HOT August 2023! Delicious Harvests, SeedSaving, Fall Starts!

August is a lovely time for a garden party…a weekend breakfast or perhaps at the Full Moons Aug 1 and the Aug 30 Blue Moon! Or wear your loveliest summer hat at the Afternoon Garden Tea Party! By fabulous illustrator Kate Greenaway!

Veggies and Flowers, Birds & Bees! Summer is in full swing at Rancheria Community Garden! Please enjoy tasty images of beauty and bounty at Rancheria Community Garden! We are Sowing the Future!

Share your gardening stories! Community of Gardens, a digital archive hosted by Smithsonian Gardens, is gathering gardening stories from gardeners and community gardening enthusiasts. Your participation can help others to better understand the meaning and value of gardens to American life – today and in the future. Submit your images, videos, and stories to their archive by emailing communityofgardens@si.edu or sharing your stories through their website.

Across-the-Plot Gardening Tips

In SoCal, trees bloomed a month late; birds arrived a month later than usual. July has been coolish, lots of overcast and mildews, some plants never got full stride, some are ending a bit early. BUT, here at the very end of July, here in Santa Barbara, we got 84° the 25th with more heat predicted! In spite of that, get those winter plants going. That will give you time for second winter plantings November/December. When hot, it is a tad challenging getting winter seeds and starts going. Watering will be critical, 2 to 4 times/day sometimes. Morning water is best for your plants in general. It keeps the ground cooler during the day when your plant needs that protection. Shade might be crucial for seedlings; Mulch well. Don’t slack off; you will be glad for the earlier rewards later.

For those of you who planted early spring, many of your plants are now finishing. It’s time to save seeds from your best plants! Clear space and ready your soil for winter planting. Start mini nursery seed beds in your garden or for transplanting from local nursery starts as soon as they become available. If you haven’t installed gopher protection wire, this is the best time, as summer ends, fall begins!

Just getting started in a new garden, or you just love to plant?! Summer plants you can still plant for fall harvests are early varieties of determinate tomatoes, bush beans and corn. Today, 7.31, I saw six packs of peas at a nursery! Hope they are late summer hardy! Corn is more disease prone at this time though. Tuck in your year-round fillers, beets, bunch onions, carrots, summer lettuces, winter radish, to keep a colorful and delicious variety on your table.

ONIONS For the biggest, sweetest harvests, late summer and early fall are the prime times to sow seeds of short- or intermediate-day onions. Fall-sown short- and intermediate-day onions tend to yield more and are larger and sweeter than those seeded or transplanted in early spring. Onions have stupendous flavor and come in white, yellow, red!

In our hot Santa Barbara foothills and further south, watch your melons, big squashes and pumpkins for their best harvest time – when their stem is brown and dry, or they ‘slip’ off the vine. Let your winter squash harden. When you can’t push your fingernail in winter squashes, and the stem is brown, it’s ready to harvest. Hold off irrigating melons about a week before they will ripen so their sugars will concentrate. Harvest okra while it is small and tender – bigger is NOT better!

Keep up with harvesting so plants don’t quit producing. More about harvesting! As in July, keep up with watering just beyond that dripline, maintain trenches and berms, replenish mulch.

If you want to extend your season, give your favorite late summer/fall heavy producers a good feed to extend their harvests. Eggplants have large or many fruit, beans put out a ton of beans, tomatoes, big or small, are working hard, peppers can be profuse! They like a tad of chicken manures scratched in, bunny poop and straw (pick up at Animal Shelters), well aged horse manure and compost makes them dance with the faeries in the night time! If you are avoiding digging pests, use alfalfa meal, but avoid fish emulsion, manures and worm castings that attract them. Do this also if you planted late or have second rounds that are just beginning to bud and bloom. Compost is #1 because it gives a sustained feed and increases water holding capacity.

• First, pull back your mulch, scratch the soil lightly to break up any crusty area. Scratch only around your plant in spots, not the whole area. You want to leave the majority of the surface feeder root system intact because they are where your plant uptakes most of its nutrients, oxygen and water.
• Use a spade fork to open holes around your plant, water well.
• Lay on what you are adding on the surface out to just beyond the drip line. If your plant has grown beyond the basin you made for it, enlarge the basin to fit it.
• Mix your amendments in gently in a few spots or not at all, so as not to break surface feeder roots. Again, feeder roots not only supply your plant with food and oxygen, but also uptake water so needed in late summer in SoCal.
• Pull the mulch back into place, replenish if needed, replace if it is no longer doing its job.
• Water again, gently and slowly so not to wash the mulch away, to let the water and nutrients soak in. You can water once then come back and give them a third round of water to let it soak down a little deeper. The nutrients from the feed drizzle down and act like compost tea.

Fertilizers highest in P, Phosphorus – the P in NPK, keep blooming and fruiting optimum. Liquid fertilizers are absorbed easily and promptly, and there is no root damage. Now is the time you wish you had added mycorrhizae fungi, the good guys, at planting time, to enhance Phosphorus uptake! Aged organic compost makes for healthy roots that make their own natural organic phosphoric acid that helps break down compounds of calcium and phosphate into a usable, soluble form. It’s too late to add bonemeal or seabird guano. They take 2 and 3-4 months respectively to become available to your plants for blooming. They are another must add at planting time. NOW, Phosphorus from fish bone meal 3-18-0 is easily taken up! So is chicken manure 1.1-0.8-0.5, but the P is a lot less. Add chicken manure using the process as in the list above. Lettuces thrive on chicken manure feeds! Reminder, don’t use these if you have digging predators like raccoons, skunks.

• Peppers specially like a foliar feed of non-fat powdered milk (Calcium) and Epsom Salts (Magnesium & Sulfur). They also can use more Potassium. This time of year kelp meal is good source and releases quickly. If you have predators about, don’t get the kind mixed with stinky fish emulsion.
• Foliar feed all your plants with a super mixed tea – use NO manure in teas you will use on leaves you will eat, like lettuce! At the same time, for deeper root feeding, use a spade fork to make holes about your plant. Push it into the soil, wiggle back and forth a bit, then pour the rest of that tasty mixed tea down the holes. Replace the mulch and water well at soil level to a bit beyond the dripline.

A word to the wise. If your plant is done, it’s done. No amount or any kind of feeding will ‘help’ it. It’s nature. Thank it. Either save seeds or if it is clean, not diseased or infested, compost it.

Seeds are your last harvest! Allow your healthiest top producers to seed. Tie a ribbon on plants (at top and bottom or where you might grab it if in a weeding frenzy) or on fruits you want to save seeds from so you don’t accidentally harvest them too soon! Each year keep your best! Remember, these seeds are adapted and localized to you, your location, how you garden! Scatter some seeds about if they would grow successfully now! Or just scatter them about and when it’s the right time up they come, even if it’s next spring! Many seeds, especially self seeders, will come up quite well on their own, even the tiniest ones like Breadseed Poppy, chamomile and some lettuces! Some need Cold Stratification, overwintering in the ground, or some time in your fridge!

Save enough seeds for your own planting, for several rounds of planting across next year’s season, for replanting when there are losses. Save some to give away or share at the seed swap. Our 2024 Santa Barbara area Seed Swap is in January! If you are willing, take some of your extras to a local Seed Bank! While you are there, pick up some of your favorites and some new ones to try out! Keep the local races going. 2020 Note! As your plants come into seeding time, consider sharing them as soon as possible! “Little Free Seed Libraries” are Sprouting Up to Help Gardeners Share Seeds in Troubled Times. Take a look at some very clever and loving ideas!

Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s better than ever plantings. See more about SeedSaving!   How to Save Tomato Seeds!

After seedsaving, when your plants are done, let them go, compost if pest and disease free, start clearing space for fall soil prep. Bag up ground waste where plants have had disease or infestations and put it in the garbage, NOT in the green waste recycle.

Fall Soil Prep!

August is perfect time to ready your soil for the very first fall plantings, starting mid-August from seed!

At this time of year, seasonal change, before deciding how to prep your soil, decide what you will plant! Some plants are perfect this time of year and the next couple of months. See Photoperiodism! Know if your favored plants need regular or acidic soil. Make or amend accordingly for more bountiful harvests! Maybe put the acid lovers in a area of their own?

Designing your winter garden depends on your microclimate, seeds you have or can get, transplants you can get or grow, the amount of space you have, whether you will be growing a soil feeding leguminous cover crop. How you prep your soil depends on what your soil already is like, what your plants need. Many plants need slightly acidic soil. Some areas need more rich soil for high production winter ‘heavy’ feeders. Some want a little sand, others don’t want soggy feet. If you are planting seeds, do the seed beds first! Seeds germinate faster and healthier with worm castings. 25% is ideal. Be sure to protect this area from worm loving predators like raccoons or skunks. Check out Designing your SoCal Winter Veggie Garden! Think Big!

EMPHASIS! Some would consider the ultimate ‘soil prep’ to be installing GOPHER wire protection, LOL! Here we are at the turn of the season, a very good time to do the job. Water well and deeply each of 3 days before if your soil is hard deeper down. Test a spot first. Get a team of friends together and go for it! Appoint a watcher to play music, make sure everyone stays hydrated. Bring gloves, wear sturdy shoes, safe boots. You may not be able to do the whole area at once, but do what you can. You will be so glad you did! You can do it!

Cover crop soil restoration! You can plant herbs, Calendula, all sorts of things, but a Green Manure mix including lots of legumes and oats does the best. Legumes collect Nitrogen from the air, N being the number one element plants need for leaf growth! Know that Nitrogen fixing plants don’t pull nitrogen from the air on their own. They actually need help from a common bacteria called Rhizobium. Whether you are planting cover crops, beans or peas, if there is no Rhizobium in the soil from previous plantings, add the bacteria to the seed mix, making a seed covering slurry, then plant immediately. Legumes deposit the N on their roots in little nodules. When you turn the legumes under, they not only feed your soil with their leaves, but those little nodules on their roots! Beans and Peas are legumes. Always cut off rather than pull out their roots. Leave those roots there to feed your soil! Their nitrogen isn’t released until the plant dies. The deep roots of oats loosen your soil, creating channels for oxygen and water and soil critters to navigate. Also, they produce more growth in late fall/early winter than in spring! Perfect for winter crop plantings! The Basics – Cover Crops   In depth about Living Mulch!

If you have enough area, plant one space entirely with a cover crop. If your area is smaller, each year plant a different section with your cover crop. Some years you can get two cover crops in, especially if you are planting successively for a steady table supply. When the first patch is done you plant it. You start your second patch where another area has been finishing. Or if you are doing one area for early planting, save another for planting bareroots in January.

If you are inclined, always be making compost with clean garden waste, kitchen scraps. Decide where you want to compost; leave space next to it so you can move your compost back and forth. Or you can move your composter around to enrich the soil there. The fastest way to compost is to make a pit or a trench. Add your healthy green waste or kitchen waste, chop it fine, turn it in mixing it with your soil. If you trenched it, turn it a few times over the next few days. If you have a pit, turn it two to three times over the next few days, then add it where it is needed when it is done. To balance the materials, add dry newspaper or something dry that decomposes quickly. Straw can literally take months. If you don’t have dry material, add bought compost that has plenty of bark type bits for water holding capacity and to keep your soil looser.

If composting isn’t for you, buy the best in bags you can! In addition to the basics, we want to see worm castings, mycorrhizae fungi, bat guano, kelp meal, maybe some peat to loosen clay and add more water holding capacity, chicken manure. If you soil isn’t loamy and doesn’t hold water well, look for a texture that has bits of bark that will add more water holding capacity.

Start Seedlings for transplant, or plant seeds right in the ground!

Choose the very best seeds possible! We want health and abundance! Climate is your first consideration. Cold tolerance if you are in a year round area. Disease and pest tolerance, resistance. Pests are per your area and time of year. For strong mildew resistance, more, take a look at Cornell’s super plant by plant Veggies Disease Resistant List! Allow plenty of time. It covers a lot. Also know that some of the plants are commercially produced and may not be what a home gardener wants ie a tough plant that can withstand processing before it gets to market. But sometimes, those commercial plants are the very best and the latest on the market! Try two or three varieties! 

Seeds germinate really well, quicker and healthier when worm castings are added to your soil along with the compost. Castings strengthen your plants’ immune systems germination is faster, they have water holding capacity! Add 25% for best results. Boost up seed beds and add amendments out to the dripline where you will be installing transplants. Put a stake where your planting holes will be so you can add more at those points when you install your transplants. See Soil for Seed Starting! DIY, Pre-made Remember to protect any areas where you use worm castings in advance!

Plant seeds of small plants where they will live permanently as space becomes available. That’s beets, celery, chard, mustard greens, parsley, winter radish varieties, kohlrabi, Mizuna, bok choy, rutabaga, turnips. Peas are a well favored winter crop! Pole peas go up on the trellis to save space! Sow carrots (they do best from seed). Keep the soil moist and shaded until they’re up, and then gradually allow them more sun over a week’s time. Some plants, especially hard seed carrots, do well in mini low sided trenches where they keep more moisture to germinate.

Plant the seeds for biggies in little nursery areas. Plant them far enough apart that you have plenty of space to get your trowel in, not damage any neighbor seedling roots, to transplant them to their permanent home as space becomes available. That’s Brassicas: cabbage (especially red, and savoy types that resist frost better), broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards, cauliflower and kale babies!

Don’t forget to plant your plants’ companion plants as well! In fact, plant them together in your Nursery Patch and transplant them together when their space becomes available! A great winter set might be Broccoli, cilantro and lettuce. If you choose cilantro, don’t delay transplanting when space becomes available – cilantro makes deep roots fast! The exception is carrots, another deep roots fast plant. Better to plant them in a permanent location. Instead of a trowel, leave enough space between them and other companion sets, to lift them out with a small shovel! When ready, predig their new space for them, dig deeply so there is room for their roots to go straight down. Add winter amendments as needed and mix them into the soil. Water the hole just enough to moisten it. Dig deeply under your companion sets so not to cut their growing roots, and transfer them to their new planting hole. Immediately give them their first pest/mildew prevention treatments. Voilà! Happy plants! They will grow quickly, be strong and productive.

See Super Fall Veggies for help choosing the very best varieties and Fall companion planting! Don’t forget to plan space to commingle your valuable companion plants! They enhance growth, repel pests, bring pollinators, can help withstand diseases. Here’s your quick handy list of winter companions:

• Cilantro with Broccoli! It makes brocs grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener!
• Celery, potato and onions enhance broccoli flavor! Chamomile is thought to too and, called the Plant Dr, heals nearby plants!
• Lettuce among, beside Cabbages to repel cabbage moths
• Chives, Cilantro, Garlic, Geraniums, Lavender, Mint family (caution – invasive), and onions are said to repel aphids.
• Mustard and nasturtium can be planted near more valuable plants as traps for the aphids. A word to the wise, nasturtiums are often snail habitat and can quickly take over an area!
• Calendula is a trap plant for pests such as aphids, whiteflies, and thrips by exuding a sticky sap that they find more appealing and delicious than nearby crops. Plant them a bit away from the plant you want to survive.
• Peas and carrots are terrific together but NO onion family with Peas!
• Include winter blooming flowers and herbs plus habitat for your pollinators!

PLEASE plant winter habitat and flowering plants for our beneficial insects – bees, hoverflies, butterflies, pollinators! Here’s a BC list of 15 Plants that Help Bees through the Winter If they will grow there, they surely will grow here! We depend on bees for our survival! See Pollination: Honeybees, Squash Bees & Bumblebees!  How to Care for Your Pollinators in Winter

Winter plants that get a good start while there is still some heat, will be producing a lot sooner than plants started when it gets cooler. You will have a much earlier crop, plus time for a successive crop, maybe start another round in December! Be sure to leave space to plant additional rounds to keep a steady table supply, especially peas! You can plant the waiting to space to quick small growers for table variety. Just harvest them when you are ready to plant your second round.

If planting from seed is not for you, no time, gone on vacation, of course you can wait and get transplants when the nurseries bring them in. Just know nursery selections are not as big as what you can buy as seeds. They sell what sells most. Island Seed & Feed has the best and greatest selection of organic seed in the Santa Barbara area, and there are marvelous ethical seed companies. Be sure to get seed varieties that are right for your area! Always choose the best, varieties that resist or tolerate local pests or disease, that in winter can withstand frost/freeze.

Keep harvesting, do your soil preps, plant some seed, and wait for September or October for transplants. Labor Day weekend is a favorite big planting time for many gardeners, and that’s only a month away now! At that time you can plant both seeds and transplants of the same plants! Effectively that’s two rounds at once, the seeds, depending on weather, coming in six to seven weeks after the transplants!

Among HOT August days, there are hints of fall. Days are a tad shorter; shadows fall in different places. For us SoCal gardeners it’s time to design – Think Big! It’s in our minds, maybe put to paper. What will be new and different this year. Will you relocate your garden, reroute your paths? Start a Food Forest?! What new foods will we try, is there a more productive or resistant variety? Will you be adding compost space, or a worm bin? Would you like raised beds on legs this time? How about a greenhouse?! Have you ever planted a green manure cover crop? Will your soil be different? Will you be planting tall indeterminate peas in a cage that shades, or quickie low bush peas? Both?! Is the gopher wire installed yet? What about greywater systems? Rainwater capture?

Put your feet up, review your garden notebook. In the cool of late summer evenings think it through…. Dream about your new winter garden…

Updated annually

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Check out the entire August 2023 Newsletter!

Winter Garden Design!
Veggie Garden Nursery Patch!
Broccoli, the Queen of Brassicas!
5 Simple & Easy Storage Ideas for your Harvest Bounty!
Dehydrate?! EZ, No Storage Expenses, Use Less Space, Nutritious Tasty Results!

Upcoming Gardener Events!  Get your lodgings for the 10th Annual National Heirloom Exposition, Ventura CA Sep 12-14!  Sep 27-30 44th American Community Gardening Assn Conference in Houston. Santa Cruz Permaculture is in full swing – get your Certificate and MORE!

SUBSCRIBE to the entire newsletter!    Friend or Follow on Facebook! 

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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 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. Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

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Jumpin’ July 2023! Happy Harvests & Delicious Feasting!

May You and your family enjoy a super beautiful, bountiful and juicy July!

Happy 4th of July to you all! Henry David Thoreau says ‘Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.‘ That’s us, growing the freshest, most nutritious, organic food there is! Enjoy your luscious tomatoes!

July is Tomato month! Bush and cherry toms turned red in May and June, but the big beefsteaks, and indeterminate all-summer-long tomatoes come in July in big numbers! Super sandwiches and salads on the way!

July is not so much a planting month as water, sidedress, harvest and share, seedsaving/getting seeds, and make compost month. Fall soil prep begins for late July, Aug, Sep & Oct plantings! Plan your fall garden. Update your seed variety selections to more resistant, heat and drought tolerant varieties.

July usually brings your greatest variety of table fresh veggies, herbs and flowers! It’s colorful and full of great textures. This is giveaway time if you don’t do canning. It’s giveaway time if you have so much there is enough canned and/or frozen for you and your family and then some! Some of us SoCal gardeners don’t can at all because our fall, winter crops are so nutritious and freshly abundant there is no need! Some feel eating with the seasons is the most natural and best for your body.

Sharing is a blessing for people who don’t have access to fresh organic food or are unable to garden. Fresh foods last so much longer than store bought, and have so much better taste and nutrition! Start with family, friends, neighbors. Give to senior communities and those who prepare food for them. Remember they often have special dietary needs and more fragile teeth. Less spicy and less crunchy. Give to any organization that helps people in need, the FoodBank, maybe your local women’s shelter. When we eat better we think more clearly, our body heals, our Soul mends. Thank you and bless you for caring so much.

Sidedressing is important now while plants are working hard!

General sidedressing, during season feeding times, are when baby plants are just up 5, 6 inches tall, when vines start to run, at bud time & first flowering, and first fruiting. From then on it varies per plant! Late July when some plants are near the end of production, extend their fruiting with a good feed – in the ground, or foliar, preferably both, but foliar tops ground feeding for several reasons! See more!

