October 2023 Very Last Summer Harvests, Final SeedSaving, Fall Transplants!

See the Farmers’ Almanac Fall Forecast 2023: When Will Sweater Weather Arrive?

Congratulations on your Squash & Pumpkin harvests and Happy Halloween, Day of the Dead!

Brassicas are the SoCal winter veg garden winners!

LARGE BRASSICAS

Broccoli is the favorite Brassica and rightfully so per the nutrition it offers. Plants differ in size, head color and shapes, how heat tolerant they are, if you intend to let them over summer and make side shoot production, varies! To get value for the room Brocs take up, a lot of gardeners seek varieties that produce a lot of side shoots after the main head is taken. Some newer varieties produce side shoots before the main head is taken! These smaller heads are great steamed if large, or tossed with your salad if small. Do as you wish! Many of these newer varieties grow no more than 1 to 1 1/2′ tall, in other words, close to the ground rather than up on taller stalks. This means you can’t cut off the lower leaves to plant smaller plants underneath. So before you select varieties, take a look online at mature plant profile. You can still plant around them, just not under them. Keep that in mind when planning your layouts. Research has shown there are less aphids when you plant different varieties of brocs together! Probably true for other large Brassicas as well. Superb Broccoli!

Kale has become a have-to-have! Eat young leaves fresh in salads. Steam with other veggies over rice. High in Vitamin A and anti-cancer properties! Lovely varieties – green or purple, flat or curly leaves. They just keep growing. They are technically a biennial, 2 year plant. The first year is for production, the second they make seeds. But. In SoCal they can over winter several years. Or if we have exceptionally hot weather, they may bolt and make seeds the first year! You can end up with a pom pom style, a poof of small leaves on a tall bare stalk, especially the curly leaf or dinosaur kales. But they lose their verve, look tired, are tasteless, rather tortured. A fresh young kale in good soil will easily take up a 3′ footprint and produce thick tender vibrant leaves like crazy! What a difference. I hope you start fresh ones each year. They grow so quickly. You won’t lose any harvest time if you plant a baby at the base of the old one, then take the old one down when you are getting those sweet young leaves from the baby. I’ll bet you forgot how good they can really taste! Just be sure to work in some high quality compost so it can be strong and keep producing well. Beautiful Kale!

Cauliflower now comes in the standard white, also green, orange and purple! The disadvantage is there is only one head and that’s it, though as with any Brassica, the leaves are edible. Like Collard greens.

Cabbage is more dense for the dollar than Cauliflower though it too has only one head and takes a long time to grow – even the mini varieties! But what a feast! A cabbage head is amazing and you can fix it so many ways. Shred in salad, coleslaw, steamed, cabbage soup – Borscht, stir fried, cabbage rolls, cabbage kimchi, in tacos, as sauerkraut! Or try a traditional Irish dish, colcannon, a mixture of mashed potatoes, cabbage or kale, onions, and spices. YUM! There are many cabbage varieties as well – ‘white,’ red or green. Different sizes, and I do mean different. There are 4 to 6″ minis for container gardens, sooner eating or you just don’t need a huge cabbage. There are easily more than a foot in diameter monsters you can barely carry! First they grow loose, then they fill in and make hard dense heads. An amazing plant! While your cabbages are putting on size, plant lettuces among them and other Brassicas. Lettuce repels cabbage moths. Magnificent Cabbages!

Brussels Sprouts are charming mini cabbages on a stalk! They like a colder climate to make big sprouts. In Santa Barbara SoCal area you need to be prepared to harvest lots of small ones. But, I have to tell you, the last couple years we have been getting sprouts up to almost 2″ diameter in two of our community gardens, so it wasn’t good soil that made the difference. The sprouts liked the weather or new more heat tolerant varieties are on board!

All these big Brassicas need feeding from time to time because they are big, and most of them are continuously producing leaf crops! They are all susceptible to Mildew. Try for resistant varieties. Water in the morning when possible so they can dry by evening. A good reason not to over water or fertilize is aphids and whiteflies! They like softer plants. Use plenty of worm castings, as much as possible in their soil – as much as 25% if you can! Plant your Brassicas far enough apart, leaves not touching, for airflow when they are mature, so pests and diseases don’t easily spread plant to plant. Brassicas are generally frost tolerant, even a bit freeze tolerant, and it is said their flavor improves with a freeze!

Cilantro is their best companion! If you like the scent, winter, early spring are good times for cilantro. It doesn’t bolt so fast. Summer it bolts, winters it will freeze, so replants go with the territory. Cilantro makes brocs grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener! Plant it just inside the mature drip line and let it grow up and through your Brassicas! The exception is cabbage since it can’t grow through cabbage. I grow cilantro even though I don’t eat it. I like how it looks and smells and it is a living mulch. When it seeds I scatter the seeds where I think I will be wanting some as companion plants and comes up where and when it wants if you keep the soil moist. Cilantro!

ENJOY LOTS OF SMALL BRASSICAS! 

For salads arugula, bok choy, kohlrabi, mizuna, mustard, tatsoi, peppery sweet alyssum! Alyssum is a terrific little companion plant and attracts special small pollinators. Root crops are winter Daikon and White Icicle, pretty China Rose and handsome Long Black Spanish radish, turnips, rutabagas! Grow horseradish for fermenting. No need to allot special space for these except for the horseradish. It has a good 3′ diameter footprint! Plant these tasty small Brassicas in rows, between, among, around, in patches on the sunny side of big brassicas! A few here, a few there! Be artful with your design – sizes and colors. Enjoy their many flavors at your winter table! Same with other little winter types like onions, beets.

Then, there are all the other plants not Brassicas!

Peas – Flat, Snap or Pod

Flat is the same as Chinese or snow peas. String ’em or buy the stringless variety, and eat ’em right then and there or toss a few with your salad, steam or stew in Asian dishes, add to your stir fry! Shelling or English peas are so delicious fresh out of the pod and mighty tasty steamed so fresh from the pod. SNAP peas are the sinful favorite of many. The pod is thick and tender, sweet and delicious! Few make it home from my garden. I just eat them. That’s why you get stringless varieties. Who wants to be picking their teeth at the garden, LOL?! Ok, if some of those snap peas do make it to the kitchen, add them to salads. If you must, lightly steam them, add them to stir fries. They are very tender. To keep their fresh green look, undercook….

Yellow, green or purple, you can get bush or pole peas! Bush peas come in sooner; pole peas grow tall, so come in later. Soon as your bush peas are done, the pole peas will come in shortly after, making for a steady supply. And the pole peas keep on coming. Compared to beans or tomatoes, peas have a shorter life span. And when they are done, they are done. Fertilizing, coaxing, additional water doesn’t help. Successive planting is the answer. Plant once a month or so if you love peas. You do have to keep them picked or, like beans, they stop producing. They have short roots and need to be kept moist. Onion family stunts peas! But carrots enhance peas! Plant carrots around the cage or along the trellis. If you plant carrots on one side of them, trench peas a tad lower. Water the pea side so the carrots don’t get too much water and split.

Peas are the winter legume as beans are the summer legume of your garden! They are the trellis plants of our winter gardens. Put in your trellis first, then plant pole seeds, plus transplants of bush and pole all at the same time for them to come in one after the other. Your bush peas in cages will produce first, then your pole peas, and likely your seeded pole peas will follow in short order. Soon as your peas are done, clip off the plant, leaving the roots with their Nitrogen nodules in the ground to feed your soil. The Nitrogen is only released from the nodules after the plant has died. Plant more!

Presprouting your pea seeds makes sense! Presprouting assures no spots will be empty where a seed didn’t come up and you lose production! Presprouting peas is super simple. Paper towel on plate, lay out peas an inch apart, fold the paper towel over them, spritz with clean water, keep them moist. By +/- 5 days they will have sprouted, some more than others! Carefully put the ones that sprouted in the ground so you don’t break the little roots. If you have hungry birds, cover the sprouted peas with aviary wire soon as you put them in the ground. A smart trick is to plant them in a slight low sloped mini trench. Moisture goes to the bottom of the trench, drying wind goes over the top of the trench. When you are planting while it is still warm in late fall, if you are planting from sprouts, very carefully cover the soil with a very fine mulch to keep the soil moist. Planting from seed do the same cover the soil lightly. The sprouts will emerge and grow through the mulch. You can cover the trench with a board on top of the aviary wire. It’s high enough so the sprouts can get some size. Be sure there is a tad of airflow so the sprouts under the board are not baked! Delicious Peas! As with any seeds or transplants, a couple days before planting put down organic slug/snail bait and remove any overnight marauders that would feast on your tiny new plants.

You can have a terrific time with beets! They thrive in cooler weather. Many colors! Grow the elongated winter biggies, Cylindra! Plant them at the same time you plant smaller varieties so you have the littles first, while you are waiting for the biggies! Early Wonder Tall Tops and Dutch Baby Ball are a tasty choices, or red cold hardy Flat of Egypt! Try a yellow like Touchstone Gold! All About Beets, So Sweet!

Chard is an elegant super productive winter favorite! Handsome, colorful, really, they are the ‘flowers’ of the winter garden! Superlative nutrition, low calorie, easy to grow! If you want quantity, plant Fordhook Giants! They are wondrous – easily 3′ tall, foot wide leaves when conditions are right for them! Chard can’t be beat for production per square foot. Elegant Nutritious Chard!

Lettuces thrive in cooler weather too, but do cover them at threatened heavy pelting rain storms and freezes. Lay down tomato cages, cover, and secure the cover so it doesn’t blow away. Remove when the day warms up. Lettuces come in all kinds of shapes and delicious colors. They do best in rich soil, regular moisture. Winter is the cooler time when tender butter leafs and heading varieties do well.

Try super dense Salanova! Johnny’s Seeds says: Harvested as fully mature heads, the flavor and texture have more time to develop than traditional baby-leaf lettuces. The unique structure of the core produces a multitude of uniformly sized leaves, harvestable with one simple cut. Salanova is more than 40% higher yielding, has better flavor and texture, and double the shelf life of traditional baby-leaf lettuce, making it an excellent, more economical option. What do you think about that?!  Beautiful Lettuce!

Perfect timing for tasty root crops – beets, turnips, rutabagas, daikon radish. Beets are a double winner because the roots and the leaves are edible! Pick leaves from time to time. When your beets are the size you want, pull them and eat all the leaves and the beets as well!

Winter is growing time for long Daikon Radish. And Carrots. Carrots are a dense root, so they take a while. Plant short varieties like Thumbelina and Little Fingers for sooner eating. Kids love them! At the same time plant longer varieties to eat when the Little Fingers are done. Or plant successively, every 2 weeks, once a month per your needs. The longer the carrot, the longer it takes to grow. Look at the seed pack to see how many days it takes to maturity. Of course, you can pull them sooner and smaller, like for you and your pup! 🙂 Avoid manuring where you know you will be planting carrots – makes them hairy. Steady water supply and not too much or they split or fork. You might enjoy some of the mixed color packs – Circus Circus, Sunshine, or Cosmic Purple! Tasty Nutritious Carrots!

Parsnips, celery and parsley are all in the carrot family and enjoy cool SoCal weather. Celery is another in-the-garden edible let alone low calorie! Leeks and bunch onions, but, remember, NO onion family near peas.

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 If you haven’t planted already…some of you carry your layout plan in your head, others draw and redraw, moving things around until it settles and feels right. Do add a couple new things just for fun! Try another direction. Add some herbs, flowers for pollinators, or different edible flowers. Leave a little open space for surprises! 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!

