Veggie Garden Nursery Patch!

This small humble Nursery Patch was for starting Okra seedlings. Radish were started among them at the same time. By Cerena Childress, Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA

If you plant from seeds as well as transplants and can’t, for whatever reason, grow them in home, an outdoor Nursery Patch is a terrific strategy! It can be a small area, as above, or whatever size you need! You can make more than one as space becomes free to use, and make them whenever you want for successive plantings!

Set aside a sunny location, or shady if you expect hot weather and the seedlings need some shelter. If you can’t get your seeds to start in a shady area, but they would do well there once growing, start them in sun, move them to shade! This is an ideal solution. When no area is yet available, like summer crops are still producing, yet the time has come to start early winter plants (SoCal!), a Nursery Patch is the ticket! It is convenient because all your seedlings are in one place, easy to care for, easy to cover on extra hot days, shelter from wind if necessary. You can use a Nursery Patch any time of year when there is a jam due to lack of space, but space will be available soon!

Spring planting time depends on soil temp, day length – photoperiodism, day and night temps – cold stratification, so the trick then is to start your seeds inside. But if it is late spring and you still have some winter plants doing well, a Nursery Patch works well then too!

In warm climates like SoCal, July, August is a great time for starting winter plants a tad early depending on your locality, the weather, available space, whether you decide to grow winter plants. As various plants finish – harvests/seedsaving, and you prep your soil, you can transplant seedlings to their new homes per your garden design plan.  Choosing Summer Seeds  Summer Design  Winter Design – Think Big!  More on Winter Design  

You can plant a lot of seeds in a small space! Seed spacing is important for later transplanting. Six to eight, ten inches? I like a large thin bladed trowel that cuts into the soil with the least disturbance, gets deep enough to surely get below the roots, and to carry the soil the seedling is used to intact with the roots to its new planting hole. If you are transplanting a tiny lettuce seedling, you could probably get away with using a tablespoon! If you do it right, your seedling doesn’t know it was moved, doesn’t miss a beat in its growth! It is safe to plant a little further apart in case you get delayed by weather or a late season plant keeps on producing and doesn’t give up its space by the time you planned and you still want that harvest! Your seedling will get bigger than planned, so allow for Mother Nature!

Depending on the best window for your new plant, you may have to sacrifice a plant or two to make space to receive it! Some seedlings grow inordinately quickly if you hit their growing window just right. So your finishing plant gets done on time, but your seedling is happy to see you and waiting for no one! So leave a little more room between starts just in case they get a little bigger than anticipated!

Allow Space for Wise Companion Planting! If at all possible, plant companions before you plant your crop so the companions can help your main crop immediately upon arrival. Among the companions please add plants to attract beneficial insects and bees, butterflies. Provide habitat and food for them all year long!   Super SoCal Fall, Winter Veggies Varieties, Smart Companion Plantings!

In your Nursery Patch, don’t forget to plant your plants’ companion plants together! Plant them together and transplant them together when their space becomes available! The exception is carrots. They grow long roots quickly, so better to plant them in a permanent location. Instead of a trowel, leave enough space between companion sets to safely lift them out with a small shovel! When ready, predig their new space for them, dig deeply so there is room for their roots to go straight down. Add amendments as needed and mix them into the soil. Water the hole just enough to moisten it. Dig deeply under your nursery plant companion set so not to cut their growing roots, and transfer them to their new planting hole. Immediately give them their first pest/mildew prevention treatments. Voilà! Happy plants! They will grow quickly, be strong and productive.

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

SEED CHOICES

Make sure you are planting for the right time of year at your location when your plant will do its best.

Choose top quality from reputable seed houses.

Research plant strengths and weaknesses. That means resistance, tolerance of disease, pests, temperature – cold or hot, drought, whether it will do well in the type of soil you have. For strong mildew resistance, more, take a look at Cornell’s super plant by plant Veggies Disease Resistant List! 