• Manure feeds are especially great for lettuce, and all others except for beans, beets, carrots, parsnips, sweet and white potatoes, and tomatoes, or there’ll be more foliage than fruit! Lettuce loves chicken manure but only about a 1/4 inch gently dug in. NO foliar teas with manure in them on foliage you will be eating.
• Give your peppers and Solanaceae, tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, Epsom Salt/Magnesium foliar treatments.
• Every couple of weeks your strawberries would love a light fish emulsion/kelp drench.
• Or you can foliar feed everyone some tea! Make a super duper mixed tea – no compost is needed in that mix for plants whose soil was well composted before planting. First make your tea. When it is ready, make your spade fork holes and apply a good compost/worm castings mix, then foliar feed with your tea! Less holes are better because you don’t want to damage too many of the lateral surface feeder foots. Drippings will help moisten your mulch and compost/castings on the ground below! Last, water gently and well with a low flow water wand underneath your plant so everything stays where you put it and you don’t wash away your foliar feed. Do that before the sun gets on your plants or while it is still cool in the day and plants have plenty of time to dry during the day. Low flow also lets water and tea and compost/castings drippings drizzle down into the spade fork holes! THAT is a super feed!

  Mixed teas feed and help prevent pests and diseases. They serve up beneficial living microbes to your plant and provide trace minerals it may need. Use foliar tea more frequently for plants that are ailing or in recovery. On an immediate basis, foliar feeding is 8 to 20 times more potent than ground feeding, and your plant takes it up in as little as an hour! Plants in immediate need can be helped right away! Compost supplies the organic matter that tea doesn’t supply, so it is critical in and of itself, plus it has many times more nutrients than a diluted tea. On and in the ground it decomposes slowly, feeds your plant steadily. It and castings have great water holding capacity. Do both whenever you can!

• Compost is always super. Remember to use acidic compost for veggies that prefer slight acidity! Pull back the mulch. Grab your spade fork, insert it, rock it gently, remove the fork leaving the holes. Stay 8″ away from the central stem, go out to the dripline. Gently scratch up only one or two separate areas around your plant out to the dripline, even a little further to encourage roots to extend, and to feed the feeder roots that are in progress growing out further. Avoid breaking a substantial number of tiny surface feeder roots, otherwise your plant will be slowed down by being in recovery for lack of food and ability to uptake water. Mix in your compost and lay on a 1/2″ to an inch of compost on top of areas you didn’t dig up. While you are at it, be sure your basins are retaining their shape out to the dripline. Put your mulch back, add more (straw) if it needs replenishing, replace it if it’s by a plant that has had pests or disease. If wilts or blight, put no more than 1″ total of straw. You want airflow so the soil will dry a bit. Gently water well. Keep the area moist for a few days so soil organisms can multiply! See Composting Methods, Make it Your Way!Get/make acidic compost for your plants that prefer acidic soil – blueberries, cranberries, beans, cucumber, eggplant, parsley, parsnips, pepper, radish, rhubarb, rutabaga, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. Another site says: Chicory, eggplant, endive, potato, rhubarb, shallot, sorrel, sweet potato. SFGate says ‘Vegetable plants that do best in mildly acidic soil include carrots, cauliflower, celery, cucumbers, garlic, sweet peppers, pumpkins, winter squash and tomatoes. Another site says: Bean, Brussels sprouts, carrot, chive, collard, corn, cucumber, garlic, kale, kohlrabi, mustard, parsley, pea, pepper, pumpkin, radish, rutabaga, squash, sunflower, tomato, turnip, watermelon. Get a soil test kit or use your intuition. You can see there are differences of opinion among the ‘experts!’ Woody mulches help maintain acidic soil pH. Specific info about soil pH for veggies
• Save yourself some time by adding 25% Worm castings, and for plants that need it, a bit of manure, to your compost and apply them all together. Especially apply that mix to any ailing plants or plants in recovery. Castings help our plants uptake soil nutrients and boost your plant’s immune system. When your plant is taxed producing fruit in great summer conditions, it also is peaking out for the season and fighting pests and diseases are harder for it. Adding compost and castings may prolong and up the quantity and quality of late summer fruits. However, sometimes a plant is just done. No amount of coaxing will have effect. It worked hard. Thank it. Let it produce its seeds for seedsaving, or take it to the compost altar.

If you prefer organic granulated fertilizer sprinkle it around evenly per instructions, and water in well. Just know you will have to do that more frequently, and it doesn’t provide the water holding capacity that compost and castings do.

Feeding your plants can be plant specific or in general. For example, Tomatoes and Peppers (and Roses – edible petals), do well with a little sulfur. It is easily applied – a Tablespoon of Epsom salts, and a 1/2 teaspoon liquid dish soap as a surfactant (so your application sticks to the leaves), in a gallon watering can is all it takes. If the nozzle turns up to get under those leaves, all the better. Apply before the sun hits your plants or while it is still cool. For Peppers, usually one or two feedings are enough – at transplant or baby height about 8″ and when buds and blooms/fruit set start.

If any of your plants are looking puny, have yellowing leaves, you might give them a bit of easy uptake blood meal for a quick Nitrogen pick me up. Add compost, castings and a tad of manure too so your plant has steady food after the blood meal (an expensive feed) is used. If you have predator creatures, especially skunks or raccoons, forgo stinky fish emulsions, manures and blood meal. Use something else, like Alfalfa Meal.

Late July, gardeners are starting to want new ways to enjoy their Zucchini! ZOODLES! Zucchini Zoodles Kale Pesto Edamame Recipe! Here are 28 cool summer variations on how to include this common veggie in a unique way!

Take care of pests and diseases asap! You don’t want them to spread or increase, lose the fruit of all your efforts and time. July brings hot weather, water stress, the stress of continued production. Though you may be a bit tired with all your tending and harvesting, this is not the time to interrupt your care. The heat will bring pest hatchings; tired plants may get overwhelmed by diseases. Be consistent with your watering. Stay on it with your harvest to keep your plants in production, sidedress (feed) as needed. Mercilessly squash the cucumber beetles, the green/yellow and black striped jobs. They give your plants, especially cucumbers, deathly systemic diseases. Put down pellets for slugs & snails, use sulfur and soap in foliar feeds to keep back aphids. See more! Keep plants that are susceptible to Whiteflies free from dust and Ants, and well supplied with worm castings. Hose the flies away, and remove infected leaves or the whole plant if it gets them repeatedly. Insecticidal soaps or Neem oil can reduce populations, but they also harm beneficial insects.

The old one, two! If your area has Fusarium/Verticillium wilts or Mosaic Virus, first foliarly apply 1/4 C bleach to a gallon of water. Be sure to apply to both under and upper sides of the leaves, and the stems. The next day give your plants a boost with the immune booster/mildew prevention mix: 1/4 C nonfat powdered milk, 1 regular crushed aspirin, heaping tablespoon Baking Soda, 1/2 teaspoon dish soap, to a gallon of water. Or spray with Copper. Let NO LEAVES TOUCH THE GROUND OR ANOTHER ALREADY DISEASED OR VULNERABLE PLANT. Know that the fungi are also windborne, so if your plants are beside each other it spreads from one to the next and others nearby.

I found refraining from watering my strawberries but once a week, unless it is exceptionally hot or windy weather, and not mulching under my strawberries keeps the slugs and snails at bay. They don’t like dry soil. Do put down organic slug/snail bait where you will be sprouting seeds and while the seedlings are coming up. Aphids don’t thrive in a dryer environment either. Water and feed the plants susceptible to them a little less. Remove yellowing leaves asap. Yellow attracts whiteflies. Leafminers love temps in the 70s! Remove damaged areas of leaves immediately so they don’t spread. Plant so mature plant leaves don’t touch each other so pests and disease don’t go plant to plant. Three to four consecutive 80+ hot days can bring those odd Leaffooted Bugs! Keep special watch on your tomatoes! Mice and rats and birds love tomato nibbles and the rodents are well equipped to climb! A garden kitty who loves to hunt is a good helper. Put a tiny bell on your kitty so birds, especially hummingbirds, are warned. Keep your compost turned so mice don’t nest in it, or use a covered enclosure; remove debris piles and ground shrub or hidey habitat. PLEASE don’t use rodenticides that in turn kill birds, pets, or animals that would feed on a poisoned animal. That includes Gophers. For gophers, install wire barriers. See more about pests! 

Watering in July is vital, along with Compost & Mulch. Compost increases water holding capacity. Mulch shades soil, keeps it and your plant’s roots cooler, keeps soil more moist longer, less water needed. EXCEPTION: Melons and winter squashes in cooler coastal areas don’t need mulch! They self shade and hot soil helps them produce better. Give them a good sized basin so tiny lateral feeder roots can fully supply that big plant with water and nutrients. Put a tall stake in the center of the basin so you know where to water when the area is covered by those big leaves! For plants that do well with mulch, replenish tired or missing mulch the birds might have scratched away.

Steady water is a must to produce good looking fruits. Some water then none makes misshapen strawberries, called catfaced, curled beans and cukes, carrots lose their consistent shape and may be dryish. Tomatoes have more flavor when they are watered, but a tad less just before harvest concentrates their sweetness. You can do that with bush varieties, determinates, but with indeterminate vining types you just have to see how it goes. Lots of tasty flavor tests may be in order! They have deep tap roots, so usually watering nearby plants is sufficient. Short rooted plants like beans, beets, lettuces need frequent watering to keep moist. If you are in an extremely hot area, shade cloth might be needed. On hot windy days, some may need watering twice a day, even more. Some plants just need a lot of water, like celery. Eggplant needs 2″/week rather than the standard 1″/week!

If you are in a hot, dry, windy area, see Growing Super Veggies in HOT, Drought, Desert Areas!

Don’t be fooled by Temporary High Temps! Non heat resistant or tolerant tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and beans, stop flowering and fruiting when temps rise above 85 to 90 degrees F for an extended time depending on humidity. Humidity causes pollen to stick and not fall to pollinate. Dry heat causes the pollen to fall and not stick! When weather cools, you will have blooms again and be back in production. Rattlesnake beans, on the other hand, keep right on producing at 100 degree temps! So choose heat tolerant veggie varieties, like Heatmaster and Solar tomatoes, from locales with hot weather. Wonderful heat tolerant varieties are out there!

Cool summer evenings enjoy Zucchini Lasagna! You can even eat it cold, and for breakfast!

Though July is more a maintenance and harvest month, Yes you can plant more! At this point, transplants are best, but many plants will not still be available at nurseries, and it is a tad late to plant many summer plants from seed. What you can plant is beans! They grow quickly and if you grow bush beans and quickly maturing heat tolerant varieties you will still be eating beans in Sept and Oct if it doesn’t get cold early! Get patio container, dwarf types of quick growing heat tolerant determinate tomatoes if you can find them. Previously planted tomatoes may be done producing, or bit the dust for one reason or another – likely a blight or wilt. Remove the old plants to reduce further spread of disease – do NOT compost them – bag and trash, do not green recycle. Beef up the soil and plant your late tomatoes in an entirely different spot.

More lettuces! In summer you want heat tolerant, slow bolting, tip burn resistant lettuce! Lettuce Leaf and Red Sails and Outredgeous are great. Jericho from Israel is great. Sierra, Nevada. Nevada is a Green Crisp/Batavian that grows BIG, doesn’t bolt, and is totally crispy! Green Star is ruffly, quickly grows big around! Parris Island Romaine is slow bolting. Green Towers Romaine tolerates moderate summer heat and has some resistance to tipburn and bolting.

Transplant basil, celery, chard, cucumbers, dill, kale, leeks, summer lettuce, green onions, white potatoes, summer savory, New Zealand spinach. In our hot foothills and further south, go for more melons, okra, pumpkins, summer & winter squash. I’ve seen tomato transplants and bean seeds started in August produce plentiful crops into SoCal’s October! Rattlesnake pole beans do as they are supposed to, make beans in up to 100 degree weather! Yard long beans tolerate late summer weather and make magnificent beans! And some varieties of those don’t get mildew!

Corn is an exception – late plantings often develop smut. But. That smut, from a fungus called Ustilago maydis, is considered a delicacy by many. ‘It’s insanely delicious and luxurious, like black truffles.’ In Mexico it is known as huitlacoche. – weet-la-COH-cheh. Your neighboring gardeners may especially not be pleased, however. See more!  

Fall transplants need babying! Transplant late afternoon or evening so plants have the whole night to begin to recover before they’re hit with a full day of sun and heat. Water well and provide shade from intense mid-day sun. Prop up and secure some of those plastic plant flats that have the smaller grid pattern to filter the light. Keep your transplants moist for at least a month or until they’re well established. Mulch to save water unless they thrive on hot soil.

Harvesting See Grow Veg’s great post on ‘How to Tell When Fruits and Vegetables are Ready for Harvest’ Harvesting has special little techniques and storage varies considerably from veggie to veggie! See more for details!

Be really patient with your big Bells and sweet roasting Peppers. Both like to wait until the nights are longer and cooler in late summer before fruiting and plumping up – making their thick walls. Peppers need time on the plant to absorb nutrients and water and plump up their flesh. Some will still need to change color.

♦♦ At the end of the month, SoCal gardeners start your early winter crops first plantings! Sow carrots (they do best from seed), celery and Brassicas. Brassicas are arugula, Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage (especially red and savoy types, which resist frost better), cauliflower, and kohlrabi, mizuna, mustard, pak choi, radish, rutabaga, turnip. Besides having your tasty winter crops earlier, you may have time to plant a second round later on. I have planted in December and had terrific crops! They aren’t called winter crops for nuthin!

Mid to late July start preparing by clearing areas for late July first fall plantings.

1. Remove finishing weakened plants that attract pests and get diseases. Remove debris insects live in. Remove and trash mulch from under plants that were diseased and replace with clean mulch.
2. Decide if and where you will plant your green manure patches/aka living mulch/cover crops. Living Mulch!  Cover Crops
3. Improve the soil, mainly, add worm castings to mini nursery areas where you will be planting seeds. Castings speed germination, boost the immune system of the seedlings, and add water holding capacity to help keep the soil moist. Leave space so the seedlings can be removed by a narrow trowel to their permanent place when they become big enough and space becomes available. Keep the soil moist and shaded until they’re up, and then gradually allow them more sun over a week’s time.

It’s time to get seeds if you don’t already have them! If seeds and mini nurseries aren’t your thing, wait until your local nursery starts having the transplants that make you happy! Late August they might start trickling in. Labor Day weekend is a favorite planting time for some gardeners depending on how hot it still is. October is just fine too! One year it stayed so hot we all planted the first couple weeks of November!

Tasty Zucchini Rolls made with Sunflower Seeds Pate, Sun Dried Tomatoes and Spinach! See complete recipe by Chris at Sprout People!

If you are just starting, just got your first plot at one of the community gardens, first, prepare your soil! While waiting for fall planting time, plant a few patches of fast growing, less water needing, heat lovers, lots of summer heat tolerant lettuces for your salads! They may need a little shade cloth protection. Plan out your fall/winter layout – general rule is plant tall to the north, short to the south. Winter plants don’t take up as much food in cooler weather, so use less compost and manure. Remember, nature’s soil is naturally only 5% organic matter, but we are growing veggie bearing plants, so a little more than that is perfect. Too much food and plants go to all leaf, but then a lot of winter veggies are just that, all leaf! Cabbage, Chard, Kale, Lettuces. Oh, lettuces thrive with manures, so put more in the lettuce patch areas, but none where the carrots or peas will grow. They don’t need it. Garden Design/Seed Selection   Fall/Winter Garden Design   Magic of Permaculture!

Important Habitat! As plants finish, let some of them grow out to save seeds. A carrot, celery and cilantro produce masses of seeds! Besides being food for pollinators and beneficial predator insects, their blooms are beautiful! Birds will have seeds for food and scour your plants for juicy cabbage worms, whiteflies, aphids, earwigs, grasshoppers, cucumber beetles and grubs! Chickadees even eat ants!

Seedsaving is really a no-nonsense game! Besides being our second harvest, it insures the purity of your line! Save seeds from your best plant, a plant that grew well at your place! It’s important to our world community, as Thomas Rainer says, to preserve our garden heritage & biodiversity! Besides, it’s fun! Keep some for you – some as spices & others for planting. Package as gifts, and reserve some to take to the Seed Swap in January! 2020 Note! As your plants come into seeding time, consider sharing them as soon as possible! “Little Free Seed Libraries” are Sprouting Up to Help Gardeners Share Seeds in Troubled Times. Take a look at some very clever and loving ideas! Here we are in 2023 and it’s still a good idea!

Let some beans go until they are completely dry in their pods; let corn dry until the kernels are hard on the cob. Let a cucumber turn yellow and tough. Save some seeds from your favorite and best tomatoes. Dry them further at home. When ready, put in an envelope, label with the date/year, their name/variety, where grown, any special notes you think would be helpful. See more about SeedSaving! Here are important details for all veggies at NativeSeed.org!

SoCal, be ready for winter rain! If you garden at home, please look into water capture and gray water systems – shower to flower, super attractive bioswale catchments. Santa Barbara City offers several rebates! Santa Barbara County rebates info per city! Call (805) 564-5460 today to schedule a FREE water system checkup! Check out the Elmer Ave retrofit!

Oh, and please see Tomato Varieties! Humble to Humongous & More!

Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes. ~ Author Unknown

Updated annually

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Check out the entire July 2023 Newsletter!

Harvest & Storage Tips for Our Summer Favorites!
Seasonal Soil Care for Veggies! 
Leaffooted Bugs, Leptoglossus zonatus
SeedSaving! A Beautiful Annual Ritual & Celebration!
Veggie Seed Saving Plant by Plant!

Upcoming Gardener Events! Reminder! Get lodgings for the 10th Annual National Heirloom Exposition, Ventura CA Sep 12-14! Don’t miss this superlative event! July 21 & 22 43rd Annual Seed Savers Exchange Conference! Sep 27-30 44th American Community Gardening Assn Conference in Houston. 

SUBSCRIBE to the entire newsletter!    Friend or Follow on Facebook! 

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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 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. Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

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September 2022 Last Summer Harvests, SeedSaving, Fall Transplants!

This veg garden is at Gaia Retreat, in Bundjalung Country, Brooklet, Australia. They are approaching vernal equinox now, while we in SoCal are soon upon autumnal equinox. Their cool plants are finishing while we are starting ours! This spot offers a fine shed, a native bee home low on the pole and a three floor bird apt at the top! 

It’s definitely fall now. In coastal Santa Barbara July, and now August, there have been lots of cool  overcast days and mildews to match. Some plants never got full stride, some are ending a bit early. Some possibly record breaking heat is predicted here at the very end of August and early Sep at 80 and over for over a week! If you love your summer plants a lot more than winter plants, you can take a chance. Plant that last batch of bush beans, even pole beans, and early cold tolerant determinate bush tomatoes. More likely it will be better to get those winter plants going a few days after the heat, like mid September, otherwise there may be early bolting. That will give you time for second plantings November/December. If late August was hot where you garden, and so is September, it will be a tad challenging getting winter seeds and starts going. Extra watering will be critical; shade may be needed for seedlings.

Many of you that had HOT August weather haven’t gotten transplant starts going, but have started seedlings at home. Rather than planting out your seeds garden wide, it would be easier to plant them in a shaded patch for transplant later. Caring for them will be all in one place, easier to cover if needed. See the details: Veggie Garden Nursery Patch Many veg gardeners are still waiting until the bolting time passes in your area. California has had severe fires; other areas flooding, floods feared in after fire areas. Here are some tips for remediation and recovery if you are in extreme conditions. Call in Permaculture teams to make the best new beginnings. Even many of them have never been so challenged and are learning as they go. Take time to work with the team as much as you can. Get connected with experience leaders. Collaborating is productive.  

Last Harvests are being collected and stored, seeds saved! See more about SeedSaving!  How to Save Tomato Seeds! 

