages or on trellises. Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of culinary dandelions! Tall varieties of broccoli you keep for summer side shoots. Cucumbers are great on the trellis below the pole beans, or if a large variety, on their own trellis. Long beans! Tall varieties of okra.

Middle height: Determinate tomatoes, bush beans, okra, tall peppers like Big Jim Anaheim or Poblanos, zucchini. White potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs. Radish with cukes and squashes to repel cucumber beetles, with cukes, squashes and eggplant to trap flea beetles! Large Winter Squash vines and pumpkins are middle height, while some mini melons would fall to the lower mid height zone. Put in zucchini and vines, sweet potatoes, to take up space if you don’t want to do a lot of tending, but do know, you must keep those zucchini picked! If your zucchini is dense, and you miss seeing it, an unpicked zuke can become a 6″ diameter 2′ long monster in as little as 5 days! Grow heat tolerant flat leaf kale like Thousand Headed Kale! It has many growing points instead of just one and self mulches!

Put beets and carrots in the short zone, as an understory, between and among big plants. Bunch onions away from beans, great with other short rooted plants like lettuces that need to be kept moist. Summer small bulbed variety radishes give a great spike of hot flavor to a cool summer salad! Some delicious heat lover mini melons are quite small leaved and do best on the ground. They are easily trellised, but put that trellis in a sunny hot spot because it is cooler up on an open trellis.

Chamomile! Healing Herb, Great for your Garden, Easy to Grow!

See Smart Garden Design Leads to Excellent Plant & Seed Selection! for more tips!

While you are thinking where to put things, select permanent spots for herbs, gateway points for flowers and edible flowers! Designate a permanent patch for all seasons flower habitat for bees. Cilantro is both tasty and has lovely feathery leaves and flowers, great pollinator food. Chamomile is downright heady scented on a warm morning. Comfrey, Knitbone, is both healing (arthritis/bones) and speeds your compost, is high in soil nutrition. Poppies are beautiful; humble white Sweet Alyssum is dainty and attracts smaller beneficial insects like hover flies that eat aphids! Calendula traps aphids, whiteflies, and thrips! Marigolds are brilliant and called the workhorse of pest deterrents! Cosmos is cosmic! Breadseed Poppies will literally have your bees rolling in pollen! See Stripes of Wildflowers! See Pollinator Meadow!

Finish your Summer Gardening preparations!

Install a greywater, rain capture system
Install gopher wire protection.
Install pathways, berms.
Waffle Garden, basins & windbreaks, Water Garden. Excellent drought choices.
Gather cages & trellises
Terrace slopes – capture water runoff, prevent topsoil loss, mulch it
Build creative raised beds, Efficient Keyhole Gardens, try Hugelkultur
Get new containers, pallets, boards, tulle, net or wire for bird protection
Organize where you will keep straw bales for summer mulch
Setup compost and worm box areas

Complete your Soil Prep!

Add compost, only 5 to 10%, & other amendments to your soil all at the same time.
Add well aged manure as appropriate. Less in spring because you want fruit production, not leaf, unless it is a plant grown for its leaves, like lettuce, kale or cabbage! None for carrots, peas or beans.
Add 25% worm castings. As little as 10% works. They are potent, help with seedling germination, boost immunities to disease, add water holding capacity.
Bone Meal is a slow release fertilizer that becomes available to your plants over a 3-4 month period. It provides calcium (prevents blossom end rot) and phosphorous for blooms. See all about it!
Adding bird guano high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time helps your plants continue to bloom LATE in the season! Its NPK ratio is 1-10-0.2, takes 4 months to become available to your plants.
Sprinkle with a tad of coffee grounds to reduce wilts fungi. Add only a ½ a % to your soil or compost. A tiny bit goes a long way!
Don’t cover with mulch yet unless you need it for erosion control. Consider planting a living mulch like White Clover instead. Covered soil is cooler. Let your winter cool soil warm up. The exceptions are broccoli, cabbage, chard, and kale! Mulch ASAP because they like/need cooler soil.
Water your prepped areas when you water your veggies. Soil organisms need moist soil.
Sidedressing! Hard working plants need fuel and water. As broccoli starts to head, give it a fish/kelp tonic! With many varieties, after the main head is cut, your side shoots will flourish!

Pests Reminders and Home Remedies!

Before you put in seeds, sprinkle a bit of Sluggo type stuff around immediately to keep snails and slugs from vanishing upcoming seedlings overnight, making you think they never came up! No, they didn’t let you down. Killing off the creatures ahead of time saves the babies. It stops new transplants from being seriously damaged or entirely eaten while they are small. Do this a few times, to knock off the generations, and there will be no tiny vegetarian predators for quite a while.
Pull away those blotchy sections the leafminers make on chard and beet leaves. Remove whole leaves that are too funky for rescue. Harvest the bigger outer lower leaves more often to stay ahead of the miners. Water a tad less so leaves are less soft and inviting. Plant further apart to decrease spread.
Hose APHIDS off chard, kale, brocs, cabbages. Keep doing it for a few days to catch the ones you missed and new generations. Nearby, plant Calendula as a trap plant, radish to repel them. When you see unnaturally curled leaves, you will likely find aphids. Check both upper and undersides of the leaves and the tiny leaves at the central growth point.For hard to get at places, down the centers of chard, crinkly kale leaves, get out that spray bottle! Treat once, wait a couple days, treat the ones you missed, the ones that got away and newborns.I tried it, it WORKS! The simplest is to spray with 2 Parts alcohol, 2 parts water, 1 part soap. DO NOT use on seedlings, it will kill some of them. Spritz lightly rather than drenching or you may kill your bigger plant too! However. If the infestation is just over the top, with chard you can cut off the whole plant about 1 1/2″ above ground and simply let it regrow, though it may never be as healthy or lush as a newly grown plant. Sometimes it’s just better to start over, and not in the same place. Hose away any reappearing or lingering aphids post haste! Check out the ant situation. Ants like being near water. Water less? Get rid of the ants.
Regularly remove any yellowing leaves that attract whiteflies.
Gophers You can still put in wire protective baskets or barriers, especially now while the soil is softer after any rains. If you see a fresh mound, trap immediately. Install prevention wire.

Do not compost diseased or infested leaves or plants. Bag it and trash it!