Know that some plants do better planted where they will be, don’t like transplanting! Carrots make long tiny roots asap! Root disturbance delays and stunts their growth, may kill them. Per UCANR: Root crops (carrots, beets, turnips, etc.) are not suited to transplants as the process will damage the root. Corn, cucurbits (squash, cucumbers, melons) and beans/peas don’t like to be transplanted but can be with care.

SEED PREP

1. Cold Stratification – some seeds need a cold period or they won’t germinate. Generally this is NOT stated on the seed pack. See who needs what!
2. Presoaking the right amount of time speeds up germination. See details!
3. Presprouting assures you have a plant! No wasted time wondering if it will come up! You do have to be careful when planting them – they are fragile. See how

SOIL PREFERENCES

Prep your soil – alkaline or acid – for the type of seeds you will be planting. You can use potting soil, half potting/half soil! When making planting beds for the seedlings, use regular or acidic compost per your plants’ needs. Depending on the plant, you can plant straight in the ground if you wish. Besides any tasty amendments you might want to add, WORM CASTINGS would be Number One! Castings aid and speed germination, help with immunity and growth, and water holding capacity! If you have beds unprotected from digging predators like raccoons, avoid castings.  Some plants like a lot of drainage, others like it a little on the soggy side. ‘Evenly moist’ means never dry and no floods!

Seed planting depth is essential. In summer heat some plant seeds can be planted a tad deeper so they don’t dry out. Their seedlings may take a bit longer to appear. Seeds that merely get sprinkled with soil, or are just patted on top of the soil, need extra attention. If you have a water wand, use the Mist setting. Gently misting them is best, may be required 3, 4 times a day or more. I say gently because you don’t want to uncover them or push more soil over them, making it too deep for them to get through the soil. It might be wise to plant them in shade to get them started, then transplant into full sun later. Plan on keeping all seeds moist all the time! Keeping the soil moist prevents a crust from forming that the tiny seedlings can’t get through. Once germination starts, if they dry, they die.

Perlite sprinkled on top can be helpful if you don’t want seeds to rot or seedlings to die from damping off, a sudden death from fungal disease.

Here are the Okras planted out with companions Basil and Lettuce. The red stems are Burgundy Okra, the shorter green stems are Annie Oakley F1. They are about to be thinned. The seeds were mixed last year, so it was random combinations.

Cover if heat is too much for seedlings to emerge safely. Shade cloth comes in varying densities. Use row covers that you can water through. Movable canopies can be adjusted to follow the Sun’s path. While they are very short, you can use flats you get to carry plants at a nursery, the ones with a 1/4″ grid. Some plants like starting in mini trenches. An old farmers’ trick was to cover the length of the trench with a board. It keeps the trench dark and moist, but be sure to leave breathing access for air flow – no baking or steaming! Make the walls of your trench very low, not steep, to keep water from pushing soil down and covering the seeds too deeply.

Plant before a RAIN?! Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. If it is a heavy rain, some seeds, especially small ones, are likely to be washed away, pounded too deep. If you already sowed your seed and anticipate such a rain, get out there ahead of time to install covers, safely anchored! If that didn’t happen, scramble quickly to see if you can get a strong cover over them, taut, and well staked so it won’t be blown away, damaging the seedlings as it goes.

For planting seeds, it depends on whether it matters where they will end up. For example, a green manure cover crop (living mulch) needs no formal rows or placements. If you want a plant where you put it, might be good to wait until after the rain. Near-the-surface seeds, or small seeds, will likely rot if they get in a puddle. Some bean seeds can turn to mush in 6 hours, virtually dissolve. Plant delicate transplants ASAP just after rain or heavy drying wind. If it’s expected to be a heavy rain, wait, so your plants don’t literally drown. If heavy wind, delicate young plants can be broken. After wind and/or rain, the sun will warm up the soil and off they will go, safely!