Many have been prepping their soil as various summer plants are finishing and space becomes available! When you do, make your fall planting beds extra yummy! Add 5-10% compost, and, if you have them, add 25% worm castings – seeds germinate better and plants do especially better with worm castings! Manure amounts depend on the type of manure and which plants. Rabbit poop manure can be used immediately with no composting – get some at the shelters! We want rich soil for big winter plants so they can make lots of those marvelous leaves for greens too. Winter plants like brocs, collards, cauliflower, cabbage and chard, are heavy producers, need plenty of food, but remember, winter is cooler and slower. Reduce you feeds potency by about 50%. Know that Carrots need little if any manure. With too much food/water they grow hairy, split /fork. Peas are legumes and usually feed themselves! Smart Manure Choices  More winter Soil tips!

It’s BRASSICA time! They are the mainstay of winter gardens! Their nutrition can’t be beat! Kale’s the Queen! Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Cabbages, Cauliflower and Collard greens! Then there are all the mini Brassicas, the fillers and littles – arugula, bok choy, mizuna, kohlrabi, mustards, radish, turnips. Rather than plant just six packs of transplants, put in seed at the same time when possible and stagger your plantings of the large Brassicas. Rather than all six cauliflower coming in at once, plant two now, two later and so on. Adjust that, of course, if you have a large area available to plant and a lot of people to feed! Another way to do it is to get varieties with early, middle and late maturity dates and plant them all at once! Plant both mini and monster cabbages at the same time! Minis come in sooner, while waiting for the monsters! Successive plantings mean a steady table supply.

There’s kale and there’s kale! This truly tasty purple curly leaf kale image is by Steve!

Finicky, or bored, eaters may enjoy a selection! Fall veggies come in lots of shapes and colors! Kales are renowned for their beauty and varieties – classic curly leaf, plain and simple flat leaf like in the image a left (less aphids and easy to hose away), Red Russian, Elephant, Red Bor that is really purple are just a few! Cauliflower comes in traditional shape and spiral, classic white plus yellow and purple and green! Get seed packs of them all and mix them together! Carrots already come in color mix seed packets! Circus Circus is a fun choice, especially when your kids are planting! Thumbelinas are faster producers for excited kids. Beets are terrific fun! Yellows, reds, pinks, whites and Chioggias (concentric circles of colors)! You can get them in rainbow mixes just like getting rainbow chard mixes! Rather than have your finicky, or bored, eater say no, open up that catalog or take them shopping at the nursery and let them pick what they would like to try!

More ‘littles,’ understory veggies that love cooler weather are beets, carrots, celery, chard, cilantro, leeks, spinach and especially lettuce – now is the time for tender butter leafs and heading lettuce! If you anticipate a hot Sep, plant more heat tolerant lettuces.

The SoCal winter legume is PEAS! Peas are like beans, our summer legume; they come in bush and pole types. And those come in three main types – English shelling, eat-’em-whole snap peas and flat China/snow peas! They are super easy to sprout! Definitely plant some every month or so. They don’t live all season long. When they are done, they’re done. It is true that picking peas, just like picking beans, is labor intensive. I eat a lot of mine before they get home, so I don’t mind. Bush peas come in first and pretty much all at once; pole come on later and continue to produce. On the first round it makes sense to plant both at once! If you don’t have time to do seeds, and aren’t wanting varieties nurseries don’t carry, just wait and when they arrive, get six packs! Transplants are always stronger than tiny seedlings. But do cover your plants if they show signs of being pecked by birds! That’s little V shaped nibbles on the leaves. Aviary wire is your best choice because it allows pollinators access and it is durable. You can clothespin or use clips for harvest and plant care access to hold openings closed when not in use.

CARROTS! Compost, yes! They want easy-to-push-through soil. Manure, no! Makes them hairy and they fork. And over watering, irregular watering, can make them split. Build your beds up so they drain well, are above the coldest air that settles low down. PEAS! The same. Compost to keep the soil loose and have water holding capacity for these short rooted green People. This winter legume makes their own Nitrogen, so feed only lightly if at all. Decide where both of these will be planted and amend accordingly. Conveniently, Peas are enhanced by Carrots! Start your carrots as much as 3 weeks to a month before you start your peas so the Carrots will be up and helping.

If your ground hasn’t been planted to peas before, or if you don’t know if it has, it’s more than wise to use peas specific inoculant at planting time. Seeds may be unable to start, if there isn’t ample Rhizobium leguminosarum, a nitrogen fixing bacteria, available to them. The bacteria ‘infect’ your plants and cause them to make the nodules they need for quality survival. Without those nodules, they are feeble, struggle and produce little. Very sad. See more and how to use the inoculant at Peas!

Presprouting your Peas is easy and it’s fun to watch them come to life! Fold a paper towel in half on a plate. Spritz the half on the plate with water. Lay on your seeds about an inch apart. Cover and spritz until good and wet. Put them in a warm place ie top of fridge, out of sunlight. Check them about every 6 hours; keep them moist. Water well at bedtime so they make it those 8 hours. Take them to work with you if it’s only you doing the parenting. While you are waiting, put up their trellis if they are pole peas.

When the little sprout is 1/4 to 1/2″ long, depending on temps it takes 2 -5 days, gently put them in the ground sprout (root) down, right at the foot of that trellis. Don’t forget to use the inoculant! Gardeners vary greatly on how they space those pealets. 1″, 2″, 6″. There is good reason to leave a little more space. More air circulation makes for less mildew that Peas are quite susceptible to. You can put the pea practically at the surface! But do cover it a bit so it doesn’t dry out. Next thing you know, you will have little plant sprouts coming up! The nice thing about presprouting is you know if you’ve got one! If a seed doesn’t sprout, you won’t be wondering like as you would had you planted it in the ground. That’s why some gardeners always presprout their Peas. If you plant early fall there may still be some warm days. Be prepared to give them some shade if they need it. They are short rooted and, and in those conditions, may need water daily or even twice daily. Transplants will be along at your nursery…see more on how to pick the best varieties for you!

Onions For the biggest, sweetest harvests, late summer and early fall are the prime times to sow seeds of short- or intermediate-day onions. Fall-sown short- and intermediate-day onions tend to yield more and are larger and sweeter than those seeded or transplanted in early spring.

Varieties that do better in winter are long beets like Cylindras – at left, long radishes like Daikons, pretty China Rose and handsome Long Black Spanish! Plant small beets like Dutch Baby Ball for quick beets while your Cylindras are growing twice to three times bigger! All about Beets, So Sweet!


Companion planting combos make a difference! Carrots enhance peas, onions stunt peas. Late summer plant the carrots on the sunny side at the feet of finishing pole beans. The Carrots will be up for when the beans are replaced by winter peas! Combos can use space wisely! Carrots grow down, peas grow up, perfect! Cabbage babies need to be planted 12 to 28″ apart! A healthy plant will take up much closer to that 28″. They take a long while to grow, head, head tight! While waiting, plant lettuces that repel cabbage moths, or other small fillers, that mature sooner, in the space between the Cabbages. You can do this at home amongst your ornamentals, and/or in containers too! Fillers can be onion/chive types, beets. Short quickest growing winter radishes can be among the long slower growing carrots among the slowest growing, your cabbages. Cilantro makes brocs grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener! Research has shown there are less aphids when you intermingle different varieties of brocs! See more!

No need to plant blocks or rows of smaller plants, unless you want to for the look. Biodiversity works better and uses space more wisely! Scatter them about on the sunny side between larger plants as an understory – living mulch! If it happens to be flowers, they bring pollinators right to your plant! Plant different varieties to keep your table exciting. Don’t plant them all at once, but rather every week or two for steady table supply. If you would enjoy a quick payback for your table, select the earliest maturing varieties.

If you have lots of seeds, over planting is an age old practice. Plant too, too many, then thin them with tiny pointy scissors, aka harvest the young, and eat ’em! Young radish sprouts, teeny carrots, little Brassicas of all kinds are wonderful in a salad! If they get a little big, steam them or add to stir fries and stews. Another way to do it is plant flats of lettuces, toss an entire packet of seeds in a small spot, Mesclun mixes, micro greens and mow or thin them! Tender baby greens! If mowed, they will grow back 3, 4 times.

When planting in hot fall weather, plant your outdoor seeds a tad deeper than you would in spring; soil is moister and cooler an extra inch or two down. It’s the law to keep them moist. If you plant successively for steady fresh table supply, plant a batch in September, again in October. Days will shorten and start cooling, but early fall you are taking advantage of a fast start because your plants will grow quickly in the warmer weather now than later on. September plant from seeds & transplants if you can get them, October from transplants. Be careful which plants to plant ~ see bolting!

Winter Feeding Lettuces like a light feed of chicken manure cultivated in. All the winter plants are heavy producers – lots of leaves, some of those leaves are monsters! Cabbages are packed tight, leaf after leaf! They may need a light feed. Remember, it’s cooler now, so their uptake is slower, so give them liquid feeds, teas, half strength, and things easy for them to uptake.

Keep letting your strawberry runners grow for Oct harvest. Store them in the coldest part of your fridge for them to get chilled. Plant in January. OR. Let the babies grow through winter and get the earliest spring berries! Very carefully remove old parent plants. If the roots are entangled, cut the parent plant off just below the crown. If you replace your strawberries annually, as commercial growers do, in Santa Barbara area try Seascape, bred locally at UCSB. Seascapes are big fill-your-palm plentiful berries, firm, tasty, store well, are strawberry spot resistant! They have strong roots that gather plenty of nutrition. Plan ahead! Call ahead, earliest January, to get the date bareroots arrive – they go fast! Seascapes and other varieties are available as transplants later if you miss the January window. If you will be planting bareroot berries in January for April eating, remove old plants.

Some gardeners like precise and efficient organization. Others like every square inch planted like Food Forests. Some of you carry your layout plan in your head, others draw and redraw, moving things around until it settles and feels right. Others let it happen as it happens… Do add a couple new things just for fun! Try a different direction. Add some herbs or different edible pollinator flowers. Leave a little open space for surprises! Leave some space for succession planting. Stand back, take a deep breath and ask yourself why you plant what you plant and why you plant the way you do. Anything been tickling the back of your mind you are curious about? More about Designing Your SoCal Winter Veggie Garden!  Consider a Food Forest Guild!

Soil is always first in garden care! An old adage is ‘Feed the soil, not the plants.’

Winter plants need different care than greedy summer production plants, heavy feeders. Special soil tips for your winter plants! Almost all soil can do with some compost. Some say the most important soil tip of all is Gopher wire prevention, LOL, and I can tell you the misery it is to lose a prime plant in full production that took months of growing and TLC to get there. Grrr! See Gopher prevention

The right soil! Many veggies like slightly or more acidic soil! Use that azalea/camellia compost! SoCal ‘winter’ plants in blue. Acid tolerant veggies: beans, broccoli, cabbage, turnips, carrots, cauliflower, lettuce, celery, cucumbers, garlic, onions, corn, sweet peppers, pumpkins, winter and summer squash and fruits tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and many herbs. Acid loving veggies are radish, sweet potato, parsley, peppers, eggplant, potato, rhubarb. Note that there are varying opinions on these choices. Some say some of the acid tolerant veggies prefer acidic soil! Please see Sasha Brown’s post for more details, pH and tips!

Per GardenGuides.com there’s no reliable way to guess about or estimate soil pH, so having the soil tested is the best approach to ensuring that your vegetables have the proper acidity levels. The Cooperative Extension System offices in your state can help with this. My note: If you have a small plot like our community garden 10X20s, it may not help to soil test because there is so much variance within even a couple feet, but you can do it and see! You can get a pH meter if you want only pH readings. Or you can get a soil test kit that tests for soil deficiencies and pH! Best 2022 Soil Test Kits compared

Here are lists of veggies and fruits pH tolerance. 7 is the neutral point. I was surprised at the acidic tolerance of the majority of plants! See Acu>Rite’s site for shrub and tree pHs. These pHs are not to be confused with the alkalinity/acidic qualities of the veggies and fruits when we eat them! See chart!

You can add tasty items to the planting holes too! Some plants might like a bit more manure. Add a handful of bonemeal for blooms at 2 to 3 months, and also add bat/seabird guano for continued later blooming at 4 months! It takes that long for it to become available to your plants. A handful of powdered milk is for disease prevention. Worm Castings are super valuable, give immunity and increased water holding capacity! You may have some specials of your own depending on the soil in your area and which plant you are planting there. Some gardeners spritz the roots and planting hole with Hydrogen Peroxide to add oxygen, help plant roots absorb nutrients from the soil and more!

If you need to skip a beat, take some time off from the garden, let it rest, but be smart and let nature rebuild your soil while you are resting!

1. You can cover it deeply with all the mulch materials you can lay your hands on up to 18′ deep. Believe me, it will settle quickly to less than half that height in a few days to a week depending on temps! Let the herds of soil organisms do their work over winter. That’s called sheet composting or composting in place, lasagna gardening – no turning or having to move it when it’s finished. All you have to do is keep it moist. If you live in a windy area you might cover it.  If you are vermicomposting, have worms, add a few handfuls to speed up and enrich the process. Next spring you will have rich nutritious living layers of whole soil ready for planting for no work at all! Yarrow and Comfrey leaves also speed composting. Lay them in and on.
2. You can plant it with green manure. Laying on lots of mulch is a ton of work when you do it, just gathering the materials can be a challenge. Green manure takes some work too, but it has awesome results as well. You broadcast a seed mix of legumes and oats and let them grow. Bell beans, Austrian peas, vetch and oats from Island Seed & Feed in Goleta is an excellent choice. Legumes gather Nitrogen from the air and store it in nodules on their roots! N is the main ingredient your plants need for their growth! The oat roots break up the soil. They dig deep and open channels for water and air flow, soil organisms. Cover Crops  Living Mulch

Here’s the schedule:

1. Oct 1 plant your living mulch/cover crop – put this on your garden calendar! Bell beans take that long if they are in the mix or are your choice. Use the specific FRESH inoculant to produce the Nitrogen nodules on the legume plants.
2. About Dec 1 chop down/mow, chop up your living mulch and let it lay on the surface. Studies show there is more nutrition if it is let to lay before turning under. Keep your chopped mulch moist, not wet, until it is tilled in. Being moist aids decomposition. If Bell beans are in the mix, chop when it first flowers or the stalks get too tough to easily chop into small pieces.
3. Mid Dec till in your living mulch for mid January bareroot planting. The little white balls on the roots are like a beautiful little string of pearls. Those are the Nitrogen nodules legume plants make! If there are no nodules, you either forgot to use the inoculant or not enough. The whole purpose for growing the legumes is for these Nitrogen rich nodules that restore your soil, so it is critical to use that inoculant! When you turn the chopped bits under, also turn in the right compost at the same time! For strawberries, or other acid soil loving plants, add acidic compost. If your soil needs more water holding capacity, choose compost with slightly chunkier bits.

If you aren’t planting bareroot berries in January, you can plant your soil feeding cover crop September, just be sure you have enough time for when you plan to plant in spring.

Pest and Disease Prevention Drench young plants, ones you just transplanted, with Aspirin solution to get them off to a great start! Drench your seedlings when they get up a few inches. One regular Aspirin crushed, 1/4 C nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon Baking Soda, 1/2 teaspoon liquid dish soap (surfactant), per gallon of water. Aspirin triggers a defense response and stimulates growth! Powdered milk is a natural germicide and boosts the immune system. Be sure to get the under sides of the leaves too!

• Brassica pests! Lots of ants and lengthwise curling leaves are the giveaways for aphids. Aphids carry viruses. Aphids come in green, black, red, yellow, brown or gray. Avoid over watering that makes for soft plants, tender leaves that aphids thrive on, and ant habitat. Spray the aphids away, make the ants leave. Get up under those leaves, and fervently but carefully do the tender center growth tips. Do it consistently until they don’t come back. Cinnamon works sometimes and other times not at all. Boo. But when you are starting seedlings it prevents molds and damping off. Sprinkle it on the soil in your six pack. Doesn’t hurt to get it on the leaves. Get it in big containers at Smart and Final/bulk stores. Reapply as needed. There are other spray mixes that get rid of those aphids. Water and Vinegar, or hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, a few drops of simple dish soap. If you want to spend more money, use Neem Oil. Soaps, neem oil, and horticultural oil kill only aphids present on the day they are sprayed, so applications may need to be repeated. Plant garlic and chives among your Brassicas! Their strong scent repels aphids. IPM re Aphids
  
  Most of all, generously plant CILANTRO among your Brassicas! It repels aphids as well as attracting bees and beneficial insects!
• Later on, the most prevalent disease problem is mildew. Give your plants some room for air circulation, feed and water less so they don’t get so soft. It is much harder to deal with mildew once it has started. Better to do preventative treatments of the Aspirin Solution.

September is still Seed Saving time for some areas and some plants. Make notes on how your plants did, which varieties were the most successful. These seeds are adapted to you and your locality. Each year keep your best! Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s plantings. Generously gather seeds for upcoming January Seed Swaps! If your area doesn’t have a seed swap, start organizing one!

Don’t forget winter food for our pollinators! Borage is a beautiful cool season herb with edible flowers, blue for bees! It has a large 3 to 4′ footprint, so allow for that or plan to keep clipping it back. It is a helper companion plant, so when possible, plant it right in the middle of your other plants! See more about Borage!  What flower colours do birds and bees prefer?

Plant Sweet Peas for Christmas bloom! Plant gift plants or bowls or baskets for the holidays! 

Have you put up your Greenhouse yet?! Get going! DIY Hoop houses are quickly built, inexpensive and do the job admirably! See also Greenhouses in Climate Emergencies. You can start more seedlings, overwinter sensitive plants – eat tomatoes in December! A greenhouse may be perfect for you – the right size, easy to maintain!

Have fun! September gardens are a magical time of creativity and transition!

See wonderful August summer images at Rancheria Community Garden – See the giant Double Beefsteak Tomato, Specialty Beans, Bule Gourd, Birds, Beauty and Seeds! We are Sowing the Future!

Updated annually

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Check out the entire September 2022 Newsletter!

SoCal Fall/Winter Veggie Soil Tips for Delicious Returns!
Super Fall, Winter Veggie Varieties, Smart Companion Planting!
Bolting aka Running to Seed! Causes and Prevention!
Love Kale! Beauty, Super Nutrition, Easy to Grow!
Taming Your Butternut, Waltham, Winter Squash!

This month’s topics are how to prepare for and start us fall planting – Soil, healthy productive Seed choices, Garden Design that includes companion plants and understory planting places, plus, how to safely cut up your winter squashes!

Upcoming Gardener Events! Santa Barbara City College Permaculture Design Course, Lane Farms Pumpkin Patch, 43rd American Community Gardening Assn Conference. The next National Heirloom Expo will be in 2023! Jan 29, 2023 FREE 15th Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap is ON!

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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 remaining Santa Barbara City’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!

SUBSCRIBE to the entire newsletter!    Friend on Facebook! 

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Hot August 2022! Delicious Harvests, SeedSaving, Fall Starts!

July has been coolish, lots of overcast and mildews, some plants never got full stride, some are ending a bit early. If you figure August won’t be hot either, extended harvests are unlikely. Instead, get those winter plants going. That will give you time for second winter plantings November/December. If August is hot, it will be a tad challenging getting winter seeds and starts going. Watering will be critical; shade may be needed for seedlings.

For those of you who planted early spring, many of your plants are now finishing. It’s time to save seeds from your best plants! Clear space and ready your soil for winter planting. Start mini nursery seed beds in your garden or for transplanting from local nursery starts as soon as they become available. If you haven’t installed gopher protection wire, this is the best time, as summer ends, fall begins!

Just getting started in a new garden, or you just love to plant?! Summer plants you can still plant for fall harvests are early varieties of determinate tomatoes, bush beans and corn. Today, 7.31, I saw six packs of peas at a nursery! Hope they are late summer hardy! Corn is more disease prone at this time though. Tuck in your year-round fillers, beets, bunch onions, carrots, summer lettuces, winter radish, to keep a colorful and delicious variety on your table.