Watering & Weeding Wind and sun dry soil quickly and short rooted plants like peas, or seedlings, need to be kept evenly moist. That can mean every day to every other day watering.

The good work you do now will pay off with abundant summer harvests!

Oh, and please see more in February’s Newsletter, especially about Tomatoes!

Updated annually

Fabulous February images at Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA! February closed with a cold snap, frost on the rooftops and a few plant casualties. Discovered a Chaya Tree Spinach, Amaranth, Wheat and charming Finches feasting!

Check out the entire March 2022 Newsletter!

Clever Seed Planting Tips for Indoors or Out!
Grow a Pollinator Meadow in Your Veg Garden!
How to Transplant for Super Successful Returns!
Grow Delicious and Amazing Edible Perennials!
February Letter from President Cathy Walker, American Community Gardens Assn!

Upcoming Gardener Events! UPDATE this event: SB 14th Annual FREE SEED SWAP March 20 at new location Santa Barbara Community Arts Workshop!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

SUBSCRIBE to the entire newsletter! Friend on Facebook!

Here’s To Terrific February 2022 Gardening For You!

Posted in 2022, Aphids, Aspirin, Baking Soda, Biodiversity, Brassicas, Cabbage, Cercospora leaf spot, Chard, Cold tolerant, Companion, Compost, Cover crop, Cucumber Beetle, Design - Layout, Determinate, Disease, Drought Tolerant, February, Fillers, Freeze, Frost, Frost tolerant, Fusarium Wilt, Garden, Heat Tolerant, Hugelkultur, Indeterminate, Interplant, Kale, Leafminer, Living Mulch, Mildew, Nonfat Powdered Milk, Pests, Photoperiodism, Plant, PreSprout, Radish, Rain, Season, Seeds, Snails & Slugs, SoCal, Soil, Spring, Summer, Summer, Temperature, Tomato, Understory, Varieties, Veggies, Verticillium Wilt, VFN, Water, Weather, White Fly, Wind, Winter, tagged 10 Hour Day, 2022, All-America Selections winner, Aphids, biodiversity, broccoli, Catalogs, Cercospora leaf spot, Cold tolerant, community, Companion, Compost, Cornell, Cover crop, determinate, Dinosaur Kale, Drought Tolerant, Early, Enhance growth, February, Fillers, Freeze, Frost, fusarium, Garden, Garden Design, heat tolerant, Hugelkultur, indeterminate, James M Stephens, Kale, Lacinato, leafminers, Living Mulch, mildew, Peas, Photoperiod, Plant, Rains, Repel Pests, Santa Barbara, seed soaking, Seed Swap, seeds, Sidedressing, SoCal, Soil, Soil Temp, Spring Planting, tomatoes, Veggies, verticillium, Waffle Garden, weather, whiteflies, Winter on February 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Winter Harvests, Soil Preps, First Spring Plantings!

Cold Tolerant Tomatoes, Early Heirlooms!

The beauty of planting from seeds is you can get perfect varieties, the rare and unusual! Thanks to TomatoFest for this Cool image!

Hopefully you have gotten your seeds from the catalog or nursery and you are likely itching for the right temps to plant!

Planning now is important because not all spring/summer plants are installed at the same time. Planting in the right places now makes a difference. Companions and biodiversity are key. It’s still chill, but in Santa Barbara we are now beyond the last average frost date though we are still in the less than 10 hours per day photoperiod until sometime in February. Bold Souls will be planting Zucchini, cool tolerant tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, corn and bareroot strawberries! They can be started now from seed, in the ground. Soil temps 1.26 were 44 tp 50F, still low, so make sure your plant is ok with that. Make sequential plantings in case of failures. March is a little warmer and early variety plants get a better start. April is most everything – cucumber, pepper, squash, beans, more tomatoes, watermelon. May is the true heat lovers, cantaloupe, okra (June may be better yet), eggplant. Some gardeners wait to plant tomatoes and cucumbers until May and June to avoid the more moist soil fungi of earlier months. I hold that space by planting something temporary there in March. In long summer areas June is especially good for okra, eggplant, long beans and tropical plants like Japanese Urizun Winged Beans!

Summer garden planning tips emphasize needing less water!

If you are not going to be canning, indeterminate tomatoes are the excellent choice! These are the vining tomatoes that produce all summer! This saves time and water because determinate, bush tomatoes produce quickly, all at once – great for canning, then you have to replant and wait another two months for more production. However, determinate toms do produce sooner, so for earlier table production, plant them to hold you until your indeterminates are producing. Plant 1 or 2 rounds for until your indeterminates start producing. For earliest treats, plant cherry tomatoes! Yum! Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of dandelions! The beautiful herb Borage repels Tomato Hornworms!
Choose more prolific plants and drought/heat tolerant varieties so you get more production for less water.

1) Plant tall plants to the North unless you anticipate a scorching summer. If you think it will be HOT, plant tall to the west to shade shorter plants, keep your soil cooler, use less water.

Cukes & Beans! Plan to put cucumbers up on trellises to save space, keep them disease and pest free, clean, and so they ripen evenly all the way around. Co-plant with beans! Beans above, cukes below. If you will want a lot of each, plant them on separate trellises! Japanese Long cukes give a generous supply per water used, need a lot of space! So no cukes on their trellis. Natsu Fushinari have exceptional powdery mildew resistance, especially in high heat!

Leave a winter broccoli or two for summer salad side shoots. Mulch deeply under your brocs right now! We want to keep these cool loving plants cool. If you don’t have enough trellis space, plant cukes with your brocs! Broccoli helps repel cucumber beetles, so push the mulch back on the sunny side, make your special cucumber planting mound/basin and plant cucumbers underneath those brocs! Besides keeping the soil cool, the mulch keeps the cukes off the soil, clean and insect free above the bug zone!
Leave a couple of winter kale to provide over summer greens. Heat tolerant 1000Head Kale is a prolific choice that harbors less aphids on its FLAT leaves. And, it is HUGE! Plant lettuces on the sunny side under your brocs and kale.
Eggplant likes it hot and moist! Radishes with eggplants and cucumbers. Radishes are a trap plant for flea beetles. If your area is a little cool and short seasoned like ours, plant the long skinny Ichiban Japanese eggplants rather than the bulbous Black Beauties. Ichiban’s are prolific and quite tasty.
Indeterminate tomatoes might be your tallest plant in a 6′ cage. Okra can get tall too, and both are super susceptible to soil diseases wilts. Hot Pepper’s roots help prevent the wilt. Eggplant releases Potassium tomatoes have a high requirement for and okra needs too. Interplant the four of them in a zig zag style with the shorter plants on the sunny side of the taller plants. If you have space, do a keyhole style with the tallest plant, needing the most protection, in the center.