Once you have decided what to plant, when is the big question! Day length and temps are important. Temp sequences make a difference! Some plants bolt easily – Cilantro, Brassicas, Beets and Chard. Bolting is when your plant sends up a flowering stalk to seed. Check out Bolting aka Running to Seed! Causes and Prevention!  Day Neutral/Photoperiodism

Where you plant, sun/shade is important. Plant longer maturing larger and taller varieties to the back, shorter early day varieties in front where they will get sun. Put littles on the sunny side of these. Plant your tall plants first, let them get up a bit. Then clip off the lower leaves on the sunny side and plant your littles. Or plant quick rounds of littles between, among the tall plants. They will be ready to harvest when the big plants would start shading them. A classic combo is lettuces among starting cabbages that take quite a while to make their big footprints!

Mixes rule! Plant several varieties for maturity at different times and to confuse pests. Pests are attracted at certain stages of maturity. They may bother one plant but leave others entirely alone depending on temps and the pest’s life cycle! There are less aphids on broccoli when you plant different varieties together. See Super Fall Veggies Varieties, Smart Companion Plantings! for excellent biodiverse choices.

Peas and green manure mixes – legumes and oats, feed and replenish your soil because they take N (Nitrogen) out of the air and deposit it in little nodules on their roots! If an area in your garden needs a pep up, plant it to green manure. Broadcast a seed mix of legumes and oats and let them grow. Bell beans, Austrian peas, vetch and oats from Island Seed & Feed Goleta is an excellent choice. Be sure to get the legume inoculant they recommend to use with it. The first three deposit N; the oats have deep roots that bring nutrients up and create soil channels for oxygen, water, soil organisms and roots! Plant it where next summer’s heavy feeders, like tomatoes, will be grown!

If you are planning for mid January bareroot strawberry planting, be preparing your strawberry patch now if you are planting green manure! The green manure mix I use takes 2+ months to grow. I chop it down when the bell beans start to flower. Chop it into bits, let it lay on the surface 2 weeks. Keep it moist. For strawberries and many other plants, add acidic (azalea/camellia) compost, worm castings and turn it all under at the same time. It takes two to three weeks to decompose, let the soil organisms restabilize, and be ready to plant. That puts us right at mid January when the bareroots arrive! More details on Living Mulch!

Here’s the schedule:

1. Oct 1 plant your living mulch – put this on your garden calendar! If Bell beans are in your seed mix, or are your choice, they take a couple months to start to flower.
2. About Dec 1 chop down/mow, chop up your living mulch and let it lay on the surface two weeks. This is necessary to let the dead plants release the Nitrogen from their roots. If Bell beans are in the mix, chop when they flower or before the stalks will get too tough to easily chop into small pieces. Keep your chopped mulch moist, not wet, until it is tilled in. Being moist aids decomposition.
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 that we are growing them for! At this time add any other amendments you want. Strawberries and many veggies like slightly acidic soil, so I add store bought Azalea/Camellia acid compost. It has little bark bits that add water holding capacity.

OR. Strawberry runner daughters can be clipped Oct 10 to 15, stored in the fridge for planting Nov 5ish in Santa Barbara. Remove any diseased soil where your beds will be; prep your beds with acidic compost like an Azalea mix. Commercial growers replace their plants every year. Some gardeners let them have two years but production of some varieties tapers off a lot the second year. Seascape, bred at UCSB, has excellent second year production! If you let them have two years, generously replenish the soil between the berries with acidic compost. I lay down boards between the rows where my berries will be planted. The boards keep the soil moist underneath. I planted the berries just far enough apart that they self mulched (shaded the soil) when they grew up a bit. Worked beautifully. I got the idea for the boards from a pallet gardener. If you use boards, just lift them, scoop out a little soil, add the new acidic compost.

Plant in super soil to get a good start! Clean up old piles of stuff, remove old mulches that can harbor overwintering pest eggs and diseases. Note whether your plant needs slightly acidic soil and add the right compost for that. Add the best-you-can-get composts, manures, worm castings. Worms casting are especially good in seed beds. They increase and speed germination and boost immunity. In planting holes, toss in a handful of nonfat powdered milk for immediate uptake as a natural germicide and to boost your plant’s immune system. Throw in a handful of bone meal that will decompose for uptake at bloom time, and some bird guano high in P in the NPK ratio, to extend bloom time after that. If you have other treats you like to favor your plants with, give them some of that too! If your soil has Verticillium or Fusarium Wilts, go lightly on incorporating coffee grounds either in your compost or soil. In studies, what was found to work well was coffee grounds at only 0.5 percent of the compost mix. Yes, that’s only 1/2 a percent! See more details about soil building! If you have containers, dump that old spent stuff and put in some tasty new mix!

Winter Feeding Lettuces like a light feed of chicken manure cultivated in the top 1/4 inch. 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 of things easy for them to uptake. Fish emulsion (if you don’t have predators like raccoons or skunks) or a tasty tea mix – compost, worm castings, manure (no manure tea for lettuces). Slow release like alfalfa pellets.

Weather! Rain may be coming. Give your berms a check. Restore or add, shift their location if needed. Before wind or rain, double check cages and trellises, top heavy plants. Stake them, tie peas to the trellis or cage. More Rainy Weather Tips  Start gathering sheets, light blankets for possible cold weather to come. Keep tomato cages handy. Protect Your Veggies from Freezing! Cover and tuck ’em in!

You don’t have to garden this winter!

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. 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. 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 for no work at all!
2. If you have access to materials, another wise option is to do some form of long term sustainable Hugelkultur! There are many variations, quite adaptable to your situation. It can be done in a container, a tub, on a hillside, a field, in your own little garden plot!
3. A third thing is to plant legumes and oats for superb soil restoration that takes some labor, but a lot less than tending your garden on a daily basis! 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, cover ever so lightly with soil, 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, roots.

“Our most important job as vegetable gardeners is to feed and sustain soil life, often called the soil food web, beginning with the microbes. If we do this, our plants will thrive, we’ll grow nutritious, healthy food, and our soil conditions will get better each year. This is what is meant by the adage ‘Feed the soil not the plants.‘ – Jane Shellenberger, Organic Gardener’s Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West (Colorado)

Winter watering in drought areas is the same as for summer. Before 10:30 AM, after 4 PM. Watch which way water flows along the leaves. Some plants it flows to the central stem. Some drip water off the leaf tips in a circle around your plant, the dripline. Some go both ways. Make berms just beyond where the mature plant’s water flows. If at the dripline, that’s where the tiny feeder roots take up moisture and nutrients. That’s why they call them feeder roots! If your garden has a low spot, plant your water loving plants – chard, lettuces, spinach, mizuna, mints – there or near a spigot.

Fall Pests & Diseases

• 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, 1/4 C nonfat powdered milk, 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 under the leaves too!
• Brassicas, Peas! Lots of ants and on Brassicas, lengthwise curling leaves are the giveaways for aphids, then whiteflies. Aphids carry viruses. Aphids come in fat gray or small black. Avoid over watering and feeding that makes for soft plants, tender leaves that aphids thrive on, and ant habitat. Spray aphids and whiteflies 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 is amazing. Ants don’t like it at all, and when you are starting seedlings it prevents molds and damping off. Sprinkle it on the soil in your six pack. Get it in big containers at Smart and Final or bulk food stores. Reapply as needed. ASAP remove yellowing leaves that attract whiteflies.
• Chard, Lettuces, Spinach – Slugs and snails are the bane of so many crops, but these especially. Lay down something like Sluggo immediately. Then do it again in a week or so. Kill the parents, kill the children. After about 3 times you rarely need it again anytime soon.
• Biodiversity In general, avoid row planting where disease and pests wipe the plants out from one to the next to the next. Instead or rows, plant in several different spots. If you can’t help yourself, because your family always planted in rows or that’s the way farm pictures show plantings, remember, this is YOUR garden! Also, leave room so mature plants’ leaves don’t touch. Give them room to breathe, get good big leaves that get plenty of sun and produce lots more big leaves and many big fruits! Stunted crowded rootbound plants just don’t perform as well and are more disease and pest susceptible. Leaving that breathing room between plants pay off when you plant little plants along, under bigger plants. It’s like having two crops in the same space. No need to make separate space for smaller plants. There is no law that says you must plant in a straight line or a separate space! Forget the stakes and twine; plant where you want to! Use companion plants where they will do the most good!

Keep up with your maintenance. Weed so seedlings aren’t shaded out or their nutrients used up.

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 – for you and your pup, beets, cilantro, arugula, onions, 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, Mesclun mixes, and mow them! Tender baby greens! They will grow back 3, 4 times.

Have it in the back of your mind what summer plants you will be wanting, where you will plant them. For example, plant more permanent plants like a broccoli you will keep over summer for side shoots (like All Season F1 Hybrid), or a kale that will keep on going, where they will not be shaded out by taller indeterminate summer tomatoes.

October is the last of Seed Saving time for most of us. 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! Start sorting and labeling seed baggies on coming cooler indoor evenings. Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s plantings. Generously gather seeds for upcoming January Seed Swaps!

Santa Barbara’s 16th Annual Seed Swap is January 26 2024 The last Saturday of January every year is National Seed Swap Day! Look in your area for an event, and if you don’t find one, collaborate with your neighbors, local garden clubs or permaculture group to get one going!

Plant gift plants or bowls or baskets for the holidays now! Make Lavender sachets! Put ribbons on some of your seed jars gifts. See Wonderful Gardener-Style Holiday Gifts!

Take a deep breath of this fine fall weather! Happy Gardening!

Updated annually

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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. Climate is changing, but it has been that 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.

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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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Jammin’ June 2023! 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! How fine.

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 2022 magical 48th Summer Solstice Parade will be IN PERSON June 25! 

Tasty, beautiful and inspirational May garden images at Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara, CA, show how our weather has been and what’s growing! Plant more rounds for a steady table supply!

Abundance is flowing, harvests are happening!

In our area, near the beach in Santa Barbara, we have been having coolish May grays, low morning clouds, some heavy mists, with warm sunny weather predicted soon! Zucchini, cucumbers and lettuces of all kinds are being eaten. Sizable Bell peppers are on board and small Banana, Anaheim and hot Peppers coming; humongous Seascape strawberries are here and tasty! Beans are blooming. BUT, the 25th 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. Be careful with some of your harvests. Clip rather than break away and damage or pull your plant up.

Tomatoes are on the plants. Small 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 for many veggies. 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, but remember, it has a large footprint, and easily spreads! I planted mine in 5 gallon containers with the bottoms removed. It likes a LOT of water! 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! Interplant them with susceptible plants.

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/windy 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. See Growing Super Veggies in HOT, Drought, Desert Areas! for further considerations. 

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 cool. Yes, they are a big plant/vine, 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?! If you are in hot foothills, mulch away!

Surface Feeder Roots are vital! Near the soil surface, they have access to water, nutrients, and oxygen. These elements are more abundant near the soil surface than deep within the soil. Most of a plant’s feeding is near the surface by the horizontal surface feeder roots. They must have water to pickup nutrients the plant needs. In this video, notice how much more root surface is near the soil surface versus the deep central roots! This is why you don’t want to break these roots when you cultivate, surface feed, sidedress your plants. Rather than circling your plant destroying its ability to feed, slowing, stunting it, putting it in recovery rather than production mode, instead, do only a couple small portions of area if necessary. Better is to foliar feed your plant, then, additionally, on the soil surface, add worm castings and a light layer of manure, cover with compost, cover all with mulch to keep your additions moist and from washing away. Gently water in. 