Other times that rain is just perfect! I swear, rain water has vitamins all its own! Plants get a glorious start and thrive all season long! See special Rainy Day Tactics

PREDATORS PROTECTION!

Put down snail/slug stuff two or three times BEFORE you lay in your seeds. Slugs can mow them in one night. The seedling may come up in the afternoon, it is eaten at night, and you think it never came up.

Protect from birds that pluck tender seedlings the moment they come up, seed or plant! A small flock of hungry winter birds can take the whole lot in moments. Skunks, raccoons, etc, go for the worms. Cats dig holes. A well secured wire covering is good for a larger patch.

Hardware cloth tunnels, top and top left, are great for rows! Bend them to about 8-10″ high sides. Make them as wide or narrow as you need. Hardware cloth doesn’t sag, depending on how big a patch size you need. You can always make 2 or 3 covers if needed. 8-10″ High gets you to transplant your seedlings to their permanent home soonest. You don’t want long roots that will get damaged when you transplant. A hardware cloth row cover can be made to the perfect size you need easily. They are easy to store and you can reuse them anytime you plant a new row of seeds.

In the top left image, note the bottle sleeves! The birds won’t go down inside them!

Small birds go right through chicken wire. At right, aviary wire has smaller openings, and is a lot more pliable than hardware cloth, can be flattened for storage. If it is what you have, a stick or two woven through is a trick to keep it from sagging!

Bottom left, 2″ wire is a simple remedy put together with items on hand. The advantage of this kind of wire is it rolls up easily and takes up a small storage footprint.

The advantage of wire without a covering is they are easy to water, get full sunlight and air circulation. The row cover above the wire keeps your plants cooler in hot temps or warmer in winter or early spring, keeps your soil from drying so much in windy conditions.

Be sure your covers are strongly secured so raccoons and skunks won’t dig under and flip them aside. They are attracted to manures, fish emulsion and worm castings! Stake things in place, leave no openings, put a heavy rock on top of your hardware cloth covers. Some large raccoons can roll stones away easily, flip boards up. 2″ thick square concrete stepping stones are heavy and harder for them to move. OR, don’t use manures, fish emulsion or worm castings when you start your seeds.

Once you do a few nurseries, you may accrue a few standard items, do the process without thinking.

The Burgundy Okras are quite taller now than in this image, close to 3′ and starting to flower! Some Garden Purslane, Verdolaga, a very special plant, have joined them. 9.8.21 Note: They are now 5’+ tall and making delicious Okra! 5′ is really good for our cool near-the-beach garden!

Wishing you well with your precious Nursery!

Updated 7.25.23

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

The Green Bean Connection started as correspondence for the Santa Barbara CA USA Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden. Both of Santa Barbara City’s remaining community gardens are very coastal. During late spring/summer we are often in a fog belt/marine layer most years, locally referred to as the May grays, June glooms and August fogusts. In 2018 they lasted into September and October! Keep that in mind compared to the microclimate niche where your veggie garden is.

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August 2021! Delicious Harvests, SeedSaving, Fall Starts!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save enough seeds for your own planting, for several rounds of planting across next year’s season, for replanting when there are losses. Save some to give away or share at the seed swap. Our 2022 Santa Barbara area Seed Swap is January 30! If you are willing, take some of your extras to a local Seed Bank! While you are there, pick up some of your favorites and some new ones to try out! Keep the local race going. 2020 Note! As your plants come into seeding time, consider sharing them as soon as possible! “Little Free Seed Libraries” are Sprouting Up to Help Gardeners Share Seeds in Troubled Times. Take a look at some very clever and loving ideas!

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

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

Soil Prep!