If you love cabbages, plant a few more, but they take up a fair footprint for what they produce and they take a long time to do it. In spring and summer choose quick maturing mini varieties.
SEED SAVING SPACE! Leave room for some arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery to go to flower to bring bees and beneficial insects! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next plantings. Carrots love being with cilantro, marigold and chamomile. Chamomile is a true super plant! It improves the flavor of any neighboring herb, the flowers make a lovely scent, the tea is sweet, and it is called the Plant Doctor – heals nearby plants! Plant it asap to help vulnerable plants before they get in trouble.
Pumpkin, melon, winter squash vines require some thoughtfulness. Pumpkin and winter squash vine leaves get as huge as healthy zucchini leaves, easily a foot wide! Mini melons have dainty 2″ wide little leaves, can be trellised, but they may do much better on bare hot ground rather than up in cool breezy airs. A healthy winter squash vine can easily be 3′ to 4′ wide, 30′ long plus side vines, and produce a major supply of squash! You can use them as a border, as a backdrop along a fence line. In SoCal, unless you are a squash lover, or won’t be gardening in winter, there is question as to why you would grow winter squash at all. Greens of all kinds grow prolifically here all winter long, giving a fresh and beautiful supply of Vitamin A for less calories and no storage space!

Super use of your space! As winter plants finish, that space might be planted right away. Other space may need to be held for later. For example if you plan to plant okra in June, grow quick prolific producers there until it’s the right time to plant those heat lovers! Leafy plants produce continuously, and can be harvested whole body when you want the space. You will have lush harvests while you are waiting. Think of kales, chard, lettuce, beets, even mini dwarf cabbages. Perhaps you will leave some of them as understory plants and plant taller peppers like Poblanos or Big Jim Anaheims, and tomatoes among them. When the larger plants overtake the understory, either harvest the smaller plants, or remove or harvest lower leaves of larger plants to let the smaller plants get enough sun to keep producing abundantly. And you can always plant a quick growing legume, green manure, aka living mulch, to feed your soil! In early spring and late summer you can plant White Clover. It brings pollinators too!

See Tomatoes at Cornell! Here are special instructions for planting and tending tomatoes and cucumbers where the soil is known to have verticillium or fusarium wilts fungi. Both our Santa Barbara City community gardens have them. Some gardeners plant toms in May or June to avoid moist soils.

Soil temp matters. Though the soil may become fairly warm quickly in days to come, day length is still important. No matter how early you plant some plants, they still won’t produce fruit until they have enough hours of sun, and for some, warmth including day and/or night and/or ground temps. If they miss their window, they may never produce at all…better to pull and replant. Keep growing those leafy producers – lettuce, chard, kale – in that space and plant the right plants at the right good time! See Best Soil Temps

Right now, from seed in the ground, sow beets, caraway, celery, carrots, chard, chervil, chives, collards, cilantro (coriander), dill, endive, fennel, garlic, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuces, mustards, green onions, bulb onion sets, flat-leafed parsley, late peas – mildew resistant varieties, white potatoes, radishes, shallots, spinach, and turnips. Get bolt resistant/slow bolt varieties, and especially heat and drought tolerant varieties.

Along with deciding plant locations, get ready for Summer Gardening!

Install gopher barriers.
Get summer weight garden fabric, netting or bendable wire like aviary wire for bird protection.
Install or repair pathways, berms. Lay in straw, boards, pallets, stepping stones.
Waffle Garden, basins & windbreaks, a Water Garden. Excellent drought choices.
Gather cages for toms, peppers, eggplant & trellises for beans and cukes
Terrace slopes to prevent water runoff and topsoil loss.
Mulch, secure the mulch. Plant with living mulch.
Build raised beds, Hugelkultur (see lower part of page)
Get new containers, replace tired soil
Setup Compost areas – enclosures, area to compost in place. Worm box.
Organize where you will keep straw bales for summer mulch, compost layers, pathways

Spring planting soil prep! Save time by adding all your amendments at the same time! See more

Compost! The amount of compost to use varies, depending on your soil’s condition, plant selection, compost quality, and availability. A guideline offered by Cornell University. (Veggies – bottom of Pg 4) says use 3 inches over the surface worked into the top 3-6 inches of soil!
Add well aged manure as appropriate. Less in spring because you want fruit production, not leaf, unless it is a plant grown for its leaves, like lettuce, kale or cabbage! Generally, none for carrots, peas or beans.
Add 25% worm castings. As little as 10% works. They are potent – increase germination, speed seedling growth, help with plant immunities to disease, increase water holding capacity.
Add bone meal for 3 months later blooming.
Add guanos high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time helps your plants continued bloom four months later! You want bird guano that is high P phosphorus (blooms), the middle number: 1-10-0.2.
Sprinkle with a tad of coffee grounds to reduce fungal rots and wilts!! Grounds are more potent than they have a right to be! 0.5%, that’s 1/2 a %, or less is all that is needed or wanted!
If your area is cool, don’t cover with mulch unless you need it for erosion control. Covered soil is cooler. Let your cool winter soil warm up for earlier spring planting. Do mulch deeply under broccoli and kale you will be keeping over summer. They do best with cool conditions.
Water your prepped areas when you water your other veggies. Moist, not flooded, soil is rampant with soil organisms enriching your soil for free!

Pests!

Pull away those blotchy sections the leafminers make on chard and beet leaves. Remove whole leaves that are too funky for rescue. Harvest the bigger outer lower leaves more often to stay ahead of the miners. I believe sometimes the leafminers come when the leaves have reached peak and need to be harvested, when the foliage is just past prime and softening. Rather than row planting, letting the leafminers go from plant to plant, interplant, a few here, a few there, plant with more space between them. Water and fertilize a tad less so leaves are less soft and inviting.