Kidney bean time lapse 25 days|soil cross section. Showing how roots and upper part of plant grows  Please also enjoy the comments!

Keep a sharp eye on tomatoes. If your soil has fungi, that’s wilts or blights, immediately remove leaves touching the ground or will touch the ground if weighted with water! Trim so neighboring plants don’t touch and spread diseases. 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, especially HOT peppers! See Companions above. 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 some tasty worm castings, that light 1/4″ layer of manure, cover with a 1/2 – 1″ of compost. 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 Cucumber, 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 the striped Western cucumber beetle, and both sometimes have a large impact. 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 and a juicy June!

Updated annually

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Check out the entire June 2023 Newsletter!

Peppers, HOT or Not!
Veggie Feeding Schedule for Your Delicious Summer Favorites!
Container Gardening, Garden Anywhere!
Vacation, Super Busy?! Self Watering Systems!
Special Treat! Sweet Summer Magic: Solstice Honey Cookies!

Upcoming Gardener Events: Santa Barbara’s 49th Summer Solstice Parade June 24, ROOTS! July 21 & 22 43rd Annual Seed Savers Exchange Conference! Reminder! Get lodgings for the 10th Annual National Heirloom Exposition, Ventura CA Sep 12-14! Don’t miss this superlative event!

SUBSCRIBE to the entire newsletter!    Friend 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 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!

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Happy Merry May, Cinco de Mayo & Mother’s Day!

Across-the-Plot Gardening Tips May 2023!

Merry May! Radiant Flowers, Luscious Veggies!

Are you having fun?! Does your garden make you this happy?! PLANT MORE! 

Our Santa Barbara April daytime temps varied from 59 to 84! Night temps have been 42 to 56 but dropping back to 47 the first week of May. Depending on what you are planting, some gardeners will wait until Mid-May. Sweet peppers need night temps steadily above 55°F, some say 60, and soil temps above 65°F. Get out your soil thermometer and check the soil temp where you garden! If planted too soon, sometimes plants miss their natural sequence of production, and never produce. Best to replant if you suspect this is happening. In general, plant another round 2 -3 weeks later just in case! See Best Planting Temps Per Veggie!

May, June Planting Timing

MAY is time for cantaloupe, sweet bell peppers, pumpkins and squash! Try some Urizun Japanese Winged Beans! 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. 2022 I tried Heavy Hitter, an early super productive variety. We had a cool summer and the standard Burgundy Okra outperformed it. This red variety has always outperformed every green I’ve grown. 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 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. See more!

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, germination is sooner, seedlings healthier! Plan for year round bee habitat and install helpful companion plants in advance.

Plant another round of your favorite heat lovers! Might be eggplant, limas, bell 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, 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, pink celery, fancy multi-color lettuces! Tips for super Successful Transplanting!

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 and production award!

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 most tomatoes:

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

Check out this nifty page HOW TO GROW TOMATOES IN HOT WEATHER at Bonnie Plants! Do these things well in advance to be ready! Select as Julie Martens recommends: ‘Heat-tolerant tomato varieties like Heatmaster, Solar Fire, Summer Set, and Phoenix can form fruit even as temperatures climb. These tomatoes are often described as “heat set” types, or have heat-related words or locations in their names.’ If your plant is not heat tolerant, wait. When things cool down, your plant will start making flowers and setting fruit again. See also Tomatoes are the Fireworks of Your Summer Garden!

Tomatoes! Heirlooms are particularly susceptible to the wilts, Fusarium and Verticillium. If your soil is infected, 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 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. Home Improvement/ACE has the largest tomato selection in the Santa Barbara area! See Special Planting and Growing Tips for your Tomatoes and Cucumbers! 

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!

Strengthen your summer garden!  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 and feeds mini beneficial pest predators like hoverflies whose primary food source is aphids!
• Basil repels several unwanted insects, is great near tomatoes but not in the basin with the tom. The tom needs less water. 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 unless you are growing long cuke varieties. They can fill a trellis all by themselves! Dill to go with pickling cukes. Radishes to deter Cucumber beetles.
• WHITE Potatoes with Zucchini & 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! Plus, it helps neighboring plants – called the Plant Dr!
• Calendula traps aphids, whiteflies, and thrips! Plant with tomatoes and asparagus.
• 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 .
• Spanish Lavender, Purple Cosmos are favorites of pollinators that love purple!
• 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, beets and carrots, scatter a living mulch, soil feeding legume seed mix under those plants. At the end of the season you can turn it all under – aka Green Manure. Or remove the larger plants, open up spots in the living mulch and put in winter/summer plants! See much more – Living Mulch/Green Manure!
• Hot peppers emit a chemical from the plant roots that helps prevent Fusarium wilt, root rot, and a wide range of other plant diseases!Plant whole sets of companion plants as in the image above right! Very efficient use of space!See more at Super Spring & Summer Veggies Companion Planting Tips!

Now is the time watering becomes critical!

Lots of rain so far this year. But, please, always use your Water Wise Practices!

Please water before 10:30 AM and after 4 PM as possible. Use a watering sprinkler head or wand with an easy-to-use shutoff valve. Berms need to go to the dripline or further for some plants so tiny subsurface feeder roots can fully supply your plant with water and nutrients as it needs.

SEEDS need to be kept moist. If they dry they die. If the soil gets a dry crust, tiny seedlings might not be able to push through. Covering it very lightly with a very fine textured mulch like ‘Gorilla Hair’ can help. It keeps the soil moist longer and seedlings can push through it. If not, 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 seeds… Always purchase extra seed for accidents and incidents, ie birds or insects, extreme temps.

A consideration for seeds is for convenience, plant them in a very mini ‘trench,’ nursery bed or patch, a low spot you make for them. That area will stay moist longer. Plant your seeds, cover with fine hairy light mulch. Try it! Once the seedlings have second leaves, transplant them to their permanent homes.

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 or if you have planted seed have seedlings just up. In our area there are hot days, cool days, overcast days, sometimes 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. If you have seeds in, you might provide shade and water twice a day! 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.

To SAVE WATER In Santa Barbara, a long summer, low water table area, consider getting only indeterminate tomatoes. To keep a tomato supply for your table, if you plant determinates, that have a burst of tomatoes then taper off, you have to keep planting, wait for another two months to produce. Your new tomato will need water while there is no production. Indeterminates produce all summer long, with no waiting. Determinates are good for cooler northern short summers and crops that come in all at once for canning! Early determinates are good for getting tomatoes on the table soonest! It is common practice to plant both at first planting time.

• Use 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. See Hand Watering Veggies During Drought? Big Yes!
• Furrows, basins and berms are perfect for water capture, just like the SW indigenous peoples did with their waffle gardens. The water collects at the bottom, the drying 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, less work because no berms need to be made. Let the normal soil level be the ‘berm’ for the wind to blow over. See Growing Super Veggies in HOT, Drought, Desert Areas!

Most plants need to be kept moist. Kept moist. Dry crusty soil keeps your soil from breathing. Compost, worm castings, mulch and planting living mulch are all good answers. Compost has excellent water holding capacity. Work it in gently around your plant to just beyond its drip line. 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. Feeder roots provide most of the nutrition and moisture for your plant, and it will set your production back if your plant has to stop, gets hungry, must regrow them. Worm Castings have super water holding capacity! Mulch only if your soil temps are up to par. Otherwise, wait, so the mulch doesn’t keep your soil cool. In a cool summer you might choose not to lay down mulch.

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 bulk 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 not touching the stem, or plant a dense understory of living mulch that won’t be harvested, or if you do harvest, cover that spot with straw ASAP! 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.

Pumpkins, melons and winter squash may do much better with NO mulch at all! They all need heat. Rather than trellis these crops, up in the cooling air, leave them on the ground where it’s good and hot. You might even put in a straw bale windbreak for them if you have the room. Put the bales on their sides in a U shape that opens to the hottest time of day sun! Put reflective pie tins under fruits, or mulch under the fruits to keep them clean and above ground insect level.

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.

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, attract pollinators, enhance each other’s growth so they are strong and pest and disease resistant. Mix it up! Less planting in rows, more under stories and intercropping – biodiversity. Split up groups so pests won’t go from one plant to the next, and the next. When you do rows, alternate plants like a tomato, eggplant, pepper. 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 2-3 months later uptake when your plant gets to flowering time.
   – Add bird guano high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time. It helps your plants continue to bloom LATE in the season! An NPK ratio like 1-10-0.2 is good, takes 4 months to become available to your plants.
   – Add an eency tad of coffee grounds (a 1/2 of a %) if you have wilts in your soil
   – Sprinkle mycorrhizae fungi directly on transplant roots, all but Brassicas, at planting time to increase their uptake of nutrients and water.
   – Use slightly acidic compost 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 foliar feed 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 foliar feeding 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, leafminers.
8. Trap gophers immediately if you are able. Better is to install underground wire prevention.
9. Harvest promptly. Insects and diseases can signal when plants/fruits are softening and losing strength as they age, are past prime. 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.
10. Prevention A frustrating typical spring disease is Powdery mildew. It’s common on late peas, Curly Leaf kales, broccoli, beans, cucumbers and zucchini. Choose mildew resistant varieties! Plant leaving plenty of space for air circulation. Apply your baking soda mix. Drench under and upper sides of the foliage of young plants to get them off to a great start! Do this the same or next day if transplanting. A super combo is 1 regular Aspirin dissolved, a 1/4 cup nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon liquid dish soap per gallon/watering can. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains. Not only is prevention so much better than after mildew has set in, but this mix stimulates your plant’s growth! See Aspirin Solution.Cornell’s Disease Resistant Vegetable Varieties LIST is awesome! Take a peek before you order seeds or buy transplants! It may take some time to make your choices, but is so worth it! A point to know is some varieties are commercial, meaning they are tough enough to last through shipping, and all the time it takes to process the fruits. If you are eating fresh from your garden, you may not prefer some of those varieties. Try two or three so you have some choices. Look up the variety online and see other home gardeners’ comments. Note if the commenters are in an area with similar planting conditions as yours. If a commercial seed company is the seed seller, sometimes they will also sell in mini quantities to home gardeners! Yay! Just call that 800# and ask! Often they really enjoy talking with a home gardener, delighted you called! They generally are very well informed because their business depends on it. They can tell you inside things that aren’t in the catalogs!

The usual May culprits!

• Cucumber Beetles get in cucumber, squash and melon blossoms. They aren’t picky. Depending on your location, 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 wilts, Fusarium and Verticillium, and mosaic virus, deadly to cukes, etc. 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.
• Cucumber Mosaic Virus, CMV, per IPM ‘…has a very wide host range including cucurbits (except watermelon), tomato, spinach, celery, safflower, beans, blackeyes, peppers, beets, potatoes, many ornamentals and weeds. The virus is transmitted by many species of aphids and could be seedborne.’ Buy your seeds from reputable seed houses.The 303 Plots, each 20′ X 30′, Long Beach CA Community Garden has been doing trials under guidance of entomologist, Dr. Perring at UC Riverside. Gardener Joanne Rice reports:1. Since aphids carry the virus from specific perennial weeds, we are trying to keep everything weed free.2. Starting January 1st, all members have been asked to put up yellow sticky cards to reduce the number of aphids for the year. Aphids hate hot weather so their mating time is the cold months. Dr. Perring says that will help. Also, since aphids hate hot weather, we will probably not plant squash or cucumbers until July when our real heat starts.3. Dr. Perring, when we talked, said that CMV does not damage the soil. The CMV, is on the roots of the infected plants and if when you remove the plants you do not remove every root,  you will get CMV at next planting. [REMOVE suffering plants immediately so they don’t make more infected roots. If you think you may have missed some, remove any questionable soil well beyond the dripline and Do Not put that soil anywhere you will be growing vegetables.]