ONIONS For the biggest, sweetest harvests, late summer and early fall are the prime times to sow seeds of short- or intermediate-day onions. Fall-sown short- and intermediate-day onions tend to yield more and are larger and sweeter than those seeded or transplanted in early spring. Onions have stupendous flavor and come in white, yellow, red!

In our hot Santa Barbara foothills and further south, watch your melons, big squashes and pumpkins for their best harvest time – when their stem is brown and dry, or they ‘slip’ off the vine. Let your winter squash harden. When you can’t push your fingernail in winter squashes, and the stem is brown, it’s ready to harvest. Hold off irrigating melons about a week before they will ripen so their sugars will concentrate. Harvest okra while it is small and tender – bigger is NOT better!

Keep up with harvesting so plants don’t quit producing. More about harvesting! As in July, keep up with watering just beyond that dripline, maintain trenches and berms, replenish mulch.

If you want to extend your season, give your favorite late summer/fall heavy producers a good feed to extend their harvests. Eggplants have a large or many fruit, beans put out a ton of beans, tomatoes, big or small, are working hard, peppers can be profuse! They like a tad of chicken manures scratched in, bunny poop and straw (pick up at Animal Shelters), well aged horse manure and compost makes them dance with the faeries in the night time! If you are avoiding digging pests, use alfalfa meal, but avoid worm castings that attract them. Do this also if you planted late or have second rounds that are just beginning to bud and bloom. Compost is #1 because it gives a sustained feed and increases water holding capacity.

• First, pull back your mulch, scratch the soil lightly to break up any crusty area. Scratch only around your plant in spots, not the whole area. You want to leave the majority of the surface feeder root system intact because they are where your plant uptakes nutrients, oxygen and water.
• Use a spade fork to open holes around your plant, water well.
• Lay on what you are adding on the surface out to just beyond the drip line. If your plant has grown beyond the basin you made for it, enlarge the basin to fit it.
• Mix your amendments in gently in a few spots or not at all, so as not to break surface feeder roots. Feeder roots not only supply your plant with food, but also uptake water so needed in late summer in SoCal.
• Pull the mulch back into place, replenish if needed, replace if it is no longer doing its job.
• Water again, gently so not to wash the mulch away, to let the water and nutrients soak in. You can water once then come back and give them a third round of water to let it soak down a little deeper. The nutrients from the feed drizzle down and act like compost tea.

Fertilizers highest in P, Phosphorus – the P in NPK, keep blooming and fruiting optimum. Liquid fertilizers are absorbed easily and promptly, and there is no root damage. Now is the time you wish you had added mycorrhizae fungi, the good guys, at planting time, to enhance Phosphorus uptake! Aged organic compost makes for healthy roots that make their own natural organic phosphoric acid that helps break down compounds of calcium and phosphate into a usable, soluble form. It’s too late to add bonemeal or seabird guano. They take 2 and 3-4 months respectively to become available to your plants for blooming. They are another must add at planting time. NOW, Phosphorus from fish bone meal 3-18-0 is easily taken up! So is chicken manure 1.1-0.8-0.5, but the P is a lot less. Add chicken manure using the process as in the list above. Lettuces thrive on chicken manure feeds! Again, don’t use these if you have digging predators like raccoons.

• Peppers specially like a foliar feed of non-fat powdered milk (Calcium) and Epsom Salts (Magnesium & Sulfur). They also can use more Potassium. This time of year kelp meal is good source and releases quickly. If you have predators about, don’t get the kind mixed with stinky fish emulsion.
• Foliar feed all your plants with a super mixed tea – no manure in teas you will use on leaves you will eat, like lettuce! At the same time, for deeper root feeding, use a spade fork to make holes about your plant. Push it into the soil, wiggle back and forth a bit, then pour the rest of that tasty mixed tea down the holes. Replace the mulch and water well at soil level to a bit beyond the dripline.

Seeds are your last harvest! Allow your healthiest top producers to seed. Tie a ribbon on plants (at top and bottom or where you might grab it if in a weeding frenzy) or on fruits you want to save seeds from so you don’t accidentally harvest them too soon! Each year keep your best! Remember, these seeds are adapted and localized to you, your location, how you garden! Scatter some seeds about if they would grow successfully now! Or just scatter them about and when it’s the right time up they come, even if it’s next spring! Many seeds, especially self seeders, will come up quite well on their own, even the tiniest ones like Breadseed Poppy, chamomile and lettuce! Some need Cold Stratification, overwintering in the ground, or some time in your fridge!

Save enough seeds for your own planting, for several rounds of planting across next year’s season, for replanting when there are losses. Save some to give away or share at the seed swap. Our 2023 Santa Barbara area Seed Swap is January 29! If you are willing, take some of your extras to a local Seed Bank! While you are there, pick up some of your favorites and some new ones to try out! Keep the local race going. 2020 Note! As your plants come into seeding time, consider sharing them as soon as possible! “Little Free Seed Libraries” are Sprouting Up to Help Gardeners Share Seeds in Troubled Times. Take a look at some very clever and loving ideas!

Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s better than ever plantings. See more about SeedSaving!   How to Save Tomato Seeds!

After seedsaving, when your plants are done, let them go, compost if pest and disease free, start clearing space for fall soil prep.

Fall Soil Prep!

August is perfect time to ready your soil for the very first fall plantings, starting mid-August from seed!

At this time of year, seasonal change, before deciding how to prep your soil, decide what you will plant! Some plants are perfect this time of year and the next couple of months. See Photoperiodism! Know if your favored plants need regular or acidic soil. Make or amend accordingly for more bountiful harvests! Maybe put the acid lovers in a area of their own?

Designing your garden depends on your microclimate, seeds you have or can get, transplants you can get, the amount of space you have, whether you will be growing a soil feeding leguminous cover crop. How you prep your soil depends on what your soil already is like, what your plants need. Many plants need slightly acidic soil. Some areas need more rich soil for high production winter ‘heavy’ feeders. Some want a little sand, others don’t want soggy feet. If you are planting seeds, do the seed beds first! Seeds germinate faster and healthier with worm castings. 25% is ideal. Be sure to protect this area from worm loving predators like raccoons. Shade it if needed.

EMPHASIS! Some would consider the ultimate ‘soil prep’ to be installing GOPHER wire protection, LOL! Here we are at the turn of the season, a very good time to do the job. Water well and deeply each of 3 days before if your soil is hard deeper down. Test a spot first. Get a team of friends together and go for it! Appoint a watcher to play music, make sure everyone stays hydrated. Bring gloves, wear sturdy shoes or boots. You may not be able to do the whole area at once, but do what you can. You will be so glad you did! You can do it!

Cover crop soil restoration! You can plant herbs, Calendula, all sorts of things, but a Green Manure mix including lots of legumes and oats does the best. Legumes collect Nitrogen from the air, N being the number one element plants need for leaf growth! Know that Nitrogen fixing plants don’t pull nitrogen from the air on their own. They actually need help from a common bacteria called Rhizobium. Whether you are planting cover crops, beans or peas, if there is no Rhizobium in the soil from previous plantings, add the bacteria to the seed mix, making a seed covering slurry, then plant immediately. Legumes deposit the N on their roots in little nodules. When you turn the legumes under, they not only feed your soil with their leaves, but those little nodules on their roots! Beans and Peas are legumes. Always cut off rather than pull out their roots. Leave those roots there to feed your soil! Their nitrogen isn’t released until the plant dies. The deep roots of oats loosen your soil, creating channels for oxygen and water and soil critters to navigate. Also, they produce more growth in late fall/early winter than in spring! Perfect for winter crop plantings! The Basics – Cover Crops   In depth about Living Mulch!

If you have enough area, plant one space entirely with a cover crop. If your area is smaller, each year plant a different section with your cover crop. Some years you can get two cover crops in, especially if you are planting successively for a steady table supply. When the first patch is done you plant it. You start your second patch where another area has been finishing. Or if you are doing one area for early planting, save another for planting bareroots in January.

If you are inclined, always be making compost with clean garden waste, kitchen scraps. Decide where you want to compost; leave space next to it so you can move your compost back and forth. Or you can move your composter around to enrich the soil there. The fastest way to compost is to make a pit or a trench. Add your healthy green waste or kitchen waste, chop it fine, turn it in mixing it with your soil. If you trenched it, turn it a few times over the next few days. If you have a pit, turn it two to three times over the next few days, then add it where it is needed when it is done. To balance the materials, add dry newspaper or something dry that decomposes quickly. Straw can literally take months. If you don’t have dry material, add bought compost that has plenty of bark type bits for water holding capacity and to keep your soil looser.

If composting isn’t for you, buy the best in bags you can! In addition to the basics, we want to see worm castings, mycorrhizae fungi, bat guano, kelp meal, maybe some peat to loosen clay and add more water holding capacity, chicken manure. If you soil isn’t loamy and doesn’t hold water well, look for a texture that has bits of bark that will add more water holding capacity.

Start Seedlings for transplant, or plant seeds right in the ground! 

Seeds germinate really well, quicker and healthier when worm castings are added to your soil along with the compost. Castings strengthen your plants’ immune systems germination is faster, they have water holding capacity! Add 25% for best results. Boost up seed beds and add amendments out to the dripline  where you will be installing transplants. Put a stake where your planting holes will be so you can add more at those points when you install your transplants. See Soil for Seed Starting! DIY, Pre-made Remember to protect any areas where you use worm castings in advance!

Plant seeds of small plants where they will live permanently as space becomes available. That’s beets, celery, chard, mustard greens, parsley, winter radish varieties, kohlrabi, Mizuna, bok choy, rutabaga, turnips. Peas are a well favored winter crop! Pole peas go up on the trellis, save space! Sow carrots (they do best from seed). Keep the soil moist and shaded until they’re up, and then gradually allow them more sun over a week’s time. Some plants, especially hard seed carrots, do well in mini low sided trenches where they keep more moisture to germinate.

Plant the seeds for biggies in little nursery areas. Plant them far enough apart that you have plenty of space to get your trowel in, not damage any neighbor seedling roots, to transplant them to their permanent home as space becomes available. That’s Brassicas: cabbage (especially red, and savoy types that resist frost better), broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards, cauliflower and kale babies!

Winter plants that get a good start while there is still some heat, will be producing a lot sooner than plants started when it gets cooler. You will have a much earlier crop, plus time for a successive crop, maybe start another round in December! Be sure to leave space to plant additional rounds to keep a steady table supply. You can plant the waiting to space to quick small growers for table variety. Just harvest them when you are ready to plant your second round.

If planting from seed is not for you, no time, gone on vacation, of course you can wait and get transplants when the nurseries bring them in. Just know nursery selections are not as big as what you can buy as seeds. They sell what sells most. Island Seed & Feed has the best and greatest selection of organic seed in the Santa Barbara area, and there are marvelous ethical seed companies. Be sure to get seed varieties that are right for your area! Always choose the best, varieties that resist or tolerate pests or disease, that in winter can withstand frost/freeze.

Keep harvesting, do your soil preps, plant some seed, and wait for September or October for transplants. Labor Day weekend is a favorite big planting time for many gardeners, and that’s only a month away now! At that time you can plant both seeds and transplants of the same plants! Effectively that’s two rounds at once, the seeds, depending on weather, coming in six to seven weeks after the transplants!

See Super Fall Veggies for help choosing the very best varieties and Fall companion planting! Don’t forget to plan space to commingle your valuable companion plants! They enhance growth, repel pests, can help withstand diseases. Here’s your quick handy list of winter companions:

• Cilantro with Broccoli! It makes brocs grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener!
• Celery, potato and onions enhance broccoli flavor! Chamomile is thought to too and, called the Plant Dr, heals nearby plants!
• Lettuce among, beside Cabbages to repel cabbage moths
• Chives, Cilantro, Garlic, Geraniums, Lavender, Mint family (caution – invasive), and onions are said to repel aphids.
• Mustard and nasturtium can be planted near more valuable plants as traps for the aphids. A word to the wise, nasturtiums are often snail habitat.
• Calendula is a trap plant for pests such as aphids, whiteflies, and thrips by exuding a sticky sap that they find more appealing and delicious than nearby crops. Plant them a bit away from the plant you want to survive.
• Peas and carrots are terrific together but NO onion family with Peas!
• Include winter blooming flowers and herbs plus habitat for your pollinators!

PLEASE plant winter habitat and flowering plants for our beneficial insects, for bees! Here’s a BC list of 10 Plants that Help Bees through the Winter If they will grow there, they surely will grow here! More on our pollinators! We depend on bees for our survival!

Among HOT August days, there are hints of fall. Days are a tad shorter; shadows fall in different places now. For us SoCal gardeners it’s time to design – Think Big! It’s in our minds, maybe put to paper. What will be new and different this year. Will you relocate your garden, reroute your paths? Start a Food Forest?! What new foods will we try, is there a more productive or resistant variety? Will you be adding compost space, or a worm bin? Would you like raised beds on legs this time? How about a greenhouse?! Have you ever planted a green manure cover crop? Will your soil be different? Will you be planting tall indeterminate peas in a cage that shades, or quickie low bush peas? Both?! Is the gopher wire installed yet? What about greywater systems? Rainwater capture?

Put your feet up, review your garden notebook. In the starlit cool of late summer evenings think it through…. Dream about your new winter garden…

See wonderful July summer images at Rancheria Community Garden, including a fasciated cucumber!!! We are Sowing the Future!

Updated annually

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Check out the entire August 2022 Newsletter!

Winter Garden Design! 
Veggie Garden Nursery Patch!
Broccoli, the Queen of Brassicas!
5 Simple & Easy Storage Ideas for your Harvest Bounty!
*NEW! Dehydrate?! EZ, No Storage Expenses, Use Less Space, Nutritious Tasty Results!

This month’s topics are to prepare us for getting winter seed in hand, determine how many of what your design calls for. Nursery Patches are a great way to start while summer crops are finishing. Broccoli, for many, is their number one winter crop and there are many varieties that make a difference. Simple storage for favorites for winter use and efficient dehydrating!

Upcoming Gardener Events! Santa Barbara City College Permaculture Design Course, 43rd American Community Gardening Assn Conference. The latest word on the National Heirloom Expo that I could find says ‘We look forward to the Heirloom Expo in 2023, Check back for updates!’ Jan 29, 2023 FREE 15th Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap is ON!

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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. Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

SUBSCRIBE to the entire newsletter!    Friend on Facebook! 

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June 2021! Pollination, Feeding, Super Harvests!

What’s a garden for? Fertility and good living! Bridgette and Hoyt got married on a supermoon evening at Lyons Farmette & River Bend, Lyons CO! 

June is Midsummer Magic month! Divine small Faery beings will be celebrating your garden! June 21, 24, 25 or a date close to the Summer Solstice, any day June 19–24, is celebrated as Midsummer Night; June 24 is Faery Day! In Santa Barbara the 2021 Summer Solstice festival and parade will be virtual, airing on YouTube June 27!

Abundance is flowing, harvests are happening!

In our area, near the beach in Santa Barbara, the weather has been so cool and cloudy that tomatoes are barely coloring up. However, their sidekick basil is potent delish, Zucchini and lettuces of all kinds are being eaten. Some gardeners are eating first beans. Peas, cool temps lovers, are still producing well! Haven’t seen any cukes even blooming yet, BUT, the 30th I saw the first western striped cucumber beetle. BAD news, a vector for bacterial wilt and mosaic virus! Please – very carefully read the info in Pests below and the link about them there. Bell peppers are budding, humongous Seascape strawberries are here and tasty! Be careful with some of your harvests. Clip rather than break away and damage or pull your plant up.

Cherry tomatoes come in first. Fertilize your toms with a slow release fertilizer, like alfalfa pellets, once the fruiting begins. See the Summer Feeding Schedule for all your favorites!

I have had the pleasure of growing Pink Boar Tomatoes, from the Wild Boar series bred by farmer/breeder Brad Gates. As High Mowing says, ‘Deep pink skin is stunning with contrasting olive stripes and luscious deep red flesh,’ and it was!

Unexpected benefit! Reviewer Rebecca of Old Mosses Secret Garden said: I bought [Brad Gates Blue Berries] tomatoes for my whimsical choice. My experiences were similar to others opinion, they are abundant, vigorous and salad enhancing, plus they make a wonderful antioxidant jam spread. What I wanted to share about the blue berry tomatoes is that they are top of the menu choices for BATS. Bats were not on our urban radar, four years later five thousand bats have moved in and troll the garden where the fence lines are abundant with these little tasty gems, which get devoured. This plant is the greatest organic gardening boon ever sprouted. For fair reveal though I have hundreds of evergreen spruce that also get bat vacuumed for more meaty choices, so Thank you Baker seed, your diligence to excel is my secret weapon for a fantastic garden.

Harvest at your veggie’s peak delicious moment! Juicy, crunchy, that certain squish in your mouth, sweet, full bodied flavor, radiant, vitamin and mineral rich! Besides being delicious and beautiful, it keeps your plant in production. Left on the plant, fruits start to dry and your plant stops production, goes into seeding mode. The fruit toughens or withers, maybe rots, sometimes brings cleanup insect pests that spread to other plants. Keep beans picked, no storing cucumbers on the vine. Give away or store what you can’t eat. Freezing is the simplest storage method. Cut veggies to the sizes you will use, put the quantity you will use in baggies, seal and freeze. Whole tomatoes, chopped peppers, cut beans, diced onions. Probiotic pickle your cukes. Enjoy your sumptuous meals! Sing a song of gratitude and glory!

Plant more! Try some new ones too!

In those empty spots you have been saving, plant more rounds of your favorites! Check your lettuce supply. Put in more bolt resistant, heat and drought tolerant varieties now. Some heat tolerant lettuce varieties are Sierra, Nevada, Jericho, Black Seeded Simpson. That ruffly little beauty queen Green Star has excellent tolerance to hot weather, bolting, and tipburn. Rattlesnake beans keep right on producing when temps get up to 100 degrees! Plant more of everything except winter squash, big melons, pumpkins, unless you live in the hot foothills.

Put in plants that like it hotter! Long beans grow quickly from seed now. They grow later in the season when your other beans are finishing. They make those enormously long beans in the ample late summer heat. Keep watch on them, in spite of their size they grow quickly. Harvest promptly, usually daily! Certain varieties of them don’t get mildew either! Their unique flavor keeps your table interesting. Plant Okra now, it grows quickly in this warmer weather! More eggplant and also tomatoes you have been waiting to put in the now drier fungi free ground. Plant mini melons like Sugar Baby watermelons!

For those of you that are plagued with fungi diseases in your soil, the drier soil now makes this a better time to plant. Select wilt and blight resistant Tomatoes. Remember, when you plant your tomatoes and cukes, build a mound and make a basin whose bottom is higher than the surrounding soil. You want drainage and a wee bit of drying to reduce the potential of fungi – verticillium and fusarium wilts, blights. They have deep roots, so water nearby plants but not your Tom! More Special Planting and growing tips for your Tomatoes and Cucumbers!

Companion Planting Teamwork

Plant WHITE potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs, radishes with cukes and Zucchini to repel cuke beetles, and radishes with eggplant, potatoes and arugula to repel flea beetles.

If you have more space or you lost a plant here or there, think on putting in some perfect companion plants! One of the Three Cs are super!

1. Calendula – so many medicinal uses, bright flowers, and traps aphids, whiteflies, and thrips! Yep. Plant Calendula by tomatoes and asparagus.
2. Chamomile –  is called the Plant Dr! It heals neighboring plants and improves the flavor of any neighboring herb! The flowers make a lovely scent and the tea is sweet.
3. Comfrey – aka Knitbone, is an amazing medicinal herb, a super nutritious compost speeder upper! Plant it by your compost area. UK gardeners make Comfrey Tea for their Tomatoes!

Tasty herbs – chives, parsley, or more permanent perennials like rosemary, oregano (invasive), thyme are flavorful choices that often repel pests.

Hot Peppers emit a chemical from the plant roots that helps prevent Fusarium wilt, root rot, and a wide range of other plant diseases!