I tried it, it WORKS! The simplest is to spray with 2 Parts alcohol, 2 parts water, 1 part soap. DO NOT use on seedlings, it will kill some of them. Spritz lightly rather than drenching or you may kill your bigger plant too!
For hard to get at places, down the centers of chard, crinkly kale leaves, get out that spray bottle! Treat once, wait a couple days, treat again for the ones that got away and newborns.
Ants nest near water and don’t like cinnamon. Sprinkle cinnamon around the base of your plant but not on the stem. Repeat if necessary after watering.

Whiteflies Flush away, especially under leaves. Remove any yellowing leaves, especially on your Brassicas, that attract whiteflies. Again, a little less water and food.

I like these three things this gardener said online! Sadly I didn’t record the name, so if you find the source, let me know please so I can thank and credit them!

Aphids and thrips are indications of plant stress. Before running out to buy an insecticidal soap or other chemical solution begin to solve the problem by trying to figure what the stressors are and dealing with them. Are the plants over- or under-watered? What fertilizer is being used? Is it a balanced organic fertilizer?
Predatory insects will be attracted to the site and will benefit greatly by an interplanting of Sweet Alyssum, dill, or cilantro. Our Crimson and Dutch White Clover planted along pathways between rows is excellent for attracting beneficial insects too. Place shallow dishes of water with small protruding rocks in amongst the cucumbers for beneficial insects to stop and have a drink. They’ll lay more eggs, eat more pests, and be more effective if you provide for their needs right where the problem occurs in the garden. Instead of thinking that the solution is to remove the problem, think about what can be done to aid nature in creating a balance.
Cutworms can be handpicked during the day if small pieces of wood or cardboard are laid out near the cucumbers for them to hide under. All the better to find them. Keeping chickens or ducks works too. [But be careful with the birds. They can do damage very quickly! Learn more about them BEFORE you use them!]

Diseases – Choose Resistant/Tolerant Varieties

Do not compost diseased or infested leaves or plants. Bag them and put them in the trash, not green waste.

Watering & Weeding

Thinning is a form of weeding! Thin plants that need it, like beets whose seeds start in foursomes! Thin plants you intentionally over planted – carrots, beets, turnips, kale, chard, radish, mustard! If you planted too close together, take out shorter, smaller weaker plants. Eat ’em on the spot, or they are all great in your salads along with small tender Brassica leaves. If you don’t thin, plants grown for their roots don’t have room or nutrition to grow that root. They are literally rootbound and starve each other out, stunted. So thin sooner than later. If you miss the window, thin or not, you won’t get your root – beet, carrot, radish, etc. Keep thinning as they get older. At mature size their leaves shouldn’t touch each other, except maybe for carrots. They seem to be fine unless they are left in the ground a long time, get old and weak. Thinning helps keep pests and disease from spreading from one to the next.

When you are weeding, remove blooming or seeding plants first!!! When grass has those pretty frilly little green tops, it is blooming and seeding! Remove it ASAP. Better yet is to remove weeds before they seed! If at the seeding stage, gently pull, do not shake the soil loose from the roots spreading seeds all over, and don’t put them in your compost! Bag and trash.

Happy Healthy February Gardening and the very beginning of spring planting!

Updated annually

Hooray for the Santa Barbara rains! Check out wonderful January images at Santa Barbara’s Rancheria Community Garden! Winter gardens have their own special beauty!

Check out the entire February 2022 Newsletter!

Super Spring & Summer Companion Planting Tips!
Tomato Varieties! Humble to Humongous & More!
Wilts & Cucumber Beetles, Tomatoes & Cukes!
Borage, StarFlower, is Such a Winter Spring Beauty!
Okra ~ Unique and Wonderful!
Upcoming Gardener Events!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

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Happy January 2022 Delicious Gardening to You!

Posted in 2018, 2021, Aphids, April, Aspirin, Baking Soda, Bare Root, Brassicas, Cabbage, Chard, Cold tolerant, Companion, Compost, Cover crop, December, Design - Layout, Disease, Freeze, Frost, Frost tolerant, Fusarium Wilt, Garden, Gophers, January, Kale, Leafminer, Lettuce, March, Mildew, Nonfat Powdered Milk, Peas, Pests, Plant, PreSprout, Rain, Season, Seed Swap, Seeds, Sidedress, SoCal, Soil, Spring, Summer, Temperature, Tomato, Veggies, Verticillium Wilt, Water, Weather, White Fly, Wind, Winter, tagged 2021, All-America Selections winner, Aphids, bareroot, broccoli, BrusselBerries, Catalogs, Cold tolerant, community, Companion, Compost, Cover crop, December, Dinosaur Kale, Freeze, Frost, fusarium, Garden, Garden Design, January, Juliet, Kale, Lacinato, leafminers, mildew, Nero di Toscana, Peas, Plant, presprouting, Rains, seed soaking, Seed Swap, seeds, Sidedressing, SoCal, Soil, Soil Temp, Spring Planting, tomatoes, Umami, Veggies, verticillium, weather, whiteflies, Winter on January 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Winter Harvests, Soil, Planning Your Spring Garden!

Lacinato Kale aka Tuscan, Black or Dinosaur

Elegant, nutritious Nero di Toscana Lacinato Kale aka Tuscan, Black or Dinosaur.

Delicious winter garden harvests continue! You may not feel like eating as many salads in this cooler time, but veggie soups and stews are super nutritious and great for sharing!

Once the weeds are out, if the area is clear, you have choices to make. Plant very last rounds of favorite winter plants or start prepping soil for spring planting!

January Plantings If you love your winter crops, and aren’t necessarily in a rush to do spring/summer, amend your soil immediately and plant one more round, from transplants if you can get them or the starts you have begun on your own, seeds if you must. Choose smaller/early varieties, varieties that produce in fewer days, bush or patio dwarf types that produce more quickly. See December for tips on what to plant. In cooler January weather, plantings will start slowly, but they will mature faster than usual as days get longer. Most January plantings will be coming in March, April. That’s still in good time for soil preps in April for April/May plantings. In April/May there is less fungi in the soil, so plants that are fungi susceptible get a better start – mainly that would be wilt susceptible tomatoes and cucumbers.