  4. We are currently working on a list of veggies, Summer and Winter, that are known to be CMV resistant. If you have such a list, I certainly would appreciate it. [If any of you have a list, please send it to us!]

• 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 whiteflies. 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 above. Could be right in your front yard! Be creative! 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. Comfrey, mint and oregano are invasive. Remove the bottom of a 5 gal container, sink it where you want your plant and plant in it. That contains the roots where you want them. Mint can jump ship, so keep a constant eye on it! Be mindful where you plant your herbs… 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, soft herbs like 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. Bumble Bees are special and need our support!

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 – purple cosmos, marigold, white sweet alyssum – all benefit your garden in their own way! See Grow a Pollinator Meadow at Home in Your Veg Garden!

To plant a seed is to believe in tomorrow.  

Audrey Hepburn, born May 4, 1929
Great Images at Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA!

Updated annually

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Check out the entire May 2023 Newsletter!  

The Magic of Melons ~ Cantaloupe, Honeydew!
Pollination: Honeybees, Squash Bees & Bumblebees!
Mulching ~ Why, When, With What, How Much?!
Growing Super Veggies in Hot, Dry Desert Areas!

Upcoming Gardener Events! 13th International Permaculture Day May 7!  49TH Summer Solstice Parade June 25 2023, Theme is ROOTS!  ADVANCE NOTICE NATIONAL HEIRLOOM EXPO Sep 2023!

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 remaining Santa Barbara City’s community gardens are very coastal. Climate is changing, but it has been that 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.

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April 2023 Oh, Yes, Time for Those Luscious Heat Lovers!

Across-the-Plot Gardening Tips April 2023!

Oh, Yes, Time for Those Luscious Heat Lovers!

…each a miracle of seed and sun, I’ve always been one to enjoy tomato or cucumber right off the vine, with never a trip into the house—one magical wipe down a shirt-front and they’re ready. ~ commenter Rachel

Happy Santa Barbara Earth Day! It returns to Alameda Park Saturday and Sunday April 29 & 30! The 151st Arbor Day is Friday April 28! Please plant trees, lots of trees!

March 30 Santa Barbara had 1-3” of SNOW on our mountains, and, yes, it’s been chill, and we have rain saturated soil! Many gardeners are waiting for mid to late April to plant in drier soil. Night temps have still been in the 40s, in the next five days predicted as low as 44°. 60° to 65° soil temps are what we are looking for. BELL PEPPERS especially need warmer temps, nighttime temps steadily above 55°F and soil temps above 65°F. If planted too soon, sometimes they miss their natural growth sequence and never produce. Check out the Quick Guide to Summer Veggie Soil & Temp Preferences!

APRIL through JUNE Planting Timing  

Weather note! In Santa Barbara it is cooler and a lot more moist than usual. As it warms, mildew will be in the picture. The soil is saturated and when it warms a bit, it is prime fungus – verticillium and fusarim wilts, habitat. The crops that suffer the most from wilts are tomatoes and cucumbers, squashes coming in third. Some gardeners will be waiting until May/June, when the soil is more dry, to plant those crops. Resistant/tolerant varieties will do well as long as they can. If you plant now, be prepared to start some new plants again, in May and/or June.

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

While we are waiting for the right temps, do soil preps that may still be 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 composted manure, and worm castings too! If you don’t have enough castings, save what you have and add to your planting holes amendments.

Keep COMPOSTING! Soil building is the single-most important thing you can do for your garden. Compost keeps your soil aerated, has great water holding capacity, feeds slowly just perfectly! And if you made it, you know what’s in it! Make it HOT, Cold, or In Place! In place takes the least time, is the most efficient, is a worm buffet! Make a trench 6-8″ deep, put in your ingredients, chop fine with your shovel, sprinkle with well aged composted manure, mix in some soil so the chopped bits don’t form an impervious mat, cover with the soil you removed. Give it 1 to 3 weeks and you are ready to plant! Dry is dead, so be sure it is always slightly moist. Giving back to Mama Earth is nature’s natural way! And, like Will Allen says ….there is something very Spiritual about touching the soil, that’s where life begins.

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

Heat lovers are eggplant, limas, okra and bell peppers, pumpkins! Transplant early-maturing varieties of beans, cucumbers, eggplant, melons, bell peppers, squash, and tomatoes. Sow and/or transplant asparagus, beets, carrots, celery, chard, corn, herbs, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, heat-tolerant leaf lettuce, okra, summer-maturing onions, parsley, peanuts, the last peas (choose a heat-tolerant variety such as Wando), white potatoes with zucchini, radishes (with cukes and squashes to repel cucumber beetles, and with cukes, squashes and eggplant to trap flea beetles!), rhubarb, and spinach.

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! See Tomatoes are the Fireworks of Your Summer Garden!

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

Time for heat-resistant, bolt-resistant lettuces of all kinds! Sierra, Nevada, Jericho, Black Seeded Simpson are some. Green Star wins the beauty award and is super productive! Tips for super Successful Transplanting!

 

Strengthen your summer garden! Organize your Companion plant sets! Keep the biodiversity rolling! Plant pest deterring plants first so they will be up and working when you put in your seeds or transplants!

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

Keep ’em coming! If you have already done some early planting, at mid to late April schedule to pop in another round! Poke in some bean seeds where your very last peas are finishing, add cucumber seeds or transplants between the beans, plus dill at each end of the trellis to be there when you pickle those cukes! Plant more radishes to deter the Cucumber beetles, repel flea beetles. Fill in spots that could use a helper companion plant like calendula or chamomile! Succession planting makes such good sense. To keep a steady supply of your veggies, put your seeds and transplants in at the same time. Seedlings will come along 6 to 8 weeks after your transplants! But, again, if tending seedlings isn’t your cup of tea, just leave space and put in more transplants in 6 to 8 weeks after your first planting.

It is perfect to put in fast growers like lettuce, beets, turnips, arugula, to hold space until you are ready to plant bigger plants. When it’s time for the bigger ones, clear a space/harvest, pop in your seeds or transplants and let them grow up among the littles. As the bigger plants start to shade out the littles, remove strategic lower leaves of the big plant so the littles get light too! If you anticipate a HOT summer, plant littles on the morning light side of larger plants.

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

Natural Disease & Pest Prevention!

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

Lots of rain so far this year. But, please, always use your Water Wise Practices!

Please water before 10:30 AM and after 4 PM as possible. Use a watering sprinkler head or wand with a shutoff valve. Berms need to go to the dripline of your plant so tiny subsurface feeder roots can fully supply your plant with water and nutrients as it needs. Some plants need ground water to 1 and a half times the size of the foliage diameter. Slow, spread Sink!

• Choose heat and drought tolerant varieties! They need less water! Some will keep producing at 85° and above!
• How much should you water? General rule is 1″/week. May take two, three waterings a day in extreme hot weather. Seeds and seedlings must be KEPT moist. On very hot days frequent waterings during the day may be needed. Some of your plants may need shade covers.
• Trenches or waffles?! To save water consider planting IN furrows, where moisture settles and drying wind crosses overhead. Plant crosswise to the prevailing wind so drying wind isn’t funneled down the trench, and, if possible, also to the Sun’s arc so the plants’ root areas will be slightly shaded by the depth of the furrow in early AM and late afternoon. If you still want your plants on top of the furrow, make the raised part of your furrows wide enough that you can put a mini trench on top of it! That’s what commercial strawberry farmers do. That holds the water up at your plants’ surface feeder roots area. If you make the sides of your trenches low slopes, and water carefully, your furrows won’t seriously degrade from water washing the sides away. Nor will seeds or plants be buried too deeply. But some maintenance will be required.Plants grown in thoughtfully made trenches need far less waterings and far less maintenance time. As the plants grow, they also self mulch and need even less water and less frequent waterings.Trench planting is akin to the New Mexico Zuni waffle gardens. The advantage of waffle gardens is, you can see, the wind and sun arc directions don’t matter to waffle gardens! The wind can change direction and it’s no problem! Berms cover all four sides. You can save the making and maintenance of berms by simply digging down! Zuni climate is hot and dry, sometimes windy. The berms/sides that shelter each waffle space cause hot drying winds to rise/cross over the waffle and it stays more moist inside. Be sure to mulch your waffles after the soil gets warm and before temps get hot. At that point you want to keep your soil moist and cool. The early Zunis used gravel from the nearby riverbeds. Similar sunken beds for growing food with less water have been used globally in arid regions, arising independently by Indigenous farmers.Curtis Quam’s waffle garden, which he tends with his family at Zuni Pueblo, NM = less water used, food security. By Greta Moran, photo by Curtis Quam.
• Please always be building compost. Compost increases your soil’s water holding capacity.
• When planting, make mounds with basins on top for virus sensitive plants like toms and cukes, make sure the bottom of the basin is higher than the level of the surrounding soil level. Rather than losing water to evaporation from overhead watering, put the water right where it will do the most good and nowhere else. Make the mound to the dripline or to 1.5 of it so your plant’s small surface feeder roots get moisture for food uptake. For larger leaved plants like squashes, put a stake in the center of the basin so you know where to water when the leaves get big and cover the basin. With a long watering wand you can water under the leaves rather than on them ~ unless they need a bath to remove dust. Fuzzy leaved plants like tomatoes, eggplant and zucchini don’t like wet leaves. Water at ground level.
• Once your soil is heated up, PLEASE MULCH! Straw, Self Mulching, a living mulch of understory plants like lettuce, or plant soil feeding living mulch legumes! It keeps your soil cooler, more moist, less water needed. And it stops light germinating weed seeds from germinating! Super heat lovers like melons and winter squash may be the exception. See Mulching right for each plant!Straw is dead, but has its advantages. It is organic and does decompose in time. It gets fruits up off the ground and keeps soil from splashing up on lettuce leaves! If not too deep, straw can shade but allow airflow. Your soil is cool but if has fungi it is best to let the soil dry a bit. Straw mulch can help reduce cucumber beetles 3+ different ways. 1) Mulch might directly slow beetle movement from one plant to another. 2) The mulch provides refuge for wolf spiders, daddy long legs and other predators from hot and dry conditions, helping predator conservation. 3) The straw mulch is food for springtails and other insects that eat decaying plant material; these decomposers are important non-pest prey for spiders, helping to further build spider numbers! In addition, laid on an inch or less thick, it lets airflow dry out wilts fungi in soil. That’s why straw is good to use under tomatoes and cucumbers. With other plants, lay it on 3-6″ deep!Living Mulch, Self mulching, planting closely enough so your plants self shade, is a tasty and efficient use of your soil nutrients. It’s doubly efficient space use when you plant smaller companion food producing plants under, beside, among, around larger plants!Soil feeding Living Mulch You can up the amps by tossing a mix of legume seeds under your plants to feed your soil as well! You may decide to do both. Plant the small plants you need, grow legumes under the rest along with the right companion plants per the crop there.
• Sprinkle and pat on Mycorrhiza fungi right on the roots of your transplants when you put them in the ground. It increases uptake of nutrients, water, and phosphorus that helps roots and flowers grow and develop. Ask for it bulk at Island Seed & Feed in Goleta. (Brassicas don’t connect with it, so your over summering kale or broccoli doesn’t need it.)
• Dust Mulching, cultivation, weeding, is perfect to break up exposed soil surface. That keeps the water from wicking to the surface and evaporating. Do it especially after rains. If you use a hula hoe you do two things at once! Just a half to one inch depth cuts off weed sprouts that use water. Indeed, it turns the soil a tad, all that’s needed. More weeds will follow, but it’s quick and easy to repeat the process. Two, three times, a few days apart, and there will be few weeds after that for a while. Get ’em while they are small and easy to do. Smart gardening.