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

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

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

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

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

If you are inclined, always be making compost with clean garden waste, kitchen scraps. Decide where you want to compost, leave the space next to it so you can move your compost back and forth. Or you can move your composter around to enrich the soil there. The fastest way to compost is to make a pit or a trench. Add your healthy green waste or kitchen waste, chop it fine, turn it in mixing it with your soil. If you trenched it, turn it a few times over the next few days. If you have a pit, turn it two to three times over the next few days, then add it where it is needed when it is done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August is a lovely time for a garden party…perhaps at the Full Moon? Wear your loveliest summer hat… Afternoon Garden Tea Party by illustrator Kate Greenaway

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

Updated annually

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Veggies and Flowers, Birds & Bees! July brought so many exciting pleasures and surprises! See wonderful July summer images at Rancheria Community Garden! We are Sowing the Future!

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

Winter Garden Design! 
Veggie Garden Nursery Patch!
Broccoli, the Queen of Brassicas!
5 Simple & Easy Storage Ideas for your Harvest Bounty!
THE LARGER SOIL PEST – GOPHERS

Upcoming Gardener Events! Santa Barbara City College Permaculture Design Course, Soil Not Oil 7th Conference, 42nd American Community Gardening Assn Conference. National Heirloom Expo canceled until September 2022, Jan 30 FREE 13th Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap is ON!

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

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

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JULY 2019! Happy Harvests!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sidedressing is important now while plants are working hard!

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

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

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

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

If any of your plants are looking puny, have yellowing leaves, might give them a bit of blood meal for a quick Nitrogen pick me up. Add compost, castings and a tad of manure too so your plant has steady food after the blood meal (an expensive feed) is used. If you have predators creatures, especially skunks or raccoons, forgo stinky fish emulsions and blood meal.
Late July, gardeners are starting to want new ways to enjoy their Zucchini! ZOODLES! Zucchini Zoodles Kale Pesto Edamame Recipe! Here are 28 cool summer variations on how to include this common veggie in a unique way!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seedsaving is really a no-nonsense game! Besides being our second harvest, it insures the purity of your line! They are from a plant that grew well at your place! It’s important to our world community, as Thomas Rainer says, to preserve our garden heritage & biodiversity! Besides, it’s fun! Keep some for you – some as spices & others for planting. Package as gifts, and reserve some to take to the Seed Swap in January!

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

Be ready for winter rain! If you garden at home, please look into water capture and gray water systems – shower to flower, super attractive bioswale catchments. In Santa Barbara County there are rebates available! Call (805) 564-5460 today to schedule a FREE water system checkup! Check out the Elmer Ave retrofit!

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

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See the entire July Newsletter!

Check out the Japanese Red Kuri Squash Adventure! Please enjoy these lively summer images at two of Santa Barbara CA’s community gardens, Pilgrim Terrace and Rancheria! Happy gardening!

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

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic!

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February 2019! Winter Harvests, Soil Preps, First Spring Plantings!

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

You went to the Seed Swap, have gotten your seeds from the catalog or nursery, and are 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. Bold Souls will be planting Zucchini, cool tolerant tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and corn! They can be started now from seed, in the ground. March is a little warmer and early variety plants get a better start. April is most everything – cucumber, pepper, squash, beans, more tomatoes, watermelon. May is the true heat lovers, cantaloupe, okra (June may be better yet), eggplant. Some gardeners wait to plant tomatoes until May and June to avoid the more moist soil fungi of earlier months. I hold that space by planting something temporary there in March. In long summer areas June is especially good for okra, eggplant and long beans!

Summer garden planning tips emphasizing needing less water! Companions!

PLANT PLANTS THAT REPEL PESTS IN ADVANCE SO THEY WILL BE UP AND WORKING WHEN YOUR SEEDLINGS COME UP OR YOU INSTALL YOUR TRANSPLANTS!