Photoperiodism! January and February Santa Barbara is in a period of days less than 10 hours long. We are at a turning point now that we are past Winter Solstice, now in longer days than night. Consider whether to plant right away, or wait. Some plants don’t grow when days are less than 10 hours. They may take a break and resume in March. What we plant now depends on whether it is a long day plant, long season Broccoli, or a bulbing plant. It also affects our seed choices. Some plants, some varieties, won’t grow or produce if the light isn’t right. See which and ‘when to plant’ tips – Photoperiodism.

Plant MORE of these delicious morsels now! Arugula, beets like Cylindra, brocs, Brussels sprouts if you get winter chill (there are some new purple ones on the market called BrusselBerries!!!), bunch onions, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, chard, culinary dandelions, garden purslane, kale, kohlrabi, head and leaf lettuces, Mesclun, parsnips, peas, potatoes, radishes – especially the long daikons, and turnips! Scatter your Breadseed Poppy seeds for gorgeous April, May blooms! Select a place to plant a bee bringing Borage – maybe right in the center of a circle of plants so it can serve them all! Give it plenty of room and place it so it won’t shade out shorter spring plants you will be growing.

Planting summer crops early isn’t always a gain. Even if the plant lives, some won’t produce fruit until they have enough hours of sun, and for some, warmth including day/night and/or ground temps. And some plants set in too early will never produce. That waiting time for enough sun, enough warmth, interrupts the plant’s natural cycle and the production window is lost. If you take that chance and it doesn’t work, pull and replant. No amount of waiting will do the job. To be on the safe side, plant successively! Plant every week, or every two weeks or month to get the right window, especially when weather is likely to be variable.

Choose early cold tolerant tomato varieties. Ones with northern names, in SoCal that could be Oregon Spring, or Siberian. Stupice from Czechoslovakia is very early! Bellstar, from Ontario Canada, is larger and earlier than other plum tomatoes. Early Girl is a favorite! And SunGold cherry tomatoes are almost always a winner! Cherry toms are small and will ripen when other tomatoes just stay green for the longest!

Umami Glutamate in Ripening Tomato Graph 1999 All-America Selections winner mini Roma grape tomato, hybrid Juliet, gets rave reviews! Bonnie Plants says ‘The wonderfully sweet fruit are crack resistant and remain in good condition on the vine longer than most cherry tomatoes. The fruit are as soft and juicy as cherry tomatoes, they hold up well in salads, even leftovers, and they have a longer shelf life so you can keep them on hand without picking every day. The vigorous vines set lots of fruit on long trusses and keep setting fruit throughout the summer. Quite heat tolerant. Vines are long and vigorous, so give the plant room to tumble over its cage. One of the longest-lasting tomatoes in the garden. Hybrid. Resistant to early blight (AB). Tolerant to late blight (LB).’ One of our gardeners got abundant crop through October!

Summer Garden Design is important right now! You can do diagrams on paper or just give it a good think to see if there are any changes this year, and carry it in your head. That layout is what you need to make your seed list! Seeds from catalogs and Seed Swaps! Seed Swaps are free, fun and random, a good way to try plants you might have never considered, and they are adapted to your area! Catalogs give you the best selection and of plants your nursery doesn’t carry or isn’t able to get. Check for drought and heat tolerant, bolt resistant, mildew resistant varieties or look in dry or humid southern states that match your eco niche or world areas that have heat tolerant desert low-water-needs plants and order up! The seeds of these types may need to be planted deeper and earlier than more local plants for moisture they need. They may mature earlier. Be prepared to do second plantings if needed and use a little water. See Choosing Seeds: Catalogs to Seed Swaps! Smart Design for Your Spring & Summer Garden, Seed Selection! See also some of the bigger long term choices planning and designing your garden.

Check out Seed Soaking/Presprouting Tips & Ideas! If seeds and tending seedlings aren’t for you, wait and get transplants and pop them right in the ground per their right times! No fuss, no muss.

Standard Winter Garden Veggie Predators Keep a keen watch for pests, and diseases, and take quick action!

If you need more robust soil, do something absolutely yummy with it! This is perfect timing to put in some green manure aka cover crop for April plantings. Depending on the type of plants you choose for your green manure, allow +/- 3.5 months for the process. If you want the earliest planting time for spring, plant ASAP! See Living Mulch! Put it where you will plant heavy summer feeders – tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, chilis, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and corn; hungry stalk vegetables like celery, fennel, rhubarb, and artichokes; or continually producing green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard. Or you can ‘rest’ an area by covering it with a good 6 to 18″ deep mulch/manure/straw/compost mix and any other amendments that will help the plants you will grow there! Keep it moist and it will flatten down, make a great low raised bed, in no time at all! Simply let the herds of soil organisms do their work over winter. That’s called sheet composting, sheet mulching or composting in place – no turning or having to move it when it’s finished. If you are vermicomposting, have worms, add a few handfuls to speed up and enrich the process. Continue to keep it moist, and come spring you will have rich nutritious soil for no work at all!

It’s a New Year! Some of you will make serious gardening resolutions, others will take it as it comes, one day at a time as usual. But I do recommend you secure your seeds for the year ahead! Some are now less plentiful with droughts, fires and floods, GMO threats, new laws. Recently much needed seed banks, libraries have sprung up. We want to use our seeds with reverence and seed save our best as they adapt to different climate change conditions, assure their goodness for future generations. At Seed Swaps, take only what you need. If many people grow them, there will be more adapted to our localities. Before there were seed shops, seeds were often used as money. They are as precious today as they have always been, maybe even more so.

Happy New Year Gardening and Feasting!

Updated annually

For your Winter pleasure! December images at Rancheria Community Garden! Cool weather, lots of rain! Fabulous Broccoli, a BED, unique hand built plant cover! Plan your spring/summer garden, get seeds!

Check out the entire January 2022 Newsletter!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

The Green Bean Connection started as correspondence for the Santa Barbara CA USA Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden. Both of Santa Barbara’s community gardens are very coastal. During late spring/summer we are often in a fog belt/marine layer most years, locally referred to as the May grays, June glooms and August fogusts. Keep that in mind compared to the microclimate niche where your veggie garden is. Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

See Super Fall Veggies Varieties, Smart Companion Plantings!

November 2021 Garden Magic is in the Air!