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

May your crops be abundant and your Spirit blessed!

March Cabbages, Kale, seedlings and flowers! Great Images at Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA!

Updated annually 

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Check out the entire April 2023 Newsletter!

Designing Your Spring/Summer Veggie Garden!
Quick Guide to Summer Veggie Soil & Temp Preferences!
Seed Soaking/Presprouting Tips & Ideas! Part 1
Veg Gardening Changing Climate Survival Guide!
The Inspiring Permaculture Restoration of Mexico City’s Chinampas

Upcoming Gardener Events! Santa Cruz Permaculture 2023 Design Permaculture Course April-Sep, April 29-20 CEC’s 53rd Santa Barbara Earth Day Celebration! International Permaculture Day May 7! ADVANCE NOTICE NATIONAL HEIRLOOM EXPO Sep 2023!

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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. Climate is changing, but it has been that 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.

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A Happy New Year of Delicious Gardening to you!

Across-the-Plot Gardening Tips January 2023!

Winter Harvests, Soil, Planning Your Spring Garden!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year Gardening and Feasting!

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

Updated annually 

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Check out the entire January 2023 Newsletter!

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

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

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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. Climate is changing, but it has been that 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.

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Happy December 2022! A Blessed Holiday Season to You and Yours! Thank you always for your kind support!

Delicious December ~ Winter’s June 2022!

Harvests, Maintenance, Planning & Getting Seeds!

A misty morning at the garden…..

We in SoCal are so fortunate that we can plant heartily in ‘Winter!’ Brassicas and Peas are the main story. What I call the ‘littles’ are the understory! Lettuces, root crops like beets, parsnips, turnips, Daikon radish. Smellies like onions and garlic, cilantro and arugula, and herbs like Rosemary and others, protect your garden from certain pests, and make your garden oh so fragrant and your meals so tasty!

If you already have these going, plant your last rounds now so waiting for their harvest doesn’t interfere with earliest spring plantings.

The 10 hour day! Here’s a point to know and remember! Some plants stop growing or grow very slowly with less than 10 hour days. In a greenhouse you can add lighting and that will keep them going. In Santa Barbara CA we get to just under that 10 hrs December and January. At that time some of your lettuces may take a break. Either some supplemental purchases may be needed, or change some of your eating choices for a while…

During the cold months, northern gardeners eagerly wait for the more than 10 hour days to return so they can start planting! Our Stoney Acres, in Riverton UT zone 6a, recommends heating your soil for early seed planting germinating by covering your soil with clear 10 mil plastic – lasts longer and can be reused, 3 weeks before you intend to plant! Amazing soil temp difference! See more!

Well, there are several important events in December, LOL.

1. First is being sure everyone who knows you, knows what is on your holiday garden wish list!
2. Plan your 2022 gardens, get catalogs, and order seeds NOW – for the entire year to come!
3. Maintain your garden, keep up with SoCal winter harvesting, enjoy your bounty, try some new recipes!
4. If you wish, plant your last round of winter plants, succession planting – know that if they come in late they may interfere with earliest spring planting space. Place them carefully so tall early spring plants can be installed on time. Or leave those spots open. ‘Open’ might mean just putting some lettuces or other ‘littles’ there.

Harvest Brassicas of all sorts! The big ones, broccoli, cauliflower, kale and Brussels sprouts, have grown big enough now and your earliest plantings and varieties are producing handsomely. Harvest your brocs and caulies while the heads are still tight. If you miss that, harvest asap, even the flowers and flower stalks are edible! After you take the main broccoli head, let your plant continue to grow so it will produce smaller side shoots. Some varieties produce large 3 to 4″ mini brocs and later, smaller salad size ones right on through summer! Cauliflowers are a one time harvest though you can keep eating the greens. To replace them, you might choose to pop in some beautiful chard, a potato patch, or quick growing mini cabbages in the large open spots that become available. Some cabbages, especially the mini and early varieties, are now headed tightly and ready to eat – slaw, steamed, dropped into soups and cold weather stews. You can still replant them with mini cabbies if you love them!

Deliciously fresh and nutritious winter heading lettuces, kale, celery, bok choy, cilantro, arugula and all manner of cut and come agains are in! Table onions scallions, chives and leeks can be snipped or cut off about 2″ above the ground and let to grow back 3 to 4 times! Do the same but at about 3″ with cilantro and arugula. Let some of your cilantro and arugula grow out for flowers to bring the bees, make seeds for the birds and for you to plant more! The simplest way is to scatter some of the seeds where they are needed and let them come up at will!

Winter brings a lot of tasty Root Crops. Winter long Cylindra Beets are colorful, and have cut and come again leaves too! Long winter radishes like Daikons are spicy! Carrots are splendid to eat at the garden, share with your kids, pup, bunnies, shred into salads, add to winter soups, stews and stir frys. Slice/chop/make sticks and freeze for later! Grow some Parsnips too! Turnips have so unique a flavor you might want to eat them separately to just enjoy that flavor.

Harvest peas when they get to the size you want them, and be prompt and regular with that harvesting to keep them coming! Plant more rounds if you love peas!

MAINTAINING

Sidedressing is like snacking. Some of your heavy leaf producers and big bodied Brassicas, may need a feeding now and again or just when they start to fruit. If they slow down, or just don’t look perky, slip them a liquid feed out to their dripline, or cultivate in a wee bit of blood meal. Get your long spouted watering can and foliar feed! Get that nozzle under those low cabbage leaves to get them fed there too! Lettuces love manures. Compost and manure teas, fish emulsion (when there are no digging predators), powdered box ferts, are all good. Winter feeds need to be easy for your plant to take up. Use ½ the strength of your summer feedings. Slow release is a wise consideration. An excellent way to get feeds to the roots is to push in a spade fork no more than 6″ deep. Push it in vertically (so as not to break the main tap roots), wiggle it back and forth just a bit, remove the fork, pour your foods into the holes, close ’em back up. Soil organisms will get right to work, your plant will stay healthy and be quite productive! Worm castings, though not food, work wonders with immunity, soil conditioning and help germination! Mix some in with your liquid feeds you pour around your plant. Especially add them to seed patches before planting! Protect the patch from worm loving predators.

The exceptions are carrots, peas and favas. Carrots get hairy and will fork with too much food! Over watering or uneven watering makes them split and misshapen. Your peas and favas are busy gathering Nitrogen from the air, feeding themselves. But if you didn’t use an inoculant when you planted the seeds, they may not be able to produce their own Nitrogen. If they yellow or look peaked, give them a bit, just a sprinkle or two, of blood meal for quick uptake, a little fish emulsion. Protect them from predators attracted to blood and fish.

A mini task is to keep covering the shoulders of carrots, beets, radishes, parsnips and turnips. They substantially push right up above ground as they grow. Planting their seeds deeper doesn’t compensate. It’s the nature of the veggie! Never hurts to put a handy little pile of extra soil near where you plant them, or plant them in a low sloped trench. When they need covering, pull the sides of the trench down to cover them. Uncovered shoulders look dry, are tough, sometimes bitter, and need peeling before cooking. Uncovered carrot shoulders don’t ripen but stay green, just like exposed parts of potatoes turn green. The green on potatoes is slightly poisonous, not enough to do harm, but it doesn’t look good.

Watering is important even in cool weather. Also, some plants simply like being moist ie chard, lettuce and short rooted peas, beets. No swimming, just moist. Finger check your soil after rains to see if your soil is moist at least 2″ deep. Sometimes it is rain moistened only 1/4″ deep, needs more water! Also, be careful of too much water, that makes for an aphid tasty soft plant. Watch WEATHER reports in case of freezes, heavy winds, rain. Before weather, stake and tie plants that need support. After strong winds check everybody right away to see if any plants need help. See more about rainy days!

Santa Barbara’s average First Frost (fall) date AT THE AIRPORT is December 19, Last Frost (spring) date is (was?) January 22. That can vary from the coastal areas to the foothills, and our climate is changing generally to warmer, so these dates may not be viable guides much longer, if even now. And remember, these are average dates! See great tips – Protect Your Veggies from Freezing

Except for erosion control, in winter, we pull mulch back to let the soil warm up during the short winter days. The only areas we mulch are around lettuces and chard to keep mud splash off the leaves. Also, it’s good to remove pest habitat, let the soil dry a bit between rains to kill off wilts fungi. Bag up, or pile and cover clean uninfested summer straw, mulches, to use as compost pile layers during winter. Do not keep straw from areas where there have been infestations. Don’t put it in compost, bag and trash it.

Pests & Diseases Prevention and removal! Keep an eye out for pests and diseases and take quick action! 

BEFORE you put in seeds, sprinkle a bit of Sluggo type stuff around at least two times (to kill the generations) to keep snails and slugs from vanishing upcoming seedlings overnight, making you think they never came up! No, they didn’t let you down. Killing off the creatures ahead of time saves the babies. It stops new transplants from being seriously damaged or entirely eaten while they are small. Do this a few times, to knock off the generations, and there will be no tiny vegetarian predators for a while.

Don’t lose your crops to birds! There is less food for them in winter, and, often, little rain, so they resort to eating tender juicy veggie leaves and sip the dewdrops. Buy pre made covers, or get clever and cover seeded rows with DIY small openings wire tunnels or a patch cover bent that has sides bent to the ground to keep birds from pecking at little leaves or from plucking tiny seedlings right out of the ground! You can also use small plastic bottle sections to make mini sleeves that birds won’t go down into. Or for baby lettuces, make large plastic bottle cloches, though wire covers let more light in and water through! Bird netting is inexpensive, tears easily, but is good to stretch over peas on a trellis. See more about bird, animal and insect above ground protection covers!

A common pest of Brassicas is the larvae of the pretty little Cabbage White Butterfly, Pieris rapae. The green Cabbage Worm, caterpillar, chews large, irregular holes in the leaves. They blend so well you can easily miss seeing them on the undersides of leaves. Per Natural Planet: ‘They lay up to 200 tiny yellow eggs that hatch in 7 or more days. The larvae feed heavily for 15 or more days. There are 3 to 5 overlapping generations each year, as many as 8 in warmer areas. They bore into the center of cabbage heads contaminating them with its fecal pellets. The dark-green pellets can also be found in the crook of leaves near the stem.’ See here for some terrific natural ideas on what to do!