Pat Mycorrhiza fungi right on the roots of all your transplants except Brassicas. 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. Support your local nurseries.

Here’s your tending list for Beauty and Bounty!

Water regularly so everyone is moist the way they like it! Seeds and seedlings daily, even 2 to 3 times daily on super hot days. Shading them may save their lives. Peppers like moist, so as they need it. Others not so water critical on average need an inch a week; water beans, cukes, lettuces and short rooted varieties of strawberries more frequently – lettuces could be daily on hot windy days. To double check use the old finger test or push your shovel in and wedge the soil open enough so you can see if it is moist as deep as it needs to be. Watering at ground level, rather than overhead watering, keeps your plant dry. That means less mildew, less fungal diseases, especially for fuzzy leaved plants like toms and eggplant. They don’t like water on their leaves.

If at all possible, water in the AM before 10:30 to let leaves dry before evening to prevent mildew – beans, cucumbers and squashes are especially susceptible. Plant fewer beans further apart for air flow. If your plants are near a street or there has been a dusty wind storm, wash the dust off your plants so they can breathe, and to make them less attractive to Whiteflies.

Some plants need MULCH now, and if the mulch is tired and flat, replace it with fresh clean mulch. No more than an inch of straw mulch under toms and cukes. They need airflow so the soil can dry a bit and reduce harmful fungi. Otherwise, put on 4 to 6 inches minimum to keep light germinating seeds from sprouting. Mulch any Brassicas you are over summering – broccoli, kale – 4 to 6 inches deep for them too. They need cool soil. Melons and winter squash – Butternuts, acorn, pumpkins – need heat! They are the exception – no mulch for them if you are coastal. Yes, they will need more water, so be sure their basin is in good condition and big enough so they get water out to their feeder roots. Put a stake in the center of the basin so you know where to water when the leaves get big. The only place for straw for them is right under the melons. See more at Mulching ~ Why, When, With What, How Much?!

Keep a sharp eye on tomatoes. Remove leaves touching the ground or will touch the ground if weighted with water! Trim so neighboring plants don’t touch and spread diseases like the wilts or blights. Remember, the wilts are spread by wind as well as water, so neighboring plants are very likely to give it to one another. Try planting other plants between. You can still do rows, just mix up the plants! Your healthier tomatoes will produce more, bigger toms, and longer. 

POLLINATION is vital & easy to do!

     

Hand Pollination of Cucurbits! In left image, male flower on left, female right.

Improve your tomato, eggplant and pepper production by giving the cages or the main stems a few sharp raps, or gently shake the stems, to help the flowers self pollinate. Midday is the best time. Honey bees don’t pollinate tomatoes, or other Solanaceae! Build solitary bee condos for native bees. Native bees, per Cornell entomology professor Bryan Danforth, are two to three times better pollinators than honeybees, are more plentiful than previously thought and not as prone to the headline-catching colony collapse disorder that has decimated honeybee populations. The very best Solanaceae pollinator is a Bumblebee!!! See more! Plant plenty of favorite bee foods, especially ones with purple and blue colors, their favorites!

While you are helping your tomatoes pollinate, if you are growing them in cages, also very gently help them up through the cages. Remove any bottom leaves that might touch the ground when weighted with water. Remove any diseased leaves ASAP! Do NOT put them in compost! Bag and trash.

Squashes, melons and monoecious cucumbers can easily be hand pollinated. Cukes are notorious for needing help being pollinated! Cucurbits have male and female blooms on the same plant. If there are not enough pollinators about, we need to help. Also, multiple visits from the bees are required for good fruit set and properly shaped cucumbers. Male flowers open in the morning and pollen is only viable during that day. Hand pollinate during the morning hours, using only freshly opened flowers. You can use a small pointy paint brush, a cotton swab, Q-tip, your finger, and move pollen from the male stamen to the center of the female flower. Or the best, most complete method is to take the male flower off the plant, pull the petals off, and gently roll the male flower anther around and over the female stigma in the center of the female flower. The pollen is sticky, so it may take some time. One male anther can pollinate several females. Repeat. Female blooms will simply drop off the plant if they are not pollinated or not pollinated adequately. So when your cukes are in production, you need to do this daily for more fruits.

Don’t be confused by the little fruit forming under the female flowers and think pollination has already happened. The flower needs to be fertilized, and adequately, or the fruit just falls off. Flowers not pollinated enough, that don’t abort, make misshapen fruits. That goes for corn having irregular to lacking kernels. Strawberries are called cat-faced. Squash and cucumbers can be deformed. On an unwindy day, tilt the stalk so the corn tassels are over the silks and tap the stalk. You will see a shower of pollen fall on the silks. You may need to do it from one plant to another so you don’t break the stalk trying to get the pollen to fall on silks on the same plant.

Planting a lot of plants close together stresses the plants. At higher densities, plants compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight, and the resulting stress can lead to a higher proportion of male flowers, less female flowers, the ones that produce. If you really want more fruit, give them room to be fruitful. The same goes for other stresses – damage from insects or blowing soil, low light intensities, or water stress – less female flowers are produced.

Weather affects pollination. Sometimes cool overcast days or rain, when bees don’t fly, there is no pollination. High humidity makes pollen sticky and it won’t fall. Not good for wind pollinated veggies like tomatoes. Drought is a problem for corn pollination. Too high nighttime temps, day temps 86°F and above, will keep your tomatoes, cucumbers and other vegetables from setting fruit unless they are high temp tolerant varieties. Too windy and the pollen is blown away. See Pollination: Honeybees, Squash Bees & Bumblebees!

If it is your cucumbers that are not pollinating well each year, try parthenocarpic varieties. Parthenocarpic varieties produce only female flowers and do not need pollination to produce fruit. This type of cucumber is also seedless. Try a few varieties and see if you like them.

Did you know? Flowers can hear buzzing bees—and it makes their nectar sweeter!

SIDEDRESSING! This IS the time! Feeding when your plants start to bloom and produce is a pretty standard recommendation. But if your baby is looking peaked, has pale or yellowing leaves, an emergency measure could be blood meal. Foliar feeding a diluted fish emulsion/kelp is easy for your plant to uptake. Foliar feeding a tea mix per what each plant might need, is the ultimate feed and it’s not hard to make tea mixes! Your lettuces love it if you scratch in a 1/4″ chicken manure, but no manure in a tea on leaves you will be eating! Pull your mulch back, top with a 1/2″ of compost and some tasty worm castings! If you prefer organic granulated fertilizer, easy to apply, sprinkle it around evenly. But remember, that has to be repeatedly applied. Recover with your mulch, straw, then water well and gently so things stay in place. That’s like making compost and worm tea in place!

Face up to pests!

It’s easier to deal with them when there are only a few rather than losing your whole plant or a row of plants. This is the time you will see Cucumber beetles foraging on Zucchini flowers, on Tomatillos. They are deadly to cucumbers because they transmit bacterial wilt and squash mosaic virus and cucumbers are the most susceptible to the wilts than any other garden veggie. Squish those beetles. Put one hand under where the beetle is, reach for it with the other hand. Be prepared! They are fast and can see you coming! See more Here are tips for Beetle prevention for organic gardeners:

• If possible plant unattractive-to-cucumber beetle varieties. In 2012 U of Rhode Island trials, best pickling choices are Salt and Pepper and H-19 Little Leaf. Marketmore 76 was tops for slicing cukes. If you find more current research on best varieties, please let me know!
• Plant from transplants! The youngest plants are the most susceptible.
• Interplant! No row planting so beetles go from one plant to another.
• Delay planting! In our case, most of us already having planted cucumbers, can plant another round late June or when you no longer see the beetles. Start from seeds at home now since transplants may no longer be available in nurseries later on.
• Plant repellent companion plants BEFORE you plant your cukes. Radish with eggplant, cukes & zukes act as trap plants for flea beetles and to repel cucumber beetles. Radish are the fastest growers, so get them in ASAP if you didn’t before.
• Natural predators are Wolf Spiders, daddy long legs and Ground Beetles! Let them live! They eat beetle eggs and larvae. And there is a tachinid fly and a braconid parasitoid wasp that parasitize striped cucumber beetle, and both sometimes have large impacts on striped cucumber beetles. When you see a dark hairy fly, don’t swat it! It is doing important garden business!
• Here is a super important reason to use straw mulch! Per UC IPM ‘Straw mulch can help reduce cucumber beetle problems in at least 3 different ways. First, mulch might directly slow beetle movement from one plant to another. Second, the mulch provides refuge for wolf spiders and other predators from hot and dry conditions, helping predator conservation. Third, 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. It is important that straw mulch does not contain weed seeds and to make certain that it does not contain herbicide residues which can take years to fully break down.’
• Organic mulches foster diverse populations of beneficial soil microorganisms that trigger the plant’s internal defenses.
• At the end of the season or when your plants are done, remove garden trash, tired mulch and other debris shortly after harvest to reduce overwintering sites.

If you are by a road or in a dusty windswept area, rinse off the leaves to make your plants less attractive to whiteflies. Also, asap remove yellowing leaves that attract whiteflies. Pests adore tasty healthy plants just like we do. They also make us see which plants are weak or on their way out. Give those plants more care or remove them. Replace them with a different kind of plant that will do well now and produce in time before the season is over. Don’t put the same kind of plant there unless you have changed the conditions – enhanced your soil, installed a favorable companion plant, protected from wind, terraced a slope so it holds moisture, opened the area to more sun. Be sure you are planting the right plant at the right time! Remove mulch from under plants that were diseased and replace with clean mulch. Do not compost that mulch or put it in green waste. Bag and trash it.

Please always be building compost and adding it, especially near short rooted plants and plants that like being moist. Compost increases your soil’s water holding capacity.

Reduce your carbon footprint! Grow local!

Mary Alice Ramsey in her North Carolina backyard. Photo by Hector Manuel Sanchez

May You enjoy a super beautiful, bountiful & juicy June!

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

Updated annually  

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Summer Solstice and Father’s Day are June 20 this year! Congratulations to Grads and their families! Here are some wonderful ideas for green and loving gifts for any and all! You can even start some seeds now! Click here

May 2021 was a way cooler than average, no rain, but a FIRE! Please enjoy a delightful array of early summer images at Rancheria Community Garden! You may get some ideas for those Father’s and Grad’s prezzies! We are Sowing the Future! Happy gardening!

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

• Peppers! HOT or Not!
• Veggie Feeding Schedule for Your Delicious Summer Favorites!
• Container Gardening, Garden Anywhere!
• BAGS! The Quickest & Easiest Way to Start Your Veg Garden!
• Special Treat! Sweet Summer Magic: Solstice Honey Cookies!

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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.

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August 2020! Delicious Harvests, SeedSaving, Fall Starts!

Fascinating looking at annual weather forecasts after much of the year has happened. Here is what The Old Farmer’s Almanac had/has to say for NOVEMBER 2019 TO OCTOBER 2020 for Santa Barbara:

Winter will be cooler than normal. Rainfall will be below normal in the north and above normal in the south, with below-normal mountain snows. The coolest temperatures will occur in mid- and late December, mid- to late January, early to mid-February, and early and late March. The stormiest periods will be in late November, mid- to late December, and early February; from late February into early March; and in mid- and late March. April and May will be cooler than normal, on average, with rainfall below normal in the north and above normal in the south. Summer will be cooler than normal, with rainfall slightly above normal. The hottest periods will be in mid-July and late August. September and October will be slightly cooler than normal, on average, with rainfall above normal in the north and below normal in the south.

July has been cool, lots of overcast and mildews, some plants ending a bit early. If you figure August won’t be hot either, extended harvests are unlikely. Instead, get those winter plants going. That will give you time for second plantings November/December. If August is hot, it will be a tad challenging getting winter seeds and starts going. Watering will be critical, shade may be needed for seedlings.

For those of you who planted early spring, many of your plants are now finishing. It’s time to save seeds from your best plants! Clear space and ready your soil for winter planting. Start mini nursery seed beds in your garden or for transplanting from local nursery starts as soon as they become available. If you haven’t installed gopher protection wire, this is the best time, as summer ends, fall begins!

Just getting started in a new garden, or you just love to plant?! Summer plants you can still plant for fall harvests are early varieties of determinate tomatoes, bush beans and corn. Corn is more disease prone at this time though. Tuck in your year-round fillers, beets, bunch onions, carrots, summer lettuces, winter radish, to keep a colorful and delicious variety for your table.

ONIONS For the biggest, sweetest harvests, late summer and early fall are the prime times to sow seeds of short- or intermediate-day onions. Fall-sown short- and intermediate-day onions tend to yield more and are larger and sweeter than those seeded or transplanted in early spring. Onions have stupendous flavor and come in white, yellow, red!

In our hot Santa Barbara foothills and further south, watch your melons, big squashes and pumpkins for their best harvest time – when their stem is brown and dry, or they ‘slip’ off the vine. Hold off irrigating melons about a week before they will ripen so their sugars will concentrate. Harvest okra while it is small and tender – bigger is NOT better! Let your winter squash harden. When you can’t push your fingernail in it, it’s ready to harvest.

Keep up with harvesting so plants don’t quit producing. More about harvesting! As in July, keep up with watering just beyond that dripline, replenish mulch.

If you want to extend your season, give your favorite late summer/fall heavy producers a good feed to extend their harvests. Eggplants have a large or many fruit, beans put out a ton of beans, tomatoes, big or small, are working hard, peppers can be profuse! They like a tad of chicken manures scratched in, bunny poop and straw (pick up at Animal Shelters), well aged horse manure and compost makes them dance with the faeries in the night time! Do this also if you planted late or second rounds that are just beginning to bud and bloom. Compost is #1 because it gives a sustained feed.

• First, pull back your mulch, scratch the soil lightly to break up any crusty area. Scratch only around your plant in spots, not the whole area. You want to leave the majority of the feeder root system intact.
• Use a spade fork to open holes around your plant, water well.
• Lay on what you are adding on the surface out to just beyond the drip line. If your plant has grown beyond the basin you made for it, enlarge the basin to fit it.
• Mix your amendments in gently in a few spots or not at all, so as not to break surface feeder roots. Feeder roots not only supply your plant with food, but also uptake water so needed in late summer in SoCal.
• Pull the mulch back into place, replenish if needed, replace if it is no longer doing its job.
• Water again, gently so not to wash the mulch away, to let the water and nutrients soak in. You can water once then come back and give them a third round of water to let it soak down a little deeper. The nutrients from the feed drizzle down and act like compost tea.

Fertilizers highest in P, Phosphorus – the P in NPK, keep blooming and fruiting optimum. Liquid fertilizers are absorbed easily and promptly, and there is no root damage. Now is the time you wish you had added mycorrhizae fungi, the good guys, at planting time, to enhance Phosphorus uptake! Aged organic compost makes for healthy roots that make their own natural organic phosphoric acid that helps break down compounds of calcium and phosphate into a usable, soluble form. It’s too late to add bonemeal or guanos. They take 2 and 4 months respectively to become available to your plants for blooming. They are another must add at planting time. NOW, Phosphorus from fish bone meal 3-18-0 is easily taken up! So is chicken manure 1.1-0.8-0.5, but the P is a lot less. Add chicken manure using the process as in the list above. Lettuces thrive on chicken manure feeds!

• Peppers specially like a foliar feed of non-fat powdered milk (Calcium) and Epsom Salts (Magnesium & Sulfur). They also can use more Potassium. This time of year kelp meal is good source and releases quickly. If you have predators about, don’t get the kind mixed with stinky fish emulsion.
• Foliar feed all your plants with a super mixed tea – no manure in teas you will use on leaves you will eat, like lettuce! At the same time, for deeper root feeding, use a spade fork to make holes about your plant. Push it into the soil, wiggle back and forth a bit, then pour the rest of that tasty mixed tea down the holes. Replace the mulch and water well at soil level to the dripline.

Seeds are your last harvest! Allow your healthiest top producers to seed. Tie a ribbon on plants (at top and bottom or where you might grab it in a weeding frenzy) or on fruits you want to save seeds from so you don’t accidently harvest them too soon! Each year keep your best! Remember, these seeds are adapted and localized to you! Scatter some seeds about if they would grow successfully now! Or just scatter them about and when it’s the right time, even next spring. Many seeds, especially self seeders, will come up quite well on their own, even the tiniest ones like breadseed poppy, chamomile and lettuce! Some need Cold Stratification, overwintering in the ground, or some time in your fridge!

Save enough seeds for your own planting, for several rounds of planting across next year’s season, for replanting when there are losses. Save some to give away or share at the seed swap. Our Santa Barbara area Seed Swap is in January. If you are willing, take some of your extras to a local Seed Bank! While you are there, pick up some of your favorites and some new ones to try out! Keep the local race going. 2020 Note! As your plants come into seeding time, consider sharing them as soon as possible! “Little Free Seed Libraries” are Sprouting Up to Help Gardeners Share Seeds in Troubled Times. Take a look at some very clever and loving ideas!

Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s better than ever plantings. See more about SeedSaving!  How to Save Tomato Seeds!

After seedsaving, when your plants are done, let them go, compost if pest and disease free, start clearing space for fall soil prep.

SOIL PREP!

August is perfect time to ready your soil for the very first fall plantings, starting mid-August from seed!

Designing your garden depends on your microclimate, seeds you have or can get, transplants you can get, the amount of space you have, whether you will be growing a soil feeding leguminous cover crop. How you prep your soil depends on what your soil already is like, what your plants need. Some plants need slightly acidic soil. Some areas need more rich soil for high production winter ‘heavy’ feeders. Some want a little sand, others don’t want soggy feet. If you are planting seeds, do the seed beds first! Seeds germinate faster and healthier with worm castings. 25% is ideal.

Some would consider the ultimate ‘soil prep’ to be installing gopher wire protection, LOL! Here we are at the turn of the season, a very good time to do the job. Water well and deeply each of 3 days  before if your soil is hard deeper down. Test a spot first. Get a team of friends together, mask up and go for it! Appoint a watcher to play music, make sure everyone stays hydrated. Bring gloves, wear sturdy shoes or boots. You may not be able to do the whole area at once, but do what you can. You will be so glad you did! You can do it!

Cover crop soil restoration! You can plant herbs, Calendula, all sorts of things, but a Green Manure mix including lots of legumes and oats does the best. Legumes collect Nitrogen, the number one element plants need for leaf growth! They deposit the N on their roots in little nodules. When you turn the legumes under, they not only feed your soil with their leaves, but those little nodules on their roots! Beans and Peas are legumes. Always cut off rather than pull out their roots. Leave those roots there to feed your soil! Their nitrogen isn’t released until the plant dies. The deep roots of oats loosen your soil, creating channels for oxygen and water and soil critters to navigate. They bring nutrients up from deep below. Also, they produce more growth in late fall/early winter than in spring! Perfect for winter crop plantings! The Basics – Cover Crops   In depth – Living Mulch!

If you have enough area, plant one space entirely with a cover crop. If your area is smaller, each year plant a different section with your cover crop. Some years you can get two cover crops in, especially if you are planting successively for a steady table supply. When the first patch is done you plant it. You start your second patch where another area has been finishing. Or if you are doing one area for early planting, save another for planting bareroots in January.

If you are inclined, always be making compost with clean garden waste, kitchen scraps. Decide where you want to compost, leave the space next to it so you can move your compost back and forth. Or you can move your composter around to enrich the soil there. The fastest way to compost is to make a pit or a trench. Add your healthy green waste or kitchen waste, chop it fine, turn it in mixing it with your soil. If you trenched it, turn it a few times over the next few days. If you have a pit, turn it two to three times over the next few days, then add it where it is needed when it is done. If composting isn’t for you, buy the best in bags you can! In addition to the basics, we want to see worm castings, mycorrhizae fungi, maybe some peat to loosen clay and add more water holding capacity.

Start Seedlings for transplant, or plant seeds right in the ground! 