Posted in 2021, Aphids, Artichoke, Biodiversity, Bolting, Brassicas, Broccoli, Brussels Sprouts, Cabbage, Carrot, Cauliflower, Celery, Chard, Cilantro, Cold tolerant, Community Garden, Companion, cut and come again, Design - Layout, Event!, Fall, Feed, Freeze, Frost, Frost tolerant, Garden, Garlic, Green Manure, Intercrop, Interplant, Kale, Legumes, Lettuce, Living Mulch, Mycorrhizae, November, Peas, Pests, Plant, Rain, Rancheria, Season, Seed Saving, Seed Swap, Snails & Slugs, SoCal, Soil, Strawberries, Temperature, Transplant, Varieties, Veggies, Water, Weather, Wind, Winter, tagged 2021, Aphids, artichoke, biodiversity, Brassica, broccoli, Brussels Sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, chard, cilantro, Companion, Design, Disease Prevention, Fall, Garden, Garden gifts, garlic, Green Manure, Harvest, Island Seed & Feed, John Evans, John Kohler, Kale, Legume, Legumes, lettuce, Living Mulch, Nitrogen, November, Owl House, Peas, Plant, Rancheria Community Garden, restore, Seascape, Seed Swap, SeedSaving, Shawna Coronado, Slogger boots, slugs, snails, SoCal, strawberry, transplants, Varieties, veggie, weather, Winter on October 31, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Garden author Shawna Coronado has a fine front yard spread jam packed with winter tasties! Her most popular book is ‘Living a Wellness Lifestyle!’ Her website says ‘Making a Difference Every Day.’ YES!

November, shorter cooler magical days, rich and deep! More Brassicas, Peas, Chard, Lettuce!

SoCal September planted lettuces are being eaten, plant more! Peas are being eaten, plant more. Kale leaves are or soon will be ready to start harvesting. Broccoli and Cauliflower soon to be tasty! Cabbages will take a bit longer as they ‘heart up,’ pack those leaves on tightly. You can harvest them when they are small, or if you want more food, let them get bigger, but not so big they lose that look of bursting vibrance!

Plant more rounds of everything in space you have reserved, or as plants finish. At this cooler shorter days time when plants are growing slower, it’s time to plant from transplants. Seeds are fine, and seeds of the same plants, if planted at the same time as the transplants, give an automatic equivalent of a second round of planting! Just remember, as weather cools, they won’t germinate or grow as fast as ones planted earlier.

Space your plants well. Think of the footprint of your mature plant. Crowded plants can shade each other out, and winter already has shorter days. They don’t get their full productive size or produce as productively. Smaller plants too close together can get rootbound, suffer from lack of nutrition. The remedy is simple! Thin when young and eat these luscious little plants! Or thin when they are bigger – take the whole plant! Rather than planting so closely, keep some of those seeds back for another later planting, or deliberately over plant for tender additions to your salad! If they come crowded in a nursery six pack, gently separate the little plants, plant separately. If you are really brave, do it the John Kohler way! Video Give away your extras! Plant to allow airflow so your plants will harden up a bit. Don’t over feed or water, inviting sucking pests like aphids and whiteflies that easily feed on that soft tissue. Especially true for beets and chard that get leaf miners. Ideally with chard, often a ‘permanent’ plant, space them so the mature leaves won’t touch another chard. Plants that have generous space produce more and bigger!

If you like Broccoli a lot, try these varieties! Know that there are container minis like Small Miracle to giants like Premium Crop that make 9-10″ heads ideal for freezing.

Arcadia tolerance of both cold and heat, good in foggy or wet conditions. 63-70 Days, 5-8″ heads with excellent side shoot production. Extremely disease-resistant – stands up to rot and mildew. 24 to 36″ tall.
Cruiser 58 days to harvest, tolerant of dry conditions.
If you can’t wait, De Cicco is only 48 to 65 days to maturity. It is an Italian heirloom, bountiful side shoots. Produces a good fall crop, but considered to be a spring variety. Since it is early, the main heads are smaller.
Nutribud, per Island Seed & Feed, is the most nutritious per studies, having significant amounts of glutamine, one of the energy sources for our brains! Purple broccoli, in addition to this, contains anthocyanins which give it its color. These have antioxidant effects, which are thought to lower the risk of some cancers and maintain a healthy urinary tract as well.
Green Comet if you can get it! It is just like its name says, speedy! It is a low, compact broc and produces 3 to 4″ side shoots! Amazing plant!
Premium Crop is an AAS (All-America Selections) winner! Heat tolerant, 24-30″ tall.

Brassica/Broccoli Pest Strategies, Companions

Research shows the more broccoli varieties you plant, mixing them up, alternating the varieties in the row, not planting in rows at all, the less aphids you will have! Biodiversity means to mix up your plantings to stop diseases and pests from spreading down a row or throughout a patch. Monoculture can be costly in time spent and crop losses. Plant different varieties of the same plant with different maturity dates. Pests and diseases are only attracted at certain stages of your plants’ growth and the pest’s own life cycle stages.
Cilantro repels aphids on Brassicas – broccoli, kale, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts! Said to make them grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener! Plant generous mini patches here and there. Harvest some; let others flower for bees and beneficial insects. Then share some seeds with the birds, collect some seeds for next plantings. Broadcast seeds where you will be planting more brocs.
Heading winter lettuces like plenty of water to stay sweet, grow quickly, stay in high production. Put them in a low spot or near the spigot, on the sunny side of taller celery. Also, lettuces repel cabbage moths. Put a few of them between the cabbages. Lettuces you want under Brassicas, plant from transplants because dying parts of Brassicas put out a poison that prevents some seeds, like tiny lettuce seeds, from growing. Remove those dying Brassica leaves asap.
Plant your Brassicas a little to one side to allow room for smaller understory plants on their sunny side.
Keep your Brassicas cleaned of yellowing leaves that attract White flies.

Brocs LOVE recently manured ground. Well-drained, sandy loam soils rich in organic matter are ideal. Feed up your soil out to where you anticipate your plant’s drip line will be. The trick to producing excellent broccoli heads is to keep the broccoli plants growing at a strong steady pace. Top-dress the plants with compost or manure tea; or side-dress with blood-meal or fish emulsion; and water deeply. Repeat this process every 3-4 weeks until just before harvest! John Evans, of Palmer, Alaska, holds the world’s record for his 1993 35 lb (no typo) broc! He still holds the record in 2021! He uses organic methods, including mycorrhizal fungi! And, yes, moose eat broccoli!