Chard and beets get Leafminers. Where they have eaten looks terrible but the good part of the leaves is perfectly safe to eat. Plant chard so mature leaves don’t touch, or best of all, in different places around your garden, not in rows or clusters. Thin your plants so they have room. Harvest leaves that might touch first. Remove infested leaves immediately to reduce spread! Beets are not a permanent crop, so they are planted closely. Simply harvest them at their leaves’ prime – ahead of the Leafminers.

A typical disease is Powdery mildew. Plant leaving plenty of space for air circulation, water early in the day so they dry before evening. For mildew apply your baking soda mix. The best combo is 1 regular Aspirin, a 1/4 cup nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a teaspoon liquid dish soap per gallon/watering can. Before sunrise drench under and upper sides of the foliage of young plants to get them off to a great start! It takes only an hour for the mix to be absorbed! Do this the same or next day if transplanting. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains. This also means no overhead watering, ground level only. Prevention is so much better than after mildew has set in. See Aspirin Solution. Hose away aphids and whiteflies, mildew. Remove yellowing Brassica leaves. Yellow attracts whiteflies. In general, plant further apart for air circulation, water and feed just a little less to let those leaves harden up a bit. Soft fat leaves are an invitation to aphids and mildew!

Do not compost diseased or infested leaves or plants. Don’t put them in green waste. Bag and put them in the trash. Wash your hands and clippers before you go to other plants.

Windy days are prime time to gather leaves to add to compost or process for Leaf Mold, Mulch or Compost! Leaf Mold is low in nutrients, but makes a superb soil improver, conditioner for vegetable and flower beds. Leaf mulch is free for the making! Leaf Compost processes faster when made the right way! See more!

PLANT JUDICIOUSLY NOW

Per square foot, fast growing cut-and-come-again Lettuce, Chard and Kale are by far the top winter producers! Plant more big plants like brocs and cauliflower, but remember, with cooler weather, they will grow more slowly. That may interfere with early spring plantings in March. Allow enough time to let added compost, manures, worm castings and Sphagnum peat moss (increases water holding capacity) become part of the soil organism community. If you do plant more now, better to get transplants if you can, and shave six weeks of their needed growing time to maturity. Select faster maturing varieties now.

As lettuces tire, and other plants like carrots and beets are removed, add more of them and any ‘littles’ you love on the sunny side and between the big plants. If the littles need more sun, remove large lower leaves of the big plants. Mild tasting littles include bok choy, kohlrabi, garden purslane, arugula, mizuna, watercress, young parsnips and turnips, Daikon winter radishes, and Napa cabbage. For a little more spice, go for those dark green kales, mustard, rutabaga and turnip greens! Try some culinary dandelions for super nutrition! These are plants that will take you through February, March and leave enough time to add compost and to let sit until major spring planting begins in April.

Believe me, you are going to get spring planting fever along about March, so plan ahead for it!!! Start seeds indoors the first three weeks of January for early March plantings! Choose varieties that are cold tolerant and are early maturers for the soonest table eats!

If you have enough seeds, over planting is fair game! Thin your beets, carrots, chard, kale, mustard, turnips. Take out the smaller, weaker plants. They are great in your salads along with small tender Brassica leaves. Plant patches of Mizuna and mow it!

Remember your winter companion planting tips:

1. Carrots enhance peas, onion family stunts peas
2. Carrots thrive when Cilantro, Chamomile (a spring/summer plant), Marigold are planted with them.
3. Onions, leeks and chives help repel the carrot root fly. But remember you can’t put the onion family near peas!
4. Lettuces repel cabbage white butterflies. Plant them generously among your Brassicas.
5. Cilantro enhances Brassicas – broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale and repels aphids on them!

Besides beautiful bareroot roses, decide now where you will be buying any January bareroot veggies you want! Consider: grape vines; artichokes; short-day (sweet) globe onions; strawberries: cane berries such as raspberries (get low-chill types); low-chill blueberries; and rhubarb (be cautious where you plant it, it can be poisonous to humans – children, dogs and chickens), asparagus, and horseradish. Artichoke pups need 3’ to 4’ space, 6′ to 8′ is more a reality! They are hefty growers and live 10 years! If you keep them watered, and there is enough space, they are a great street strip plant!

SPRING PREPS especially include getting the right seeds! 

Seeds! Place your order for the entirety of 2023, while seeds are still available. Now is the perfect time to sit with seed catalogs, do online research. Get your summer garden layout in mind. Dovetail it with your fall/winter 2023 choices! First choose what is good for your excellent health! Next might be how much plant you get per square foot if you have limited space and want to feed several people. When we are in drought conditions, water could be a strong consideration. Choose cold and/or heat and drought tolerant varieties per your location. Always look for disease and pest resistance per your location.

When you are planting from seeds, it’s essential to know your long and short day varieties because of your location, equator to Alaska, north or south US! See Short Day, Long Day, Day Neutral Plants -Photoperiodism! Another essential factor is days to maturity, especially if you are a northern planter!

This is the time of year when the seeds of plants that self-seed need to be in the cold! Throw them on the ground now where you want them to come up in spring. Stake the area so you don’t disturb them and know where to keep the soil moist. Cover the seed bed with something tough like hardware cloth that has small openings to protect from digging predators like raccoons if you have them. I put heavy stones on the hardware cloth to hold it in place. As soon as the seedlings start coming up, remove the hardware cloth and enclose the area until the plants are up, well and deeply rooted. This over wintering process is called Cold Stratification! Thank goodness there are other options if you miss this window. See the post.

Soonest table supply tricks! Get some early varieties, for earliest harvests along with later maturing varieties for a continuous table supply. Earlier variety fruits are generally smaller, but what a treat! Of the tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes come in first. Another trick is to plant both bush and pole varieties at the same time. The bush varieties come in sooner, followed by the pole varieties that produce continuously through the season – beans, cucumbers, peas! Peas are shorter lived; plant frequently. Cucumbers often don’t have the best disease resistance. Get the most resistant varieties and be prepared to replant in different locations.

Buying Lettuce Seeds: Summer Lettuce Varieties: In summer you want a stronger lettuce, heat tolerant & slow bolting! Lettuce Leaf Red Sails is a beauty. Jericho Romaine from Israel has become the classic summer romaine for warm regions. Sierra, Nevada. Parris Island is slow bolting. Green Towers Romaine tolerates moderate summer heat and has some resistance to tip burn and bolting. Green Star is phenomenal! Super productive, tolerance to hot weather, bolting, and tipburn, so it can be grown all season. High resistance to downy mildew. Black Seeded Simpson. And there are more – try several! Winter Lettuces favor heading and thin leaved varieties. If your area is frost prone, choose frost hardy varieties.

Know your Cucumbers! If you have been getting few fruits, low pollination is a likely factor. There are several special considerations ~ if you want to grow the best and which varieties will do what you need, how to hand pollinate or not at all, selecting companion plants, plants for pollinators, see more before you buy seeds this year!

Consider pollinator favorite flowering plants, 4 Lovely favorites! Companion planting is a super smart choice for so many reasons: Summer  Winter The longer production time of often drought tolerant water saving perennials is another wise choice!

FREE 15th Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap! SAVE THE DATE: Sunday, January 29, 2023, save your seeds to share! New location, the Santa Barbara Community Arts Workshop (SBCAW), indoor & outdoor space.

Already! Start thinking of next summer’s plantings – what seeds you will need. Process your seeds to share. Get some envelopes/baggies!

Remember, a Seed Swap is a random affair. Get your standby favorites earlier from those reliable catalogs while the seeds are still available. Use Seed Swaps as a fun backup source, new things to try, and most importantly, for local seeds. The last Saturday of January every year is National Seed Swap Day! Look in your area for an event, and if you don’t find one, collaborate with your local garden clubs or permaculture group, neighbors, to get one going! If your climate is warm enough, no rain predicted, holding it outdoors may work.

SOIL BUILDING!

Definitely start building compost for spring planting.

You could plant green manure where you will grow heavy summer feeders like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, chilies, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and corn; hungry stalk vegetables like celery, fennel, rhubarb, and artichokes; or continually producing green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, or strawberries. Or plant it if you want a break! Just lay in some green manure seed mix – vetch, bell beans, Austrian peas and oats. In Santa Barbara area get the Harmony mix and the essential inoculant at Island Seed & Feed. See The Critical Importance of Inoculants at Peas. Let it grow two to three months to bloom stage. Chop down, chop up and let it lie on the surface about 2 weeks, keeping it moist. Add any amendments you want – additional manure, compost, and turn under. Let it sit two weeks to two months. Your choice. Let the herds of soil organisms do their work! I usually do about 3 weeks. OR, lay on as many layers of compost material as you can get for an up to 18″ deep area where you will be planting. Put in some surface feeding red wriggler worms. The BEST soil enhancer and you will have a tasty raised bed!

VEGGIES STORAGE

For veggies in your kitchen, here is the UCDavis Quick Guide to Fruits & Vegetables Storage!

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

Wonderful Gardener Style Holiday Gifts!

Please be generous with your time these holidays. Rather than just serving food, maybe show someone how to grow veggies, give them seeds with instructions, give them and the kids a tour of your garden – eat carrots together!

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

Happy December Gardening and Happy Winter Solstice, Yule!

Please enjoy Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA November images! Seed Saving, Green Manure Planting, Plant Protection Methods, Beautiful and intriguing Pollinators! Take a look before you decide on planting plans or buy seeds for next year ~ you may get some terrific ideas! We are Sowing the Future!

Updated annually 

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Check out the entire December 2022 Newsletter!

Wisely Select the Right Seeds for Your Annual Plantings!
Lettuce ~ Beautiful, Nutritious, Low Calorie!
Waffle Gardens, The Roots of Square Foot Gardening!
Heating Greenhouses Without Electricity!
Wonderful Gardener-Style Holiday Gifts!

Upcoming Gardener Events!

World Soil Day Dec 5! US Composting Council’s 31st Annual Conference & Tradeshow Jan, Jan 30 FREE 15th Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap is ON! 76th Annual Holtville Carrot Festival, Santa Cruz Permaculture 2023 Design Permaculture Course April-Sep, ADVANCE NOTICE NATIONAL HEIRLOOM EXPO Sep 2023!

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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. Climate is changing, but it has been that 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.

SUBSCRIBE to the entire newsletter!    Friend on Facebook! 

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Happy November 2022! A Bountiful, Blessed ThanksGiving to You! Thank you always for your kind support!

One of the joys of gardening is the pollinators! This beautiful Monarch appeared Oct 24, 2022 on the Giant Marigold. The Marigold is used in Day of the Dead celebrations, representing Transformation. Cerena Childress photo.

November Garden Magic is in the Air! Shorter cooler magical days, rich and deep! More Brassicas, Peas, Chard, Lettuce!

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

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

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

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

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

Brassica/Broccoli Pest Strategies, Companions

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

See Super Fall Veggies Varieties, Smart Companion Plantings!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soil & Feeding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For many plants this is a good time to start cold stratification! Stake the area and label so you don’t disturb the seeds or later plant something over your seeds already installed. See more!

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

Santa Barbara’s FREE 15th Annual SEED SWAP is Sunday Jan 29, 2023, 11-4 PM at its new location the Santa Barbara Community Arts Workshop (SBCAW)! The last Saturday of January every year is National Seed Swap Day! Look in your area for an event, and if you don’t find one, collaborate with your local garden club or permaculture group to get one going! Or just gather your neighbors and do it yourself!

Plant gift plants or bowls or baskets for the holidays now! Make Lavender sachets! Put ribbons on some of your seed jars gifts. See Wonderful Gardener-Style Holiday Gifts!