Seeds germinate really well, quicker and healthier when worm castings are added to your soil along with the compost. Castings strengthen your plants’ immune systems! Add 25% for best results. Boost up seed beds and where you will be installing transplants. Put a stake where your planting holes will be so you can add more at those points. See Soil for Seed Starting! DIY, Pre-made

Plant seeds of small plants where they will live permanently as space becomes available. That’s beets, celery, chard, mustard greens, parsley, winter radish varieties, kohlrabi, Mizuna, bok choy, rutabaga, turnips. Peas are a well favored winter crop! Pole peas go up on the trellis, save space! Sow carrots (they do best from seed). Keep the soil moist and shaded until they’re up, and then gradually allow them more sun over a week’s time. Some plants, especially hard seed carrots, do well in mini low sided trenches where they keep more moisture to germinate.

Plant the seeds for biggies in little nursery areas. Plant them far enough apart that you can get your trowel in to transplant them to their permanent spot as space becomes available. That’s Brassicas: cabbage (especially red and savoy types, which resist frost better), broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards, cauliflower and kale babies!

Winter plants that get a good start while there is still some heat, will be producing a lot sooner than plants started while it is cooler. You will have a much earlier crop, plus time for a successive crop, maybe start another round in December! Be sure to leave space to plant additional rounds to keep steady table supply.

If planting from seed is not for you, no time, gone on vacation, of course you can wait and get transplants when the nurseries bring them in. Just know nursery selections are not as big as what you can buy as seeds. They sell what sells most. Island Seed & Feed has the best and greatest selection of organic seed in the Santa Barbara area, and there are marvelous ethical seed companies. Be sure to get seed varieties that are right for your area! Always choose the best, varieties that resist or tolerate pests or disease, that in winter can withstand frost/freeze.

Keep harvesting, do your soil preps, and wait for September or October transplanting. Labor Day weekend is a favorite big planting time for many gardeners, and that’s only a month away now! At that time you can plant both seeds and transplants, effectively two rounds at once, the seeds coming in six weeks after the transplants!

See Super Fall Veggies for help choosing the very best varieties and Fall companion planting! Don’t forget to plan space to commingle your valuable companion plants! They enhance growth, repel pests, can help withstand diseases. Here’s your quick handy list of winter companions:

• Cilantro with Broccoli! It makes brocs grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener!
• Celery, potato and onions enhance broccoli flavor! Chamomile is thought to too.
• Lettuce among, beside Cabbages to repel cabbage moths
• Chives, Coriander, Garlic, Geraniums, Lavender, Mint family (caution – invasive), and onions are said to repel aphids.
• Mustard and nasturtium can be planted near more valuable plants as traps for the aphids. A word to the wise, nasturtiums are snail habitat.
• Calendula is a trap plant for pests such as aphids, whiteflies, and thrips by exuding a sticky sap that they find more appealing and delicious than nearby crops. Plant them a bit away from the plant you want to survive.
• Peas and carrots are terrific together but NO onion family with Peas!

Among HOT August days, there are hints of fall. Days are a tad shorter; shadows fall in different places now. For us SoCal gardeners it’s time to design! It’s in our minds, maybe put to paper. What will be new and different this year, what will we try, is there a more productive or resistant variety? Will you be adding compost space, or a worm bin? Would you like raised beds this year? How about a greenhouse?! Have you ever planted a green manure cover crop? Will your soil be different? Will you be planting tall indeterminate peas in a cage that shades, or quickie low bush peas? Both?! What about greywater systems? Rainwater capture? In the cool of late summer evenings think it through….

Last updated 7.28.20  

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See the entire August Newsletter! Winter Garden Design, all about Broccoli, Installing Gopher Wire Protection!

Veggies and Flowers, Birds & Bees! Summer is finishing at Rancheria Community Garden! Please enjoy the abundance and adventures of blessed July summer images at Rancheria Community Garden!

Extra Treat! If you have ever thought about growing vegetables in your front yard, here are SIX examples from my ‘hood! All six have different styles and all are successful! You can commingle veggies with your landscaping or convert all or part of your front yard to veggies, take a look here for some super productive clever gardening ideas! These examples can be used in any garden, but in particular are a terrific use of space. From 1 tomato plant to 66 Early Girl tomato plants, do what works for you! How much can you grow in a small space? LOTS! Grow your own feast!

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 where your veggie garden is.

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July 2020! Happy Harvests!

Thanks to Grow Veg for this delicious image! See their great post on ‘How to Tell When Fruits and Vegetables are Ready for Harvest’

Happy 4th of July to you all! Henry David Thoreau says ‘Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.’ That’s us, growing the freshest, most nutritious, organic food there is! Enjoy your luscious tomatoes!

July is maintaining and feeding, harvesting, seedsaving, storage, share Month, the beginnings of fall planting preparations for late August!

July is Tomato month! Bush and cherry toms turned red in May and June, but the big indeterminate all-summer-long tomatoes come in July in big numbers! Super salads on the way!

July usually brings your greatest variety of table fresh veggies and herbs! It’s colorful and full of great textures. This is giveaway time if you don’t do canning. It’s giveaway time if you have so much there is enough canned and/or frozen for you and your family and then some! Some of us SoCal gardeners don’t can at all because our fall, winter crops are so nutritious and freshly abundant there is no need! Some feel eating with the seasons is the most natural and best for your body.

Sharing is a blessing to people who don’t have access to fresh organic food. Fresh foods last so much longer than store bought, and have so much better taste! Start with family, friends, neighbors. Give to senior communities and those who prepare food for them. Remember they often have special dietary needs and more fragile teeth. Less spicy and less crunchy. Give to any organization that helps people in need, the FoodBank, maybe your local women’s shelter. When we eat better we think more clearly, our body heals, our Soul mends. Thank you and bless you for caring so much.

Sidedressing is important now while plants are working hard!

General sidedressing, during season feeding times, are when baby plants are just up 5, 6 inches tall, when vines start to run, at bud time, and first fruiting. From then on it varies per plant! Late July when some plants are near the end of production, extend their fruiting with a good feed – in the ground, or foliar, preferably both, but foliar tops ground feeding for several reasons! See more!

• Manure feeds are especially great for lettuce, and all others except for beans, beets, carrots, parsnips, sweet and white potatoes, and tomatoes, or there’ll be more foliage than fruit! Lettuce loves chicken manure but only about a 1/4 inch gently dug in. No teas with manure on foliage you will be eating.
• Give your peppers and Solanaceae, tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, Epsom Salt/Magnesium foliar treatments.
• Every couple of weeks your strawberries would love a light fish emulsion/kelp drench.
• Or you can foliar feed everyone some tea! Make a super duper mixed tea – no compost is needed in that mix for plants whose soil was well composted before planting. First make your tea. When it is ready, make your spade fork holes and apply a good compost/worm castings mix, then foliar feed with your tea! Less holes are better because you don’t want to damage too many of the lateral surface feeder foots. Drippings will help moisten your mulch and compost/castings on the ground below! Last, water gently and well with a low flow water wand underneath your plant so everything stays where you put it and you don’t wash away your foliar feed. Do that before the sun gets on your plants or while it is still cool in the day and plants have plenty of time to dry during the day. Low flow also lets water and tea and compost/castings drippings drizzle down into the spade fork holes! THAT is a super feed!Mixed teas feed and help prevent pests and diseases. They serve up beneficial living microbes to your plant and provide trace minerals it may need. Use foliar tea more frequently for plants that are ailing or in recovery. On an immediate basis, foliar feeding is 8 to 20 times more potent than ground feeding, and your plant takes it up in as little as an hour! Plants in immediate need can be helped right away! Compost supplies the organic matter that tea doesn’t supply, so it is critical in and of itself, plus it has many times more nutrients than a diluted tea. On and in the ground it decomposes slowly, feeds your plant steadily. It and castings have great water holding capacity. Do both whenever you can!
• Compost is always super. Remember to use acidic compost for strawberries and some other veggies that don’t mind a slight acidity! Pull back the mulch. Grab your spade fork, insert it, rock it gently, remove the fork leaving the holes. Stay 8″ away from the central stem, go out to the dripline. Gently scratch up only one or two separate areas around your plant out to the dripline, even a little further to encourage roots to extend, and to feed the feeder roots that are in progress growing out further. Avoid breaking a substantial number of tiny surface feeder roots, otherwise your plant will be slowed down by being in recovery for lack of food and ability to uptake water. Mix in your compost and lay on a 1/2″ to an inch of compost on top of areas you didn’t dig up. While you are at it, be sure your basins are retaining their shape out to the dripline. Put your mulch back, add more (straw) if it needs replenishing, replace it if it’s by a plant that has had pests or disease. Gently water well. Keep the area moist for a few days so soil organisms can multiply! See Composting Methods, Make it Your Way!
• Save yourself some time by adding 25% Worm castings, and for plants that need it, a bit of manure, to your compost and apply them all together. Especially apply that mix to any ailing plants or plants in recovery. Castings help our plants uptake soil nutrients and boost your plant’s immune system. When your plant is taxed producing fruit in great summer conditions, it also is peaking out for the season and fighting pests and diseases are harder for it. Adding compost and castings may prolong and up the quantity and quality of late summer fruits. However, sometimes a plant is just done. No amount of coaxing will have effect. It worked hard. Thank it. Let it produce its seeds for seedsaving, or take it to the compost altar.

If you prefer organic granulated fertilizer sprinkle it around evenly per instructions, and water in well. Just know you will have to do that more frequently, and it doesn’t provide the water holding capacity that compost and castings do.

Feeding your plants can be plant specific or in general. For example, Tomatoes and Peppers (and Roses – edible petals), do well with a little sulfur. It is easily applied – a Tablespoon of Epsom salts, and a 1/2 teaspoon liquid dish soap as a surfactant (so your application sticks to the leaves), in a gallon watering can is all it takes. If the nozzle turns up to get under those leaves, all the better. Apply before the sun hits your plants or while it is still cool.

If any of your plants are looking puny, have yellowing leaves, might give them a bit of blood meal for a quick Nitrogen pick me up. Add compost, castings and a tad of manure too so your plant has steady food after the blood meal (an expensive feed) is used. If you have predator creatures, especially skunks or raccoons, forgo stinky fish emulsions and blood meal.

Late July, gardeners are starting to want new ways to enjoy their Zucchini! ZOODLES! Zucchini Zoodles Kale Pesto Edamame Recipe! Here are 28 cool summer variations on how to include this common veggie in a unique way!

Take care of pests and diseases asap! You don’t want them to spread or increase, lose the fruit of all your efforts and time. July brings hot weather, water stress, the stress of continued production. Though you may be a bit tired with all your tending and harvesting, this is not the time to interrupt your care. The heat will bring hatchings; tired plants may get overwhelmed by diseases. Be consistent with your watering. Stay on it with your harvest to keep your plants in production, sidedress (feed) as needed. Mercilessly squash the cucumber beetles, the green/yellow and black striped jobs. They give your plants, especially cucumbers, deathly systemic diseases. Put down pellets for slugs & snails, use sulfur and soap in foliar feeds to keep back aphids. See more! Keep plants susceptible to Whiteflies free from dust and Ants, and well supplied with worm castings. Hose the flies away, and remove infected leaves or the whole plant if it gets them repeatedly. Insecticidal soaps or Neem oil can reduce populations.

The old one, two! If your area has Fusarium/Verticillium wilts or Mosaic Virus, first foliarly apply 1/4 C bleach to a gallon of water. Be sure to apply to both under and upper sides of the leaves, and the stems. The next day give your plants a boost with the immune booster/mildew prevention mix: 1/4 C nonfat powdered milk, 1 regular crushed aspirin, heaping tablespoon Baking Soda, 1/2 teaspoon dish soap, to a gallon of water.

I found refraining from watering my strawberries but once a week, more in exceptionally hot or windy weather, and not mulching under my strawberries keeps the slugs and snails at bay. They don’t like dry soil. Do put down organic slug/snail bait where you will be sprouting seeds and while the seedlings are coming up. Aphids don’t thrive in a dryer environment either. Water the plants susceptible to them a little less. Remove yellowing leaves asap. Yellow attracts whiteflies. Leafminers love temps in the 70s! Remove damaged areas of leaves immediately so they don’t spread. Plant so mature plant leaves don’t touch each other so pests and disease don’t go plant to plant. Mice and rats love tomato nibbles and they are well equipped to climb! A garden kitty who loves to hunt is a good helper. Put a tiny bell on your kitty so birds are warned. Keep your compost turned so mice don’t nest in it; remove debris piles and ground shrub or hidey habitat. PLEASE don’t use rodenticides that in turn kill birds, pets, or animals that would feed on a poisoned animal. That includes Gophers. For gophers, install wire barriers. See more about pests! 

Watering in July is vital, along with Compost & Mulch. Compost increases water holding capacity. Mulch shades soil, keeps it and your plant’s roots cooler, keeps soil more moist longer, less water needed. Melons in cooler coastal areas don’t need mulch! They self shade and hot soil helps them produce better. Give them a good sized basin so tiny lateral feeder roots can fully supply that big plant with water and nutrients. Put a tall stake in the center of the basin so you know where to water when the area is covered with those big leaves! Replenish tired or missing mulch the birds might have scratched away. Steady water is a must to produce good looking fruits. Some water then none makes misshapen strawberries, called catfaced, curled beans and cukes, carrots lose their consistent shape. Tomatoes have more flavor when they are watered a tad less just before harvest. You can do that with bush varieties, determinates, but with indeterminate vining types you just have to see how it goes. Lots of tasty flavor tests may be in order! They have deep tap roots, so usually watering nearby plants is sufficient. Short rooted plants like beans, cucumbers, beets, lettuces need frequent watering to keep moist. Some plants just need a lot of water, like celery. Eggplant needs 2″/week!

Don’t be fooled by Temporary High Temps! Non heat resistant or tolerant tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, stop flowering and fruiting when temps rise above 85 to 90 degrees F for an extended time depending on humidity. Humidity causes pollen to stick and not fall to pollinate. Dry heat causes the pollen to fall and not stick! When weather cools, you will have blooms again and be back in production. Rattlesnake beans, on the other hand, keep right on producing at 100 degree temps! So choose heat tolerant veggie varieties, like Heatmaster and Solar tomatoes, from locales with hot weather. Wonderful heat tolerant varieties are out there!

Cool summer evenings enjoy Zucchini Lasagna! You can even eat it cold, and for breakfast!

Though July is more a maintenance and harvest month, Yes you can plant more! At this point, transplants are best, but many plants will not still be available at nurseries, and it is a tad late to plant many summer plants from seed. What you can plant is beans! They grow quickly and if you grow bush beans and quickly maturing heat tolerant varieties you will still be eating beans in Sept and Oct if it doesn’t get cold early! Get patio container types of quick growing heat tolerant determinate tomatoes if you can find them. Previously planted tomatoes may be done producing, or bit the dust for one reason or another – likely a blight or wilt. Remove the old plants to reduce further spread of disease – do NOT compost them – put them in the trash, not green recycle. Beef up the soil and plant your late tomatoes in an entirely different spot.

More lettuces! In summer you want heat tolerant, slow bolting, tip burn resistant lettuce! Lettuce Leaf and Red Sails and Outredgeous are great. Jericho from Israel is great. Sierra, Nevada. Nevada is a Green Crisp/Batavian that grows BIG, doesn’t bolt, and is totally crispy! Green Star is ruffly, grows big around! Parris Island Romaine is slow bolting. Green Towers Romaine tolerates moderate summer heat and has some resistance to tipburn and bolting.

Transplant basil, celery, chard, cucumbers, dill, kale, leeks, summer lettuce, green onions, white potatoes, summer savory, New Zealand spinach. In our hot foothills and further south, go for more melons, okra, pumpkins, summer & winter squash. I’ve seen tomato transplants and bean seeds started in August produce plentiful crops into October! Rattlesnake pole beans do as they are supposed to, make beans in up to 100 degree weather! Yard long beans tolerate late summer weather and make magnificent beans! And some varieties of those don’t get mildew!

Corn is an exception – late plantings often develop smut. But. That smut, from a fungus called Ustilago maydis, is considered a delicacy by many. ‘It’s insanely delicious and luxurious, like black truffles.’ In Mexico it is known as huitlacoche. – weet-la-COH-cheh. Your neighboring gardeners may especially not be pleased, however. See more!  

Fall transplants need babying! Transplant late afternoon or evening so plants have the whole night to begin to recover before they’re hit with a full day of sun and heat. Water well and provide shade from intense mid-day sun. Prop up and secure some of those plastic plant flats that have the smaller grid pattern to filter the light. Keep your transplants moist for at least a month or until they’re well established. Mulch to save water unless they thrive on hot soil.

Harvesting has special little techniques and storage varies considerably from veggie to veggie! See more for details!

Be really patient with your big Bells and sweet roasting Peppers. Both like to wait until the nights are longer and cooler in late summer before fruiting and plumping up – making their thick walls. Peppers need time on the plant to absorb nutrients and water and plump up their flesh. Some will still be needing to change color.

>> At the end of the month, SoCal gardeners start your early winter crops first plantings! Sow carrots (they do best from seed), celery and Brassicas. Brassicas are arugula, Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage (especially red and savoy types, which resist frost better), cauliflower, and kohlrabi, mizuna, mustard, pak choi, radish, rutabaga, turnip.

Mid to late July start preparing by clearing areas for late July first fall plantings. Remove finishing weakened plants that attract pests and get diseases. Remove debris insects live in. Remove and trash mulch from under plants that were diseased and replace with clean mulch. Decide where you will plant your green manure patches/aka living mulch/cover crops. Living Mulch!  Cover Crops Add worm castings to mini nursery areas you will be planting seedlings in. Castings speed germination and add water holding capacity to help keep the soil moist. Leave space so the seedlings can be removed by a narrow trowel to their permanent place when they become big enough and space becomes available. Keep the soil moist and shaded until they’re up, and then gradually allow them more sun over a week’s time.

It’s time to get seeds if you don’t already have them! If seeds and mini nurseries aren’t your thing, wait until your local nursery starts having the transplants that make you happy! Late August they might start trickling in. Labor Day weekend is a favorite planting time for some gardeners depending on how hot it still is. October is just fine too! One year it stayed so hot we all planted the first couple weeks of November!

Tasty Zucchini Rolls made with Sunflower Seeds Pate, Sun Dried Tomatoes and Spinach! See complete recipe by Chris at Tales of a Kitchen!

If you are just starting, just got your first plot at one of the community gardens, first, prepare your soil! While waiting for fall planting time, plant a few patches of fast growing, less water needing, heat lovers, lots of summer heat tolerant lettuces for your salads! They may need a little shade cloth protection. Plan out your fall/winter layout, remembering tall to the north, short to the south. Winter plants don’t take up as much food in cooler weather, so use less compost and manure. Remember, nature’s soil is naturally only 5% organic matter, but we are growing veggies, so a little more than that is perfect. Too much food and plants go to all leaf, but then a lot of winter veggies are just that, all leaf! Cabbage, Chard, Kale, Lettuces. Oh, lettuces thrive with manures, so put more in the lettuce patch areas, but none where the carrots or peas will grow. They don’t need it. Garden Design/Seed Selection   Fall/Winter Garden Design

Important Habitat! As plants finish, let some of them grow out to save seeds. A carrot, celery and cilantro produce masses of seeds! Besides being food for pollinators and beneficial predator insects, they are beautiful! Birds will have seeds for food and scour your plants for juicy cabbage worms, whiteflies, aphids, earwigs, grasshoppers, cucumber beetles and grubs! Chickadees even eat ants!

Seedsaving is really a no-nonsense game! Besides being our second harvest, it insures the purity of your line! They are from a plant that grew well at your place! It’s important to our world community, as Thomas Rainer says, to preserve our garden heritage & biodiversity! Besides, it’s fun! Keep some for you – some as spices & others for planting. Package as gifts, and reserve some to take to the Seed Swap in January! 2020 Note! As your plants come into seeding time, consider sharing them as soon as possible! “Little Free Seed Libraries” are Sprouting Up to Help Gardeners Share Seeds in Troubled Times. Take a look at some very clever and loving ideas!