The Pilgrim Terrace April 2016 Cunningham Family monster Cabbages make the good sized Lacinato Kale behind them look small! The Cabbages were well over a foot wide at maturity!

If you reserved space for planting mid-January bareroot strawberry beds, plant it to 2 month crops, like lettuce that matures quickly, arugula, mustard, turnips, and crispy red radishes that are ready to pick in little more than a month. Arugula, spinach, pretty Asian greens, such as tatsoi or mizuna, grow so fast you will have baby plants to add to stir-fries and soups just three weeks after sowing. For a quick payback on your table, select the earliest maturing varieties available. Chard grows quickly, but it is a cut and come again plant, so give it a permanent location.

Or, pop in a green manure mix to restore your soil. Island Seed & Feed has the wonderful Harmony Four green manure seed mix and the inoculant that goes with it. Nov is late to plant this mix; plant as early in the month as possible. Cut down, chop, turn in sooner for mid-January bareroot planting!

Seascape strawberry variety is my #1 pick! It was bred locally at UCSB, is an everbearer, harvest June to October! It makes huge berries that have tasty flavor and keep well. It has long roots so seeks water deeper down, more heat and drought tolerant. It is Strawberry Spot resistant. More on Strawberries!

Celery is lovely, fragrant, low-cal! Like lettuce, it is a cut and come again. Feed it from time to time, it’s working hard. Plant it by the water spigot. If you have room, you can let celery, cilantro and carrots, flower and seed too! It is super susceptible to the wilts, so be prepared to let it go. Or, try Tango, a hybrid that is sweet, extra-crunchy, grows extra tall: up to 18 inches! You can also sow the seeds 6-8 inches apart instead of 12, which makes for a larger, heartier crop. It’s tolerant of temperature fluctuations, read less bolting, and resistant to fusarium wilt! Laura Melchor says: …addition to soups and stews and together with bell peppers and onions, is one of the “Holy Trinity” of Creole and Cajun cuisine. You can use your homegrown crop as a base for jambalaya or gobble up the crisp, crunchy stalks straight from the garden – with peanut butter, of course!

Peas on a trellis, in a cage, take up less space, are off-the-ground clean and easier to harvest. Make a note to plant carrots on the sunny side of peas to enhance the growth of your peas! Baby Little Fingers make small carrots quicker than most, only 57 days to maturity! Put some beets behind the peas. They will get light through the frilly carrot leaves and the peas will go up. Peas and beets don’t mind a fair bit of water, but carrots will split if overwatered. Plant the peas a little lower and the carrots a little further away and water them a tad less once they are up. The onion family stunts peas, so no onions, bunch onions, leeks, garlic, shallots, chives nearby. See Best Varieties of PEAS and Why!

1st half of Nov: Plant seeds of globe onions for slicing. Grano, Granex, Crystal Wax.

GARLIC! Hmm…usually I would encourage you to grow garlic but with these general overall warmer times, some garlic lovers are reporting they aren’t growing it here anymore. Garlic likes chill, so even in our regular winters we don’t get the big cloves like up in Gilroy CA, the Garlic Capital. Just like the new more heat tolerant artichokes, we need someone to breed some heat tolerant garlic! For now, if you don’t mind smaller bulbs, plant away. Plant rounds of your fattest garlic cloves now through Dec 21, Winter Solstice, for June/July harvests! See a LOT about GARLIC!

Divide your artichokes! Give new babies plenty of room to grow big and make pups of their own or give them to friends! Remember, they easily have a huge 6′ footprint when they thrive and are at full maturity. Plant bareroot artichoke now or in Feb, or in March from pony packs. They have a 10 year life expectancy and a huge footprint generally not planted with an understory! Please see the latest about Artichokes, A Wild & Wonderful Experience! There are new things to know, varieties to consider, and Artichokes are a little different in their growing process than other veggies.

Shade If you want a lower profile or space is limited, get dwarf varieties. That allows more flexibility when you choose how to place your plants or are filling in a spot where a plant has finished. Plant your Tall plants in zig zag ‘rows’ so you can plant them closer together. In the inside of a zig zag, on the sunny side in front of the ‘back’ plant, put in your fillers – medium height plants and shorties. A mix of winter beets like Cylindra, Bok Choy, mustards, longer winter radishes – Daikon, kohlrabi, parsnips, rutabagas and turnips would be exciting and give tasty winter variety to your table!

Soil & Feeding

With the majority of fall crops, the main harvest is leaves! Cut and come again means a long harvest…and a very hungry plant! So, plant in super soil to get a good start! Add composts, manures, worm castings. In the planting hole, mix in a handful of nonfat powdered milk in for immediate uptake as a natural germicide and to boost their immune system. For bloomers, brocs and caulis, throw in a handful of bone meal for later uptake at bloom time. If you have other treats you like to favor your plants with, give them some of that too! Go very lightly on incorporating coffee grounds either in your compost or soil. Studies found coffee grounds work well at only 0.5 percent of the compost mix. Yes, that’s only 1/2 a percent, barely a sprinkle! See more details about soil building! The exception is carrots! Too much good soil makes them hairy, fork, and too much water makes them split.

Also at transplant time, sprinkle mycorrhizal fungi directly on transplant roots, except Brassicas! Pat it on gently so it stays there. Direct contact is needed. Brassicas don’t mingle with the fungi and peas may have low need for it, so no need to use it on them either.

Winter plants need additional feeding, and steady adequate moisture to stay healthy and able in such demanding constant production. Give them yummy compost to keep their soil fluffy with oxygen, the water holding capacity up to par. Be careful not to damage main roots. Get a spade fork if you don’t have one. Make holes in your soil instead, then, if you don’t have skunks or other digging predators, pour in a fish/kelp emulsion cocktail! Or compost, manure, or worm cast tea down the holes. Your plants will thrive, soil organisms will party down!

Winter Water! An inch a week is the general rule, but certain areas and plants may require more or less water. Don’t let light rains fool you. Do the old finger test to see if the top 2” of soil are moist. If you are managing a landscape or larger veggie garden, slow, spread and sink incoming water. Install berms or do some terracing. Direct special channels to water your precious fruit trees. Carrying buckets of water builds character, but a gray water system is ace! See Rainy Day Tactics for Spectacular Veggies! See Santa Barbara Rebates for both residential and commercial assistance.