Please enjoy Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA October images! Amazing Colorful Corn, Bule Gourd Browning, Gorgeous Butterflies, Cempasúchil, Japanese Winged Bean seed pods! Take a look before you decide on planting plans or buy seeds for next year ~ you may get some terrific ideas! We are Sowing the Future!

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

Updated annually

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Check out the entire November 2022 Newsletter!

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

Upcoming Gardener Events! World Soil Day Dec 5! US Composting Council’s 31st Annual Conference & Tradeshow Jan, Jan 30 FREE 13th Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap is ON!
ADVANCE NOTICE NATIONAL HEIRLOOM EXPO Sep 2023!

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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. Climate is changing, but it has been that 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.

SUBSCRIBE to the entire newsletter!    Friend on Facebook! 

Top^

Read Full Post »

October 2022 Very Last Summer Harvests, Final SeedSaving, Fall Transplants!

See the Farmers’ Almanac Fall Forecast 2022: When Will Sweater Weather Arrive?

Congratulations on your Squash & Pumpkin harvests and Happy Halloween, Day of the Dead!

Brassicas are the SoCal winter veg garden winners!

LARGE BRASSICAS

Broccoli is the favorite Brassica and rightfully so per the nutrition it offers. Plants differ in size, head color and shapes, how heat tolerant they are, if you intend to let them over summer and make side shoot production, varies! To get value for the room Brocs take up, a lot of gardeners seek varieties that produce a lot of side shoots after the main head is taken. Some newer varieties produce side shoots before the main head is taken! These smaller heads are great steamed if large, or tossed with your salad if small. Do as you wish! Many of these newer varieties grow no more than 1 to 1 1/2′ tall, in other words, close to the ground rather than up on taller stalks. This means you can’t cut off the lower leaves to plant smaller plants underneath. So before you select varieties, take a look online at mature plant profile. You can still plant around them, just not under them. Keep that in mind when planning your layouts. Research has shown there are less aphids when you plant different varieties of brocs together! Probably true for other large Brassicas as well. Superb Broccoli!

Kale has become a have-to-have! Eat young leaves fresh in salads. Steam with other veggies over rice. High in Vitamin A and anti-cancer properties! Lovely varieties – green or purple, flat or curly leaves. They just keep growing. They are technically a biennial, 2 year plant. The first year is for production, the second they make seeds. But. In SoCal they can over winter several years. Or if we have exceptionally hot weather, they may bolt and make seeds the first year! You can end up with a pom pom style, a poof of small leaves on a tall bare stalk, especially the curly leaf or dinosaur kales. But they lose their verve, look tired, are tasteless, rather tortured. A fresh young kale in good soil will easily take up a 3′ footprint and produce thick tender vibrant leaves like crazy! What a difference. I hope you start fresh ones each year. They grow so quickly. You won’t lose any harvest time if you plant a baby at the base of the old one, then take the old one down when you are getting those sweet young leaves from the baby. I’ll bet you forgot how good they can really taste! Just be sure to work in some high quality compost so it can be strong and keep producing well. Beautiful Kale!

Cauliflower now comes in the standard white, also green, orange and purple! The disadvantage is there is only one head and that’s it, though as with any Brassica, the leaves are edible. Like Collard greens.

Cabbage is more dense for the dollar than Cauliflower though it too has only one head and takes a long time to grow – even the mini varieties! But what a feast! A cabbage head is amazing and you can fix it so many ways. Shred in salad, coleslaw, steamed, cabbage soup – Borscht, stir fried, cabbage rolls, cabbage kimchi, in tacos, as sauerkraut! Or try a traditional Irish dish, colcannon, a mixture of mashed potatoes, cabbage or kale, onions, and spices. YUM! There are many cabbage varieties as well – ‘white,’ red or green. Different sizes, and I do mean different. There are 4 to 6″ minis for container gardens, sooner eating or you just don’t need a huge cabbage. There are easily more than a foot in diameter monsters you can barely carry! First they grow loose, then they fill in and make hard dense heads. An amazing plant! While your cabbages are putting on size, plant lettuces among them and other Brassicas. Lettuce repels cabbage moths. Magnificent Cabbages!

Brussels Sprouts are charming mini cabbages on a stalk! They like a colder climate to make big sprouts. In Santa Barbara SoCal area you need to be prepared to harvest lots of small ones. But, I have to tell you, the last couple years we have been getting sprouts up to almost 2″ diameter in two of our community gardens, so it wasn’t good soil that made the difference. The sprouts liked the weather or new more heat tolerant varieties are on board!

All these big Brassicas need feeding from time to time because they are big, and most of them are continuously producing leaf crops! They are all susceptible to Mildew. Try for resistant varieties. Water in the morning when possible so they can dry by evening. A good reason not to over water or fertilize is aphids and whiteflies! They like softer plants. Use plenty of worm castings, as much as possible in their soil – as much as 25% if you can! Plant your Brassicas far enough apart, leaves not touching, for airflow when they are mature, so pests and diseases don’t easily spread plant to plant. Brassicas are generally frost tolerant, even a bit freeze tolerant, and it is said their flavor improves with a freeze!

Cilantro is their best companion! If you like the scent, winter, early spring are good times for cilantro. It doesn’t bolt so fast. Summer it bolts, winters it will freeze, so replants go with the territory. Cilantro makes brocs grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener! Plant it just inside the mature drip line and let it grow up and through your Brassicas! The exception is cabbage since it can’t grow through cabbage. I grow cilantro even though I don’t eat it. I like how it looks and smells and it is a living mulch. When it seeds I scatter the seeds where I think I will be wanting some as companion plants and comes up where and when it wants if you keep the soil moist. Cilantro!

ENJOY LOTS OF SMALL BRASSICAS! 

For salads arugula, bok choy, kohlrabi, mizuna, mustard, tatsoi, peppery sweet alyssum! Alyssum is a terrific little companion plant and attracts special small pollinators. Root crops are winter Daikon and White Icicle, pretty China Rose and handsome Long Black Spanish radish, turnips, rutabagas! Grow horseradish for fermenting. No need to allot special space for these except for the horseradish. It has a good 3′ diameter footprint! Plant these tasty small Brassicas in rows, between, among, around, in patches on the sunny side of big brassicas! A few here, a few there! Be artful with your design – sizes and colors. Enjoy their many flavors at your winter table! Same with other little winter types like onions, beets.

Then, there are all the other plants not Brassicas!

Peas – Flat, Snap or Pod

Flat is the same as Chinese or snow peas. String ’em or buy the stringless variety, and eat ’em right then and there or toss a few with your salad, steam or stew in Asian dishes, add to your stir fry! Shelling or English peas are so delicious fresh out of the pod and mighty tasty steamed so fresh from the pod. SNAP peas are the sinful favorite of many. The pod is thick and tender, sweet and delicious! Few make it home from my garden. I just eat them. That’s why you get stringless varieties. Who wants to be picking their teeth at the garden, LOL?! Ok, if some of those snap peas do make it to the kitchen, add them to salads. If you must, lightly steam them, add them to stir fries. They are very tender. To keep their fresh green look, undercook….

Yellow, green or purple, you can get bush or pole peas! Bush peas come in sooner; pole peas grow tall, so come in later. Soon as your bush peas are done, the pole peas will come in shortly after, making for a steady supply. And the pole peas keep on coming. Compared to beans or tomatoes, peas have a shorter life span. And when they are done, they are done. Fertilizing, coaxing, additional water doesn’t help. Successive planting is the answer. Plant once a month or so if you love peas. You do have to keep them picked or, like beans, they stop producing. They have short roots and need to be kept moist. Onion family stunts peas! But carrots enhance peas! Plant carrots around the cage or along the trellis. If you plant carrots on one side of them, trench peas a tad lower. Water the pea side so the carrots don’t get too much water and split.

Peas are the winter legume as beans are the summer legume of your garden! They are the trellis plants of our winter gardens. Put in your trellis first, then plant pole seeds, plus transplants of bush and pole all at the same time for them to come in one after the other. Your bush peas in cages will produce first, then your pole peas, and likely your seeded pole peas will follow in short order. Soon as your peas are done, clip off the plant, leaving the roots with their Nitrogen nodules in the ground to feed your soil. The Nitrogen is only released from the nodules after the plant has died. Plant more!

Presprouting your pea seeds makes sense! Presprouting assures no spots will be empty where a seed didn’t come up and you lose production! Presprouting peas is super simple. Paper towel on plate, lay out peas an inch apart, fold the paper towel over them, spritz with clean water, keep them moist. By +/- 5 days they will have sprouted, some more than others! Carefully put the ones that sprouted in the ground so you don’t break the little roots. If you have hungry birds, cover the sprouted peas with aviary wire soon as you put them in the ground. A smart trick is to plant them in a slight low sloped mini trench. Moisture goes to the bottom of the trench, drying wind goes over the top of the trench. When you are planting while it is still warm in late fall, if you are planting from sprouts, very carefully cover the soil with a very fine mulch to keep the soil moist. Planting from seed do the same cover the soil lightly. The sprouts will emerge and grow through the mulch. You can cover the trench with a board on top of the aviary wire. It’s high enough so the sprouts can get some size. Be sure there is a tad of airflow so the sprouts under the board are not baked! Delicious Peas! As with any seeds or transplants, a couple days before planting put down organic slug/snail bait and remove any overnight marauders that would feast on your tiny new plants.

You can have a terrific time with beets! They thrive in cooler weather. Many colors! Grow the elongated winter biggies, Cylindra! Plant them at the same time you plant smaller varieties so you have the littles first, while you are waiting for the biggies! Early Wonder Tall Tops and Dutch Baby Ball are a tasty choices, or red cold hardy Flat of Egypt! Try a yellow like Touchstone Gold! All About Beets, So Sweet!

Chard is an elegant super productive winter favorite! Handsome, colorful, really, they are the ‘flowers’ of the winter garden! Superlative nutrition, low calorie, easy to grow! If you want quantity, plant Fordhook Giants! They are wondrous – easily 3′ tall, foot wide leaves when conditions are right for them! Chard can’t be beat for production per square foot. Elegant Nutritious Chard!

Lettuces thrive in cooler weather too, but do cover them at threatened heavy pelting rain storms and freezes. Lay down tomato cages, cover, and secure the cover so it doesn’t blow away. Remove when the day warms up. Lettuces come in all kinds of shapes and delicious colors. They do best in rich soil, regular moisture. Winter is the cooler time when tender butter leafs and heading varieties do well.

Try super dense Salanova! Johnny’s Seeds says: Harvested as fully mature heads, the flavor and texture have more time to develop than traditional baby-leaf lettuces. The unique structure of the core produces a multitude of uniformly sized leaves, harvestable with one simple cut. Salanova is more than 40% higher yielding, has better flavor and texture, and double the shelf life of traditional baby-leaf lettuce, making it an excellent, more economical option. What do you think about that?!  Beautiful Lettuce!

Perfect timing for tasty root crops – beets, turnips, rutabagas, daikon radish. Beets are a double winner because the roots and the leaves are edible! Pick leaves from time to time. When your beets are the size you want, pull them and eat all the leaves and the beets as well!