Let some beans go until they are completely dry in their pods; let corn dry until the kernels are hard on the cob. Let a cucumber turn yellow and tough. Save some seeds from your favorite and best tomatoes. Dry them further at home. When ready, put in an envelope, label with their name/variety, date/year, where grown, any other info you think you would be helpful. See more about SeedSaving!

Be ready for winter rain! If you garden at home, please look into water capture and gray water systems – shower to flower, super attractive bioswale catchments. In Santa

Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes. ~ Author Unknown

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

Updated annually 

 

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Veggies and Flowers, Birds & Bees! Summer is in full swing at Rancheria Community Garden! Please enjoy blessed June summer images of beauty and bounty at Rancheria Community Garden!

Check out the entire July 2020 Newsletter!
It includes these and more!

• Seasonal Soil Care for Veggies!
• Harvesting & Storage Tips for Our Summer Favorites!
• SeedSaving! A Beautiful Annual Ritual & Celebration!
• Hose Tips – Useful, Time & Money Saving!
• Upcoming Gardener Events!

Subscribe to the Newsletter too!

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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.

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June 2020! Pollination, Feeding, 1st Harvests!

What’s a garden for? Fertility and good living! Bridgette and Hoyt got married on a supermoon evening at Lyons Farmette & River Bend, Lyons CO! 

June is Midsummer Magic month! Divine small Faery beings will be celebrating your garden!
June 21, 24, 25 or a date close to the Summer Solstice, any day June 19–24, is celebrated as Midsummer Night; June 24 is Faery Day! In Santa Barbara the 2020 Summer Solstice festival and parade will be virtual starting June 20!

Abundance is flowing, harvests are happening!

Tomatoes are coloring up nicely, their sidekick basil is potent delish, golden zucchini and lettuces of all kinds are being eaten, purple pole beans are being harvested by adults and children! I’ve seen some big fat full size cukes and humongous Seascape strawberries! Be careful with some of your harvests. Clip rather than break away and damage or pull your plant up.

Cherry tomatoes come in first. Fertilize your toms with a slow release fertilizer once the fruiting begins.

Last year I had the pleasure of growing Pink Boar Tomatoes, from the Wild Boar series bred by farmer/breeder Brad Gates. As High Mowing says, ‘Deep pink skin is stunning with contrasting olive stripes and luscious deep red flesh,’ and it was!

Unexpected benefit! Reviewer Rebecca of Old Mosses Secret Garden said: I bought [Brad Gates Blue Berries] tomatoes for my whimsical choice. My experiences were similar to others opinion, they are abundant, vigorous and salad enhancing, plus they make a wonderful antioxidant jam spread. What I wanted to share about the blue berry tomatoes is that they are top of the menu choices for BATS. Bats were not on our urban radar, four years later five thousand bats have moved in and troll the garden where the fence lines are abundant with these little tasty gems, which get devoured . This plant is the greatest organic gardening boon ever sprouted. For fair reveal though I have hundreds of evergreen spruce that also get bat vacuumed for more meaty choices, so Thank you Baker seed, your diligence to excel is my secret weapon for a fantastic garden.

Harvest at your veggie’s peak delicious moment! Juicy, crunchy, that certain squish in your mouth, sweet, full bodied flavor, radiant, vitamin and mineral rich! Besides being delicious and beautiful, it keeps your plant in production. Left on the plant, fruits start to dry and your plant stops production, goes into seeding mode. The fruit toughens or withers, maybe rots, sometimes brings cleanup insect pests that spread to other plants. Keep beans picked, no storing cucumbers on the vine. Give away or store what you can’t eat. Freezing is the simplest storage method. Cut veggies to the sizes you will use, put the quantity you will use in baggies, seal and freeze. Whole tomatoes, chopped peppers, cut beans, diced onions. Probiotic pickle your cukes. Enjoy your sumptuous meals! Sing a song of gratitude and glory!

Plant more! Try some new ones too!

In those empty spots you have been saving, plant more rounds of your favorites! Check your lettuce supply. Put in more bolt resistant, heat and drought tolerant varieties now. Some heat tolerant lettuce varieties are Sierra, Nevada, Jericho, Black Seeded Simpson. That ruffly little beauty queen Green Star has excellent tolerance to hot weather, bolting, and tipburn. Rattlesnake beans keep right on producing when temps get up to 100 degrees! Plant more of everything except winter squash, big melons, pumpkins, unless you live in the hot foothills.

Put in plants that like it hotter! Long beans grow quickly from seed now. They grow later in the season when your other beans are finishing. They make those enormously long beans in the ample late summer heat. Keep watch on them, in spite of their size they grow quickly. Harvest promptly, usually daily! Certain varieties of them don’t get mildew either! Their unique flavor keeps your table interesting. Plant Okra now, it grows quickly in this warmer weather! More eggplant and also tomatoes you have been waiting to put in the now drier fungi free ground. Plant mini melons like Sugar Baby watermelons!

For those of you that are plagued with fungi diseases in your soil, the drier soil now makes this a better time to plant. Select wilt and blight resistant Tomatoes. Remember, when you plant your tomatoes and cukes, build a mound and make a basin whose bottom is higher than the surrounding soil. You want drainage and a wee bit of drying to reduce the potential of fungi – verticillium and fusarium wilts, blights. More Special Planting and growing tips for your Tomatoes and Cucumbers!

Plant WHITE potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs, radishes with cukes and Zucchini to repel cuke beetles, and radishes with eggplant, potatoes and arugula to repel flea beetles.

If you have more space or you lost a plant here or there, think on putting in some perfect companion plants! One of the Three Cs are super!

1. Calendula – so many medicinal uses, bright flowers, and traps aphids, whiteflies, and thrips! Yep. Plant Calendula by tomatoes and asparagus.
2. Chamomile –  is called the Plant Dr! It heals neighboring plants and improves the flavor of any neighboring herb! The flowers make a lovely scent and the tea is sweet.
3. Comfrey – aka Knitbone, is an amazing medicinal herb, a super nutritious compost speeder upper! Plant it by your compost area.

Tasty herbs – chives, parsley, or more permanent perennials like rosemary, oregano (invasive), thyme are flavorful choices.

Pat Mycorrhiza fungi right on the roots of all your transplants except Brassicas. 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. Support your local nurseries.

Here’s your tending list for Beauty and Bounty!

Water regularly so everyone is moist the way they like it! Seeds and seedlings daily, even twice daily on super hot days. Shading them may save their lives. Peppers like moist, so as they need it. Others not so water critical on average need an inch a week; water beans, cukes, lettuces and short rooted varieties of strawberries more frequently – lettuces could be daily on hot windy days. To double check use the old finger test or push your shovel in and wedge the soil open enough so you can see if it is moist as deep as it needs to be. Watering at ground level, rather than overhead watering, keeps your plant dry. That means less mildew, less fungal diseases, especially for fuzzy leaved plants like toms and eggplant.

If at all possible, water in the AM before 10:30 to let leaves dry before evening to prevent mildew – beans, cucumbers and squashes are especially susceptible. Plant fewer beans further apart for air flow. If your plants are near a street or there has been a dusty wind storm, wash the dust off your plants so they can breathe, and to make them less attractive to Whiteflies.

Some plants need MULCH now, and if the mulch is tired and flat, replace it with fresh clean mulch. No more than an inch of straw mulch under toms and cukes. They need airflow so the soil can dry a bit and reduce harmful fungi. Otherwise, put on 4 to 6 inches minimum to keep light germinating seeds from sprouting. Mulch any Brassicas you are over summering – broccoli, kale – 4 to 6 inches deep for them too. They need cool soil. Melons and winter squash – Butternuts, acorn, pumpkins – need heat! They are the exception – no mulch for them if you are coastal. Yes, they will need more water, so be sure their basin is in good condition and big enough so they get water out to their feeder roots. Put a stake in the center of the basin so you know where to water when the leaves get big. The only place for straw for them is right under the melons. See more at Mulching ~ Why, When, With What, How Much?!

Keep a sharp eye on tomatoes. Remove leaves touching the ground or will touch the ground if weighted with water! Trim so neighboring plants don’t touch and spread diseases like the wilts or blights. Remember, the wilts are spread by wind as well as water, so neighboring plants are very likely to give it to one another. Try planting other plants between. You can still do rows, just mix up the plants! Your healthier tomatoes will produce more and longer.

POLLINATION is vital & easy to do!

     

Hand Pollination of Cucurbits! In left image, male flower on left, female right.

Improve your tomato, eggplant and pepper production by giving the cages or the main stems a few sharp raps, or gently shake the stems, to help the flowers self pollinate. Midday is the best time. Honey bees don’t pollinate tomatoes, or other Solanaceae! Build solitary bee condos for native bees. Native bees, per Cornell entomology professor Bryan Danforth, are two to three times better pollinators than honeybees, are more plentiful than previously thought and not as prone to the headline-catching colony collapse disorder that has decimated honeybee populations. The very best Solanaceae pollinator is a Bumblebee!!! See more! Plant plenty of favorite bee foods!

While you are helping your tomatoes pollinate, if you are growing them in cages, also very gently help them up through the cages. Remove any bottom leaves that might touch the ground when weighted with water. Remove any diseased leaves ASAP!

Squashes, melons and monoecious cucumbers can easily be hand pollinated. Cukes are notorious for needing help being pollinated! Cucurbits have male and female blooms on the same plant. If there are not enough pollinators about, we need to help. Also, multiple visits from the bees are required for good fruit set and properly shaped cucumbers. Male flowers open in the morning and pollen is only viable during that day. Hand pollinate during the morning hours, using only freshly opened flowers. You can use a small pointy paint brush, a cotton swab, Q-tip, your finger, and move pollen from the male stamen to the center of the female flower. Or the best, most complete method is to take the male flower off the plant, pull the petals off, and gently roll the male flower anther around and over the female stigma in the center of the female flower. The pollen is sticky, so it may take some time. One male anther can pollinate several females. Repeat. Female blooms will simply drop off the plant if they are not pollinated or not pollinated adequately. So when your cukes are in production, you need to do this daily for more fruits.

Don’t be confused by the little fruit forming under the female flowers and think pollination has already happened. The flower needs to be fertilized, and adequately, or the fruit just falls off. Flowers not pollinated enough, that don’t abort, make misshapen fruits. That goes for corn having irregular to lacking kernels. Strawberries are called cat-faced. Squash and cucumbers can be deformed. On an unwindy day, tilt the stalk so the corn tassels are over the silks and tap the stalk. You will see a shower of pollen fall on the silks. You may need to do it from one plant to another so you don’t break the stalk trying to get the pollen to fall on silks on the same plant.

Planting a lot of plants close together stresses the plants. At higher densities, plants compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight, and the resulting stress can lead to a higher proportion of male flowers, less female flowers, the ones that produce. If you really want more fruit, give them room to be fruitful. The same goes for other stresses – damage from insects or blowing soil, low light intensities, or water stress – less female flowers are produced.

Weather affects pollination. Sometimes cool overcast days or rain, when bees don’t fly, there is no pollination. High humidity makes pollen sticky and it won’t fall. Not good for wind pollinated veggies like tomatoes. Drought is a problem for corn pollination. Too high nighttime temps, day temps 86°F and above, will keep your tomatoes, cucumbers and other vegetables from setting fruit unless they are high temp tolerant varieties. Too windy and the pollen is blown away. See Pollination: Honeybees, Squash Bees & Bumblebees!

If it is your cucumbers that are not pollinating well each year, try parthenocarpic varieties. Parthenocarpic varieties produce only female flowers and do not need pollination to produce fruit. This type of cucumber is also seedless. Try a few varieties and see if you like them.

Did you know? Flowers can hear buzzing bees—and it makes their nectar sweeter!

SIDEDRESSING! This IS the time! Feeding when your plants start to bloom and produce is a pretty standard recommendation. But if your baby is looking peaked, has pale or yellowing leaves, an emergency measure could be blood meal. Foliar feeding a diluted fish emulsion/kelp is easy for your plant to uptake. Foliar feeding a tea mix per what each plant might need, is the ultimate feed and it’s not hard to make tea mixes! Your lettuces love it if you scratch in a 1/4″ chicken manure, but no manure in a tea on leaves you will be eating! Pull your mulch back, top with a 1/2″ of compost and some tasty worm castings! If you prefer organic granulated fertilizer, easy to apply, sprinkle it around evenly. But remember, that has to be repeatedly applied. Recover with your mulch, straw, then water well and gently so things stay in place. That’s like making compost and worm tea in place!

Face up to pests! It’s easier to deal with them when there are only a few rather than losing your whole plant or a row of plants. I have already seen Cucumber beetles foraging on Zucchini flowers, on Tomatillos. They are deadly to cucumbers because they transmit bacterial wilt and squash mosaic virus and cucumbers are the most susceptible to the wilts than any other garden veggie. Squish those beetles. Put one hand under where the beetle is, reach for it with the other hand. Be prepared! They are fast and can see you coming! See more Here are tips for Beetle prevention for organic gardeners:

• If possible plant unattractive-to-cucumber beetle varieties. In 2012 U of Rhode Island trials, best pickling choices are Salt and Pepper and H-19 Little Leaf. Marketmore 76 was tops for slicing cukes. If you find more current research on best varieties, please let me know!
• Plant from transplants! The youngest plants are the most susceptible.
• Interplant! No row planting so beetles go from one plant to another.
• Delay planting! In our case, most of us already having planted cucumbers, can plant another round late June or when you no longer see the beetles. Start from seeds at home now since transplants may no longer be available in nurseries later on.
• Plant repellent companion plants BEFORE you plant your cukes. Radish with eggplant, cukes & zukes act as trap plants for flea beetles and to repel cucumber beetles. Radish are the fastest growers, so get them in ASAP if you didn’t before.
• Natural predators are Wolf Spiders, daddy long legs and Ground Beetles! Let them live! They eat beetle eggs and larvae. And there is a tachinid fly and a braconid parasitoid wasp that parasitize striped cucumber beetle, and both sometimes have large impacts on striped cucumber beetles. When you see a dark hairy fly, don’t swat it! It is doing important garden business!
• Here is a super important reason to use straw mulch! Per UC IPM ‘Straw mulch can help reduce cucumber beetle problems in at least 3 different ways. First, mulch might directly slow beetle movement from one plant to another. Second, the mulch provides refuge for wolf spiders and other predators from hot and dry conditions, helping predator conservation. Third, 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. It is important that straw mulch does not contain weed seeds and to make certain that it does not contain herbicide residues which can take years to fully break down.’
• Organic mulches foster diverse populations of beneficial soil microorganisms that trigger the plant’s internal defenses.
• At the end of the season or when your plants are done, remove garden trash, tired mulch and other debris shortly after harvest to reduce overwintering sites.

If you are by a road or in a dusty windswept area, rinse off the leaves to make your plants less attractive to whiteflies. Also, asap remove yellowing leaves that attract whiteflies. Pests adore tasty healthy plants just like we do. They also make us see which plants are weak or on their way out. Give those plants more care or remove them. Replace them with a different kind of plant that will do well now and produce in time before the season is over. Don’t put the same kind of plant there unless you have changed the conditions – enhanced your soil, installed a favorable companion plant, protected from wind, terraced a slope so it holds moisture, opened the area to more sun. Be sure you are planting the right plant at the right time! Remove mulch from under plants that were diseased and replace with clean mulch. Do not compost that mulch or put it in green waste. Trash it.

Please always be building compost and adding it, especially near short rooted plants and plants that like being moist. Compost increases your soil’s water holding capacity.

Reduce your carbon footprint! Grow local!

Mary Alice Ramsey in her North Carolina backyard. Photo by Hector Manuel Sanchez

May You enjoy a super beautiful, bountiful & juicy June!

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

Updated annually  

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Summer Solstice is June 20, Father’s Day June 21! Congratulations to Grads and their families! Here are some wonderful ideas for green and loving gifts for any and all! You can even start some seeds now! Click here

Veggies and Flowers, Birds & Bees! Please enjoy a delightful array of early summer images at Rancheria Community Garden! You may get some ideas for those Father’s and Grad’s prezzies! Happy gardening!

Check out the entire June 2020 Newsletter!
It includes these and more!

• Veggie Feeding Schedule for Your Delicious Summer Favorites!
• Success with Eggplant, Aubergine!
• Container Gardening, Garden Anywhere!
• Special Treat! Sweet Summer Magic: Solstice Honey Cookies!

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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.

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August 2019! Splendid Harvests, SeedSaving, Fall Starts!

For those of you who planted early spring, many of your plants are now finishing. It’s time to save seeds from your best plants! Clear space and ready your soil for mini nursery seed beds in your garden or for transplanting from local nursery starts as soon as they become available. If you haven’t installed gopher protection wire, this is the best time, as summer ends, fall begins!

Just getting started in a new garden, or you just love to plant?! Summer plants you can still plant for fall harvests are early varieties of determinate tomatoes, smaller size beans (bush beans are faster) and corn. Corn is more disease prone at this time though. Tuck in your year-round fillers, beets, bunch onions, carrots, summer lettuces, winter radish, to keep a colorful and delicious variety for your table.

ONIONS For the biggest, sweetest harvests, late summer and early fall are the prime times to sow seeds of short- or intermediate-day onions. Fall-sown short- and intermediate-day onions tend to yield more and are larger and sweeter than those seeded or transplanted in early spring. Onions have stupendous flavor and come in white, yellow, red!

In our hot Santa Barbara foothills and further south, watch your melons, big squashes and pumpkins for their best harvest time – when their stem is brown and dry, or they ‘slip’ off the vine. Hold off irrigating melons about a week before they will ripen so their sugars will concentrate. Harvest okra while it is small and tender – bigger is NOT better! Let your winter squash harden. When you can’t push your fingernail in it, it’s ready.

Keep up with harvesting so plants don’t quit producing. More about harvesting! As in July, keep up with watering just beyond that dripline, replenish mulch.

If you want to extend your season, give your favorite late summer/fall heavy producers a good feed to extend their harvests. Eggplants have a large or many fruit, beans put out a ton of beans, tomatoes are big and working hard, peppers can be profuse! They like a tad of chicken manures scratched in, bunny poop and straw (pick up at Animal Shelters), well aged horse manure and compost makes them dance with the faeries in the night time! First, water well. Pull back your mulch, lightly scratch your soil, then lay what you are adding on the surface out to just beyond the drip line. Mix it in gently so as not to break surface feeder roots. Pull the mulch back into place, replenish if needed.

Fertilizers highest in P, Phosphorus – the P in NPK, keep blooming and fruiting optimum. Liquid fertilizers are absorbed easily and promptly, and there is no root damage. Now is the time you wish you had added mycorrhizae fungi, the good guys, at planting time, to enhance Phosphorus uptake! Aged organic compost makes for healthy roots that make their own natural organic phosphoric acid that helps break down compounds of calcium and phosphate into a usable, soluble form. It’s too late to add bonemeal or guanos. They take 2 and 4 months respectively to become available to your plants for blooming. They are another must add at planting time. NOW, Phosphorus from fish bone meal 3-18-0 is easily taken up! So is chicken manure 1.1-0.8-0.5, but the P is a lot less. Scratch it in lightly, but only around your plant in spots. You want to leave the majority of the feeder root system intact. The feeder roots not only supply your plant with food, but also water so needed in late summer in SoCal.

• Peppers specially like a foliar feed of non-fat powdered milk (Calcium) and Epsom Salts (Magnesium & Sulfur). They also can use more Potassium. This time of year kelp meal is good source and releases quickly. If you have predators about, don’t get the kind mixed with stinky fish emulsion.
• Foliar feed all your plants with a super mixed tea – no manure in teas you will use on leaves you will eat, like lettuce! At the same time, for deeper root feeding, use a spade fork to make holes about your plant. Push it into the soil, wiggle back and forth a bit, then pour the rest of that tasty mixed tea down the holes. Replace the mulch and water well at soil level to the dripline. That will feed at root level too and give the soil organisms something to think about!