Securely stake tall or top heavy plants before predicted winds! Tie your peas to their trellis or plant them inside well-staked remesh round cages so the peas are protected from winds. Check on everything the morning after. Some areas may need more shelter and you could create a straw bale border, or even better, a permeable windbreak of low growing bushes, like maybe blueberries! Lay down seedless straw, a board, or stepping stone pathways so your footwear doesn’t get muddy. Treat yourself to some great garden clogs or fab muck boots! (Sloggers)

Some areas will be having freezes! See Protect Your Veggies from Freezing! Cover and tuck ‘em in! In all cases, rain, wind and freezes, keep a close eye on weather reports. If you have a special farmers’ weather report in your area, use that one!

Mulch? The purpose for mulch in summer is to keep your soil cool and moist. If you live where it snows, deep mulch may keep your soil from freezing so soon. But when SoCal temps start to cool, days are shorter, it’s time to remove mulch, especially if it is a moist pest or disease habitat, and let what Sun there is heat up the soil as it can. If your area is windy, lay on some mulch to keep your soil moist. If you regularly have high winds, anchor the mulch or use mulch that doesn’t blow away easily. When it is rainy, mulch slopes with mulch that won’t blow or float away. If needed, cover it – garden staple down some scrap pieces of hardware cloth, cut-to-fit wire fencing or that green plastic poultry fencing, or even floating row cover laid right on the ground. Or do a little quick sandbag terracing. Low to the ground leaf crops like lettuce, arugula, spinach, bok choy and chard need protection from mud splash. Lay down some straw before predicted storms. Storms come with wind, so lay something over the straw, like maybe rebar pieces, to hold the straw in place, some remesh, or some anchored chicken wire. If the straw area is small, just pop in some garden staples. Everyone’s needs are unique ~ be creative!

Pest & Disease Prevention Drench young plants, seedlings getting their 3rd and 4th leaves, and ones you just transplanted, with Aspirin solution to get them off to a great start! One regular Aspirin mushed, 1/4 C nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon liquid dish soap (surfactant), per gallon of water. Baking soda makes the leaves alkaline and inhibits fungal spores like mildew! Aspirin triggers a defense response and stimulates growth! Powdered milk is a natural germicide and boosts their immune system. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains.

RESTORE OR REST an area. Decide where you will plant your tomatoes, heavy feeders, next summer and plant your Green Manure there! Plant some bell beans (a short variety of fava easier to chop down) or a vetch mix for green manures to boost soil Nitrogen. The legume mix can include vetch, Austrian peas and bell beans, plus oats that have deep roots to break up the soil. When the bell beans start flowering, chop the mix down into small pieces. Let that sit on the surface, keeping it moist, for two weeks, then turn it under. The Nitrogen from the legumes’ roots nodules is only released after the plant dies. That’s why we wait 2 weeks – for it to be released into the soil. Being moist aids decomposition. If your soil can use other amendments, manures, green sand, compost with bark bits for water holding capacity, add them and turn everything under at the same time! Wait 2 or more weeks for it to mingle and get the soil organisms going again, then plant! Bell beans alone are great; you get a lot of green manure per square foot. If you change your mind, eat the beans!

Or cover an area you won’t be planting this winter with a good 6″ to 18″ deep of mulch/straw, crushed leaves, clean garden waste – spent plants, kitchen waste, sprinkle grass clippings so they don’t mat, seaweed, add amendments as you wish. Some gardeners add a bit of granular organic fertilizer for nitrogen. Alternate green/wet layers with brown/dry materials as possible. Then simply let the herds of soil organisms do their work over winter. This is called Lasagna gardening, sheet composting or composting in place – no turning or having to move it when it’s finished. If you are vermicomposting, have worms, add a few handfuls to speed up and enrich the process. Keep it slightly moist. Next spring you will have rich nutritious soil for no work at all!

Birds and Bees! Plant wildflowers now from seed for early spring flowers! Germination in cooler weather takes longer, so don’t let the bed dry out. If you have space, make habitat for beneficial insects, birds and animals too! Start building now to put your solitary bee home up in March or early April! If you already have one, clean it, and if you have an owl house, now is the time to clean it out too. Depending on where you live they are usually empty from Halloween until early December! Nesting site selection starts in January, so build yours and get it up as soon as you can!

Santa Barbara’s 13th Annual Seed Swap is January 30 at its new location the Santa Barbara Community Arts Workshop (SBCAW)! The last Saturday of January every year is National Seed Swap Day! Look in your area for an event, and if you don’t find one, collaborate with your local garden club or permaculture group to get one going! Or just gather your neighbors and do it yourself! See more!

Plant gift plants or bowls or baskets for the holidays now! Make Lavender sachets! See Wonderful Gardener-Style Holiday Gifts!

Layer up, enjoy these crisp days. Let the wind clear your Spirit, the rain cleanse and soften your Soul.

Updated Annually

Check out these wonderful October 2021 images at Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA! We had a few days of above 80 temps. Many plants are still surprisingly in production! Persimmons and Cherimoya are in! Winter plants are in beautiful progress! I saw an uncommon Gulf Fritillary Butterfly and two ravens (NOT crows) have been hanging out in our area! From mighty flowers to tasty veggies, birds and butterflies, starting more fall plantings, our garden surely appreciated the fine RAIN we had! We are Sowing the Future!

Check out the entire November 2021 Newsletter! It includes these items and more!

Rainy Day Tactics for Spectacular Veggies!
Protect Your Veggies from Freezing! Cover and tuck ‘em in!
Cold Stratification for Some of Your Seeds
Magnificent Cabbages are Easy to Grow!
Wonderful Gardener-Style Holiday Gifts!

Upcoming Gardener Events! US Composting Council’s 30th Annual Conference & Tradeshow, Santa Barbara’s 13th Annual SEED SWAP! World Soil Day!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

The Green Bean Connection started as correspondence for the Santa Barbara CA USA Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden. All three of Santa Barbara’s community gardens are very coastal. During late spring/summer we are often in a fog belt/marine layer most years, locally referred to as the May grays, June glooms and August fogusts. Keep that in mind compared to the microclimate niche where your veggie garden is. Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

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