Winter is growing time for long Daikon Radish. And Carrots. Carrots are a dense root, so they take a while. Plant short varieties like Thumbelina and Little Fingers for sooner eating. Kids love them! At the same time plant longer varieties to eat when the Little Fingers are done. Or plant successively, every 2 weeks, once a month per your needs. The longer the carrot, the longer it takes to grow. Look at the seed pack to see how many days it takes to maturity. Of course, you can pull them sooner and smaller, like for you and your pup! 🙂 Avoid manuring where you know you will be planting carrots – makes them hairy. Steady water supply and not too much or they split or fork. You might enjoy some of the mixed color packs – Circus Circus, Sunshine, or Cosmic Purple! Tasty Nutritious Carrots!

Parsnips, celery and parsley are all in the carrot family and enjoy cool SoCal weather. Celery is another in-the-garden edible let alone low calorie! Leeks and bunch onions, but, remember, NO onion family near peas.

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 If you haven’t planted already…some of you carry your layout plan in your head, others draw and redraw, moving things around until it settles and feels right. Do add a couple new things just for fun! Try another direction. Add some herbs, flowers for pollinators, or different edible flowers. Leave a little open space for surprises! 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!

Once you have decided what to plant, when is the big question! Day length and temps are important. Temp sequences make a difference! Some plants bolt easily – Cilantro, Brassicas, Beets and Chard. Bolting is when your plant sends up a flowering stalk to seed. Check out Bolting aka Running to Seed! Causes and Prevention!  Day Neutral/Photoperiodism

Where you plant, sun/shade is important. Plant longer maturing larger and taller varieties to the back, shorter early day varieties in front where they will get sun. Put littles on the sunny side of these. Plant your tall plants first, let them get up a bit. Then clip off the lower leaves on the sunny side and plant your littles. Or plant quick rounds of littles between, among the tall plants. They will be ready to harvest when the big plants would start shading them. A classic combo is lettuces among starting cabbages that take quite a while to make their big footprints!

Mixes rule! Plant several varieties for maturity at different times and to confuse pests. Pests are attracted at certain stages of maturity. They may bother one plant but leave others entirely alone depending on temps and the pest’s life cycle! There are less aphids on broccoli when you plant different varieties together. See Super Fall Veggies Varieties, Smart Companion Plantings! for excellent biodiverse choices.

Peas and green manure mixes – legumes and oats, feed and replenish your soil because they take N (Nitrogen) out of the air and deposit it in little nodules on their roots! If an area in your garden needs a pep up, plant it to green manure. Broadcast a seed mix of legumes and oats and let them grow. Bell beans, Austrian peas, vetch and oats from Island Seed & Feed Goleta is an excellent choice. Be sure to get the legume inoculant they recommend to use with it. The first three deposit N; the oats have deep roots that bring nutrients up and create soil channels for oxygen, water, soil organisms and roots! Plant it where next summer’s heavy feeders, like tomatoes, will be grown!

If you are planning for mid January bareroot strawberry planting, be preparing your strawberry patch now if you are planting green manure! The green manure mix I use takes 2+ months to grow. I chop it down when the bell beans start to flower. Chop it into bits, let it lay on the surface 2 weeks. Keep it moist. For strawberries and many other plants, add acidic (azalea/camellia) compost, worm castings and turn it all under at the same time. It takes two to three weeks to decompose, let the soil organisms restabilize, and be ready to plant. That puts us right at mid January when the bareroots arrive! More details on Living Mulch!

Here’s the schedule:

1. Oct 1 plant your living mulch – put this on your garden calendar! If Bell beans are in your seed mix, or are your choice, they take a couple months to start to flower.
2. About Dec 1 chop down/mow, chop up your living mulch and let it lay on the surface two weeks. This is necessary to let the dead plants release the Nitrogen from their roots. If Bell beans are in the mix, chop when they flower or before the stalks will get too tough to easily chop into small pieces. Keep your chopped mulch moist, not wet, until it is tilled in. Being moist aids decomposition.
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 that we are growing them for! At this time add any other amendments you want. Strawberries and many veggies like slightly acidic soil, so I add store bought Azalea/Camellia acid compost. It has little bark bits that add water holding capacity.

OR. Strawberry runner daughters can be clipped Oct 10 to 15, stored in the fridge for planting Nov 5ish in Santa Barbara. Remove any diseased soil where your beds will be; prep your beds with acidic compost like an Azalea mix. Commercial growers replace their plants every year. Some gardeners let them have two years but production of some varieties tapers off a lot the second year. Seascape, bred at UCSB, has excellent second year production! If you let them have two years, generously replenish the soil between the berries with acidic compost. I lay down boards between the rows where my berries will be planted. The boards keep the soil moist underneath. I planted the berries just far enough apart that they self mulched (shaded the soil) when they grew up a bit. Worked beautifully. I got the idea for the boards from a pallet gardener. If you use boards, just lift them, scoop out a little soil, add the new acidic compost.

Plant in super soil to get a good start! Clean up old piles of stuff, remove old mulches that can harbor overwintering pest eggs and diseases. Note whether you plant needs slightly acidic soil and add the right compost for that. Add the best-you-can-get composts, manures, worm castings. Worms casting are especially good in seed beds. They increase and speed germination and boost immunity. In planting holes, toss in a handful of nonfat powdered milk for immediate uptake as a natural germicide and to boost your plant’s immune system. Throw in a handful of bone meal that will decompose for uptake at bloom time, and some bird guano high in P in the NPK ratio, to extend bloom time after that. If you have other treats you like to favor your plants with, give them some of that too! If your soil has Verticillium or Fusarium Wilts, go lightly on incorporating coffee grounds either in your compost or soil. In studies, what was found to work well was coffee grounds at only 0.5 percent of the compost mix. Yes, that’s only 1/2 a percent! See more details about soil building! If you have containers, dump that old spent stuff and put in some tasty new mix!

Winter Feeding Lettuces like a light feed of chicken manure cultivated in the top 1/4 inch. 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 of things easy for them to uptake. Fish emulsion (if you don’t have predators like raccoons or skunks) or a tasty tea mix – compost, worm castings, manure (no manure tea for lettuces). Slow release like alfalfa pellets.

Weather! Rain may be coming. Give your berms a check. Restore or add, shift their location if needed. Before wind or rain, double check cages and trellises, top heavy plants. Stake them, tie peas to the trellis or cage. More Rainy Weather Tips  Start gathering sheets, light blankets for possible cold weather to come. Keep tomato cages handy. Protect Your Veggies from Freezing! Cover and tuck ’em in!

You don’t have to garden this winter!

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. 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. 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 for no work at all!
2. If you have access to materials, another wise option is to do some form of long term sustainable Hugelkultur! There are many variations, quite adaptable to your situation. It can be done in a container, a tub, on a hillside, a field, in your own little garden plot!
3. A third thing is to plant legumes and oats for superb soil restoration that takes some labor, but a lot less than tending your garden on a daily basis! 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, cover ever so lightly with soil, 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, roots.

“Our most important job as vegetable gardeners is to feed and sustain soil life, often called the soil food web, beginning with the microbes. If we do this, our plants will thrive, we’ll grow nutritious, healthy food, and our soil conditions will get better each year. This is what is meant by the adage ‘Feed the soil not the plants.‘ – Jane Shellenberger, Organic Gardener’s Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West (Colorado)

Winter watering in drought areas is the same as for summer. Before 10:30 AM, after 4 PM. Watch which way water flows along the leaves. Some plants it flows to the central stem. Some drip water off the leaf tips in a circle around your plant, the dripline. Some go both ways. Make berms just beyond where the mature plant’s water flows. If at the dripline, that’s where the tiny feeder roots take up moisture and nutrients. That’s why they call them feeder roots! If your garden has a low spot, plant your water loving plants – chard, lettuces, spinach, mizuna, mints – there or near a spigot.

Fall Pests & Diseases

• 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, 1/4 C nonfat powdered milk, 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 under the leaves too!
• Brassicas, Peas! Lots of ants and on Brassicas, lengthwise curling leaves are the giveaways for aphids, then whiteflies. Aphids carry viruses. Aphids come in fat gray or small black. Avoid over watering and feeding that makes for soft plants, tender leaves that aphids thrive on, and ant habitat. Spray aphids and whiteflies 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 is amazing. Ants don’t like it at all, and when you are starting seedlings it prevents molds and damping off. Sprinkle it on the soil in your six pack. Get it in big containers at Smart and Final or bulk food stores. Reapply as needed. ASAP remove yellowing leaves that attract whiteflies.
• Chard, Lettuces, Spinach – Slugs and snails are the bane of so many crops, but these especially. Lay down something like Sluggo immediately. Then do it again in a week or so. Kill the parents, kill the children. After about 3 times you rarely need it again anytime soon.
• Biodiversity In general, avoid row planting where disease and pests wipe the plants out from one to the next to the next. Instead or rows, plant in several different spots. If you can’t help yourself, because your family always planted in rows or that’s the way farm pictures show plantings, remember, this is YOUR garden! Also, leave room so mature plants’ leaves don’t touch. Give them room to breathe, get good big leaves that get plenty of sun and produce lots more big leaves and many big fruits! Stunted crowded rootbound plants just don’t perform as well and are more disease and pest susceptible. Leaving that breathing room between plants pay off when you plant little plants along, under bigger plants. It’s like having two crops in the same space. No need to make separate space for smaller plants. There is no law that says you must plant in a straight line or a separate space! Forget the stakes and twine; plant where you want to! Use companion plants where they will do the most good!

Keep up with your maintenance. Weed so seedlings aren’t shaded out or their nutrients used up.

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 – for you and your pup, beets, cilantro, arugula, onions, 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, Mesclun mixes, and mow them! Tender baby greens! They will grow back 3, 4 times.

Have it in the back of your mind what summer plants you will be wanting, where you will plant them. For example, plant more permanent plants like a broccoli you will keep over summer for side shoots (like All Season F1 Hybrid), or a kale that will keep on going, where they will not be shaded out by taller indeterminate summer tomatoes.

October is the last of Seed Saving time for most of us. 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! Start sorting and labeling seed baggies on coming cooler indoor evenings. Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s plantings. Generously gather seeds for upcoming January Seed Swaps!

Santa Barbara’s 15th Annual Seed Swap is January 29 2023!  More details in the Oct Newsletter! The last Saturday of January every year is National Seed Swap Day! Look in your area for an event, and if you don’t find one, collaborate with your neighbors, local garden clubs or permaculture group to get one going!

Plant gift plants or bowls or baskets for the holidays now! Make Lavender sachets! Put ribbons on some of your seed jars gifts. See Wonderful Gardener-Style Holiday Gifts!

Please enjoy Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA September images! Definitely a Corn Month! See a giant butterfly and tomatoes, fun Bird Baths! The White Flowered Gourd is getting huge;  the long red beans are seeding! Take a look before you make final October planting plans ~ you may get some terrific ideas! We are Sowing the Future!

Take a deep breath of this fine fall weather! Happy Gardening!

Updated annually

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Check out the entire October 2022 Newsletter!

Chard! An Elegant, Colorful, Nutritious Pleasure!
Growing the Best Varieties of PEAS, How and Why!
CARROTS! Steaming, Roasted, Juicing, Snacking, Salad!
Bird, Animal, Insect Pests Above Ground Protection!

Upcoming Gardener Events! Loomis CA Eggplant Festival OCT 1, 43rd American Community Gardening Assn Conference. Lane Farms Pumpkin Patch IS OPEN! World Soil Day Dec 5! Jan 30 FREE 13th 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. Climate is changing, but it has been that 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.

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