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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Happy March 2023 Gardening, Spring Equinox!

Across-the-Plot Gardening Tips March 2023!

March Planting, Thoughtful Garden Design & Perfect Veggie Choices!

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

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

MARCH through June Planting Timing  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Cornell’s Veggies Disease Resistant List!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finish your Summer Gardening preparations!

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

Complete your Soil Prep! 

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

Pests Reminders and Home Remedies!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updated annually 

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Check out the entire March 2023 Newsletter!

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

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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Here’s to terrific February 2023 Gardening to you!

Across-the-Plot Gardening Tips February 2023!

Winter Harvests, Soil, Planning Your Spring Garden!

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

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

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

Summer garden planning tips emphasize needing less water! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PESTS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DISEASES

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

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

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

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

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

Watering & Weeding

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

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

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

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

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

Updated annually 

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Check out the entire February 2023 Newsletter!

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

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

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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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