Seeds are your last harvest! Allow your healthiest top producers to seed. Tie a ribbon on plants (at top and bottom or where you might grab it in a weeding frenzy) or fruits you want to save seeds from so you don’t accidently harvest them! Each year keep your best! Scatter some seeds about if they would grow successfully now! Or just scatter them about and when it’s the right time, even next spring. Many will come up quite well on their own, even the tiniest ones, breadseed poppy, chamomile and lettuce! Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s better than ever plantings. Remember, these seeds are adapted and localized to you! If you are willing, take your extras to a local Seed Bank! While you are there, pick up some of your fall favorites and some new ones to try out! Hold some for your local Seed Swap! Our Santa Barbara area Seed Swap is in January. See more about SeedSaving!  How to Save Tomato Seeds!

After seedsaving, when your plants are done, let them go, compost if pest and disease free, start clearing space for fall soil prep.

SOIL PREP!

August is perfect time to ready your soil for the very first fall plantings, starting mid-August from seed! Do the seed beds first!

Some would consider the ultimate ‘soil prep’ to be installing gopher wire protection, LOL! Here we are at the turn of the season, a very good time to do the job. Get a team of friends together and go for it! Appoint a watcher to play music, make sure everyone stays hydrated. Bring gloves, wear sturdy shoes or boots. You may not be able to do the whole area at once, but do what you can. You will be so glad you did! You can do it!

Cover crop soil restoration! You can plant herbs, Calendula, all sorts of things, but a Green Manure mix including lots of legumes and oats does the best. Legumes collect Nitrogen, the number one element plants need for leaf growth! They deposit the N on their roots in little nodules. When you turn the legumes under, they not only feed your soil with their leaves, but those little nodules! Beans and Peas are legumes. Always cut off rather than pull out their roots. Leave those roots there to feed your soil! The deep roots of oats loosen your soil, creating channels for oxygen and water and soil critters to navigate. They bring nutrients up from deep below. Also, they produce more growth in late fall/early winter than in spring! Perfect for winter crop plantings! The Basics – Cover Crops   In depth – Living Mulch!

If you have enough area, plant one space entirely with a cover crop. If your area is smaller, each year plant a different section with your cover crop. Some years you can get two cover crops in, especially if you are planting successively for a steady table supply. When the first patch is done you plant it. You start your second patch where another area has been finishing. Or if you are doing one area for early planting, save another for planting bareroots in January.

If you are inclined, always be making compost with clean garden waste, kitchen scraps. Decide where you want to compost, leave the space next to it so you can move your compost back and forth. Or you can move your composter around to enrich the soil there. The fastest way to compost is to make a pit or a trench. Add your healthy green waste or kitchen waste, chop it fine, turn it in mixing it with your soil. If you trenched it, turn it a few times over the next few days. If you have a pit, turn it two to three times over the next few days, then add it where it is needed when it is done. If composting isn’t for you, buy the best in bags you can! In addition to the basics, we want to see worm castings, mycorrhizae fungi, maybe some peat to loosen clay and add water holding capacity.

Seeds germinate really well and quicker when worm castings are added to your soil along with the compost. Castings also strengthen your plants’ immune systems! Add 25% for best results. Boost up seed beds (castings improve germination) and where you will be installing transplants. Put a stake where your planting holes will be so you can add more at those points.

Start Seedlings for transplant, or plant seeds right in the ground! 

Plant seeds of small plants where they will live permanently as space becomes available. That’s celery, chard, mustard greens, parsley, winter radish varieties, kohlrabi, Mizuna, pak choi, rutabaga, turnips. Peas are a well favored winter crop! They go up on the trellis! Sow carrots (they do best from seed). Keep the soil moist and shaded until they’re up, and then gradually allow them more sun over a week’s time.

Plant the seeds for biggies in little nursery areas. Plant them far enough apart that you can get your trowel in to transplant them to their permanent spot as space becomes available. That’s Brassicas: cabbage (especially red and savoy types, which resist frost better), brocs, Brussels sprouts, collards, cauliflower and kale babies!

Winter plants that get a good start while there is still some heat, will be producing a lot sooner than plants started while it is cooler. You will have a much earlier crop, plus time for a successive crop, maybe start another round in December! Be sure to leave space to plant additional rounds to keep steady table supply.

If planting from seed is not for you, no time, gone on vacation, of course you can wait and get transplants when the nurseries bring them in. Just know nursery selections are not as big as what you can buy as seeds. Island Seed & Feed has a great seed selection in the Santa Barbara area, and there are marvelous seed companies. Be sure to get seed varieties that are right for your area! Always choose the best, varieties that resist or tolerate pests or disease, that in winter can withstand frost/freeze.

Keep harvesting, do your soil preps, and wait for September or October transplanting. Labor Day weekend is a favorite big planting time for many gardeners, and that’s only a month away now! At that time you can plant both seeds and transplants, effectively two rounds at once, the seeds coming in six weeks after the transplants!

See Super Fall Veggies for help choosing the very best varieties and Fall companion planting! Don’t forget to plan space to commingle your valuable companion plants! They enhance growth, repel pests, can help withstand diseases. Here’s your quick handy list of winter companions:

Cilantro with Broccoli! It makes brocs grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener!
Lettuce among, beside Cabbages to repel cabbage moths
Chives, Coriander, Garlic, Geraniums, Lavender, Mint family (caution – invasive), and onions are said to repel aphids.
Mustard and nasturtium can be planted near more valuable plants as traps for the aphids. A word to the wise, nasturtiums are snail habitat.
Calendula is a trap plant for pests such as aphids, whiteflies, and thrips by exuding a sticky sap that they find more appealing and delicious than nearby crops. Plant them a bit away from the plant you want to survive.
Peas and carrots are terrific together but NO onion family with Peas!

Among HOT August days, there are hints of fall. Days are a tad shorter; shadows fall in different places now. For us SoCal gardeners it’s time to design! It’s in our minds, maybe put to paper. What will be new and different this year, what will we try, is there a more productive variety? Will you be adding compost space, or a worm bin? Would you like raised beds this year? How about a greenhouse?! Have you ever planted a green manure cover crop? Will your soil be different? Will you be planting tall indeterminate peas in a cage that shades, or quickie low bush peas? Both?! What about greywater systems? Rainwater capture? In the cool of late summer evenings think it through….

Updated annually…

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See the entire August Newsletter!

Check out wonderful July images at Santa Barbara’s Rancheria Community Garden! See the Japanese Red Kuri Squash Adventure,  humongous spaghetti squash, and the GREAT PUMPKIN! Enjoy the SnapDragons and visiting Munias -aka nutmeg mannikin or spice finch! The garden is a treat!

The Green Bean Connection newsletter started as correspondence for the Santa Barbara CA USA, Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden. All three of Santa Barbara city community gardens are very coastal. During late spring/summer we are in a fog belt/marine layer area 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.

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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May 2019! Radiant Flowers & Tasty Veggies!

Are you having fun?! Does your garden make you this happy?! PLANT MORE! In SoCal it’s Cantaloupe planting time!

Coolish April temps have delayed sweet pepper plantings. Night temps are still dipping below 55°. Soon… Sweet peppers need nighttime temps that are steadily above 55°F, some say 60, and soil temps above 65°F. If planted too soon, sometimes they miss their natural sequence of production, and never produce. Best to replant if you suspect this is happening. See Best Planting Temps Per Veggie!

May, June Planting Timing

MAY is time for cantaloupe, sweet bell 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, for warmer drier soil, 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 for coastal SoCal. If YOU anticipate a HOT summer, plant a tad earlier, but be prepared to deal with it if summer is overcast as often is the case after all.

Long beans are spectacular and love heat. Late May, June is the best time to start them. They grow quickly from seed. They will last longer than other beans, hitting their stride toward the end of summer. Certain varieties of them don’t get mildew either! Their unique flavor keeps your table interesting.

While we are waiting for the right temps, do soil preps that are still needed. Weed out plants that won’t help your summer lovers. Make your soil fluffy with water holding compost, only 5 to 10%, while also adding tasty well aged manure! Add worm castings to areas that will be seeded. Castings improve germination and germination is sooner.

Plant another round of your favorite heat lovers! Might be eggplant, limas, peppers and pumpkins! Transplant or seed different varieties of beans, cucumbers, eggplant, melons, peppers, squash, and tomatoes than you planted before! Sow and/or transplant asparagus, beets, carrots, celery, chard, corn, herbs, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, heat-tolerant leaf lettuce, summer-maturing onions, parsley, peanuts rhubarb and spinach! Add white potatoes and radish with zucchini, radishes with cukes to repel cuke beetles, and with eggplant to repel flea beetles. Add fillers and littles under bigger plants as living mulch! Put some color in your choices! Plant RED table onions, fancy lettuces! Tips for super Successful Transplanting!

Choose heat and drought tolerant varieties when you can. For example, why wait when it gets HOT and your tomato stops setting fruit?! Get heat tolerant varieties the heat doesn’t bother! Heat tolerant tomatoes keep right on producing when temps get up to and above 85! Rattlesnake beans are a winner! They produce in up to 100 degree weather! They have a slightly nutty flavor. You do have to keep watch and pick almost daily because they get long and plump quickly – and are still tender!

Problem temps for tomatoes:

High daytime temperatures (above 85 F)
High Nighttime Temperatures (above 70 F)
Low Nighttime Temperatures (below 55 F)

Check out this nifty page of heat tolerant tomato varieties at Bonnie Plants! If your plant is not heat tolerant, wait. When things cool down, it will start making flowers and setting fruit again. See also Tomatoes are the Fireworks of Your Summer Garden!

Time for heat and leaf tip burn resistant, bolt-resistant lettuces of all kinds! Sierra, Nevada, Jericho, Black Seeded Simpson are some. Green Star wins the beauty award!

Tomatoes! 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 Santa Barbara area continued 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 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! If you are interested in the Indigo family of tomatoes, in the Santa Barbara area, Terra Sol and La Sumida both have them this year!

Once you have these strong varieties installed particular maintenance will keep them healthy longer.

• Remove any leaves that will touch the ground if weighted with rain, dew or by watering.
• Remove infected leaves the curl the length of the leaf or get brown spots.
• Lay down a loose 1″ deep straw mulch blanket to allow air circulation and the soil to dry. No friendly fungi habitat. The most important purpose of this mulch is to keep your plant’s leaves from being water splashed or in contact with soil, which is the main way they get fungi/blight diseases.
• When the straw gets flat and tired, remove (don’t compost) and replace.

Flowers or veggies that are great companion plants for your tomatoes!

Companion Plants! Always be thinking what goes near, around, under, with, what enhances your plant’s growth and protects it from damaging insects and diseases, or feeds your soil! Keep the biodiversity rolling! Plant pest deterring plants first so they will be up and working when you put in your seeds or transplants! If you forget, you can always add your companions later.

• Alyssum is a great old fashioned pretty border plant, an understory living mulch. And WHITE Alyssum repels the cabbage butterfly.
• Basil repels several unwanted insects, is great near tomatoes but not in the basin with the tom. The tom needs less water. Plant the Basil beside the tom basin. The deeper tomato roots will get water used to water the Basil!
• Beans, Cukes, Dill, Radish Combo! Cukes and Beans are great on the trellis, one high, one low. Dill to go with pickling cukes. Radishes to deter Cucumber beetles.
• WHITE Potatoes with Zucchini & Cukes 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!
• Calendula traps aphids, whiteflies, and thrips!
• Chamomile is a love! Pretty, great tea, known as the “plant doctor,” chamomile has been known to revive and revitalize plants growing near it. That’s especially good to know for plants that are susceptible to diseases. Plant it by plants that are wilts susceptible, like your tomatoes & cucumbers .
• Cosmos is for pollinators! More at SFGate
• 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! Leave a little open space to lightly dig in some compost or manure later in the season. If you already have enough lettuce 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 in the living mulch and put in winter/summer plants! See much more – Living Mulch/Green Manure!

Now is the time watering becomes critical!

SEEDS need to be kept moist. If they dry they die and you either replant or if you don’t have time, just go get transplants. Of course, the advantage of seeds is you have a lot more variety choices than what you can get at the nursery if you aren’t too late in the season to get them if you don’t have any more… Always purchase extra seed for accidents and incidents, ie birds or insects.

TRANSPLANTS need to be kept moist the first few days until they acclimate to their new home. Gentle watering. I water once, then go back and do the whole area again, giving the first watering a chance to soak down. Flooding is not necessarily a good choice. Soil needs oxygen, and plants can literally drown.

THE SCHEDULE What schedule, LOL?! It all depends on the weather. In our area there are hot days, cool days, overcast days, not often windy. But very hot and windy together might mean watering twice a day, whereas cool and overcast might mean an inch of water a week could be just fine. Water beans, cukes, lettuces and short rooted varieties of strawberries more frequently – 2 to 3 times a week, daily in very hot or windy weather. Poke your finger in the ground after rains to see just how deep the water soaked in. Use your shovel and wedge a spot open to see if the soil is moist deeper.

Most plants need to be kept moist. Kept moist. Dry crusty soil keeps your soil from breathing. Compost, mulch and planting living mulch are all good answers. Compost has excellent water holding capacity. Work it in gently around the dripline of your plant so as to damage as few roots as possible. Maybe only do one or two sides of your plants so all the feeder roots are not destroyed. It will set your production back if your plant has to regrow them. Mulch only if your soil temps are up to par. Otherwise, wait, so the mulch doesn’t keep your soil cool.

Living mulch has two advantages over dead mulch like bark or straw. 1) Living mulch can be an edible understory of small plants I call Littles. Their shade keeps the soil cool and moist. On balance they need water too, so you might use a wee bit of more water, but you also get 2 crops in the same space! 2) Living mulch can be soil feeding legumes under your bigger plants. They too shade and keep your soil moist and looser. In Santa Barbara a good choice can be White Clover. Get seed at Island Seed & Feed.

The plant that does well with straw is cucumbers! It keeps the fruits clean and soil free, and, drum roll, might slow cucumber beetle movement from one plant to another! Plus, it is great shelter for wolf spiders, daddy long legs and other predators. The more spidies the more healthy your garden!

The first plant you mulch is any over summering Brassica – broccoli, kale. They like cool soil, so pile it on good and deep, 4 to 6 inches, or plant a dense understory of living mulch. Peppers are quite the reverse, the last plants you mulch. They like soil temps above 65. Mulch keeps the soil cooler, so use your soil thermometer to see if the mulch is cooling it too much for your peppers.

Furrows and basins are perfect for water capture, just like the SW indigenous peoples did with their waffle gardens. The water collects at the bottom, the wind goes over the berms. You can raise your tomato and cucumber basins onto the tops of your mounds so there is better drainage and your soil dries somewhat. For plants that are not wilt fungi vulnerable, dig your basins and furrows down. Let the normal soil level be the ‘berm’ for the wind to blow over.

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. The exception is winter plants in the Brassica family – Broccoli, Kales. They don’t interact with mycorrhiza.

Save water by using a long water wand to water under your plants, not the foliage. Use one with different settings so you use only what your plant needs, and an easy to use shut off valve so you use water only when you need to.

Garlic, bulb onions, and shallots naturally begin to dry this month. When the foliage begins to dry it’s time to STOP watering them. Dry outer layers needed for long storage will form on the bulbs. When about half of the foliage slumps to the ground, bend the rest to initiate this maturing. The bulbs will be ready for harvest when the foliage is thoroughly dry and crisp.

Natural Disease & Pest Prevention!

1. 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 plants will be 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.
2. Think biodiversity! Plant companion plants that repel pests, enhance each other’s growth so they are strong and pest and disease resistant. Mix it up! Less planting in rows, more understories and intermingling. 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.
3. Make top notch soil!
4. In planting holes
   – Add worm castings for your plants’ excellent health. 25% is best; 10% will do if that’s all you got.
   – Add a tad more tasty properly aged manure mixes where manure lovers like peppers 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 Jamaican guano high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time. It 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. Other guanos don’t have this particular NPK ratio.
   – 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, 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.
5. 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 bath for a taste of sulfur. More details and all the recipes.
6. 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! Some sites say with good starting soil you shouldn’t need to amend during the season. Your plants will tell you if they do need more food. Maybe your soil wasn’t perfect. Maybe your plant has phenomenal production and gotten hungry. When production slows down, decide if you want more. Feed your plant a bit and see what happens.
7. 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.
8. Harvest promptly. Insects and diseases can signal when plants/fruits 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. Whiteflies are attracted to yellow.
9. 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.

The usual May culprits!

• Cucumber Beetles get in cucumber, squash and melon blossoms. They aren’t picky. They are yellow greenish with black stripes or dots about the size and shape of a Ladybug. They are cute but are the very worst garden pest. They carry bacterial diseases and viruses from plant to plant, such as bacterial wilt and mosaic virus, deadly to cukes. Radish repels them, is a champion plant, a hero of the garden! Plant enough radish for you to eat and to let others just grow, be there permanently or at least until the beetles are done, gone. IPM data Straw mulch recommended.
• Squash Bugs like your Zucchini and other squash, cucumber and melons. Plant radish and WHITE potatoes amongst them to repel the bugs. Let some of the radish grow full height, eat the others as usual! You will get three crops instead of just one! IPM info
• Flea Beetles look like large black fleas and do hop mightily! They seem harmless enough, make tiny little holes in the leaves of eggplant, potatoes, arugula. But, those tiny holes add up. As the beetles suck out the juice of your plant they disrupt your plant’s flow of nutrients, open the leaves to disease, your plant is in a constant state of recovery, there is little production. Your plant looks dryish, lacks vitality. The trap plant for them, one that they like best, is radish! Thank goodness radish grow fast! Better yet, plant it ahead of time, or ASAP when you put seeds and transplants in.  IPM notes
• Whiteflies do the honeydew thing like aphids do, leaving a nasty sticky black sooty mold or white fibers all over your plant’s leaves. The honeydew attracts ants, which interfere with the activities of Whitefly natural enemies. They are hard to get rid of, so keep a close watch on the undersides of leaves, especially if you see little white insects flying away when you jostle your plant. Whiteflies develop rapidly in warm weather, in many parts of California, and they breed all year. Prevent dusty conditions. Keep ants out of your plants. Hose them away immediately. Calendula is a trap plant for them. See more

Now is the time to be thinking of soil prep for the future! Gather and dry good wood now for trial Hugelkultur composting at the end of summer, early fall! Woods that work best are alders, apple, aspen, birch, cottonwood, maple, oak, poplar, willow (make sure it is dead or it will sprout). Hugelkultur can be a simple huge pile or an elegant graceful design like this one. Could be right in your front yard! See more!

Plant Bee 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. 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, 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, marigold, white sweet alyssum – all benefit your garden in their own way! See Stripes of Wildflowers! Here are some special considerations – Courting Solitary Bees!

To plant a seed is to believe in tomorrow. Audrey Hepburn, born May 4, 1929

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April images April brought our Santa Barbara CA Community Gardens lovely flowers – Poppy fever, baby birds, flavorful herbs, the starts of many veggies, inspiring and tasty Artichokes! It’s only $67/yr for a 10X20’ plot that will produce more than you anticipate! Check out these images and informative comments! Happy Gardening!  

2019 Mother’s Day is May 12! Here are some wonderful ideas for green and loving gifts! Get living gifts started now! Click here

See the entire May 2019 GBC Newsletter!

May 2019! Radiant Flowers & Tasty Veggies!

The Magic of Melons ~ Cantaloupe, Honeydew!
Pollination: Honeybees, Squash Bees & Bumblebees!
Mulching ~ Why, When, With What, How Much?!
Artichokes, A Wild & Wonderful Experience!

Upcoming Gardener Events! SBCC 18th Annual Plant Sale! Santa Barbara Botanic Garden Spring Native Plants SALE is finishing May 5! International Permaculture Day, Fairview Gardens Events & Programs – Summer Camp. Quail Springs Permaculture Farm Events! 2020 International Permaculture Conference Argentina!
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The Green Bean Connection newsletter started as correspondence for the Santa Barbara CA USA, Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden. All three of Santa Barbara city community gardens are very coastal. During late spring/summer we are in a fog belt/marine layer area 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!Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! 

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