• 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 for more production. However, determinate toms do produce sooner, so for earlier table production, plant them to hold you until your indeterminates are producing. For earliest production, plant cherry tomatoes! Yum! Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of dandelions! The beautiful herb Borage repels Tomato Hornworms!
• Choose more prolific plants and varieties of them so you get more production for less water.
• 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 keep them disease and pest free, are clean, and so they ripen evenly all the way around. Co-plant with beans! Beans above, cukes below. If you will be wanting a lot of each, plant them on separate trellises! Japanese Long cukes give a generous supply per water used! Suyos are a great choice – give them plenty of room.
• Next, intermingle mid height plants, bush beans, determinate tomatoes, tall peppers like Big Jim Anaheim or Poblanos, Zucchini! 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 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 under your brocs! Broccoli helps repel cucumber beetles, so push the mulch back on the sunny side, make your special cucumber planting mound/basin and plant cucumbers underneath those brocs! Besides keeping the soil cool, the mulch keeps the cukes off the soil, clean and insect free above the bug zone!
• Leave a couple of winter kale to provide over summer greens. Heat tolerant 1000 Headed Kale is a prolific choice that harbors less aphids on its FLAT leaves. Plant lettuces on the sunny side under your brocs and kale.
• Eggplant likes it hot! Plant them where they will be sheltered from prevailing winds. Radishes with eggplants and cucumbers. Radishes are a trap plant for flea beetles. If your area is a little cool, plant the long skinny Ichiban Japanese eggies rather than the bulbous Black Beauties. Ichiban’s are prolific and quite tasty.
• 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. 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 a separate patch with more acidic soil 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 quite a while to do it. In spring and summer choose quick maturing mini varieties.
• SEED SAVING SPACE! Leave room for some arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery to go to flower to bring bees and beneficial insects! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next plantings. Carrots love being with cilantro, marigold and chamomile, and chamomile improves the flavor of any neighboring herb! Chamomile flowers make a lovely scent and the tea is sweet.
• 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 better on bare hot ground. Comparatively, it’s cool up on those trellises. A healthy winter squash vine can easily be 3′ to 4′ wide, 30′ long plus side vines, and produce a major supply of squash! You can use them as a border, as a backdrop along a fence line. In SoCal, unless you are a squash lover, or won’t be gardening in winter, there is question as to why you would grow winter squash at all. Greens of all kinds grow prolifically here all winter long, giving a fresh and beautiful supply of Vitamin A for less calories and no storage space!

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

Hardly anyone can resist planting early tomatoes! 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. All our Santa Barbara City community gardens have them. Some gardeners plant toms in May to avoid moist soils.

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

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

Start seedlings indoors now for March/April plantings. A 2005 North Carolina State University damping-off study found it’s not the mixture but what’s on top of the soil that counts most. Damping-off differences almost disappeared between commercial organic seed-starting mixtures and various homemade mixtures after all of the seeds were covered with vermiculite instead of a planting medium. No brewing, spraying or sprinkling. Simple fix!

If seeds and tending seedlings aren’t for you, just wait, get transplants and pop them right in the ground per their right times!

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, peas – mildew resistant varieties, white potatoes, radishes, shallots, spinach, and turnips. Get bolt resistant/slow bolt varieties, and especially heat and drought tolerant varieties.

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

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

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! None for carrots, peas or beans.
• Add 25% worm castings. As little as 10% works. They are potent – increase germination, faster seedling growth, help with plant immunities to disease, increase water holding capacity.
• Adding guanos high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time helps your plants continue to bloom LATE in the season! Jamaican bat is high P phosphorus (blooms) 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!
• Don’t cover with mulch unless you need it for erosion control. Covered soil is cooler. Let your winter cool soil warm up. Do mulch 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 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 and bring nutrients up. 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 predators, 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 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. Water 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 ones you missed. After that, water and feed them a little less.

• 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.
• 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!
• 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.

DISEASES

Prevention  A frustrating typical disease is Powdery mildew. It’s common on Curly Leaf kales, peas. 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 of 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 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. Planting only every 3 years in the same spot isn’t possible if there is too little garden space, so cultivating, turning and drying the soil between plantings is good. See more

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.

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, don’t shake the soil loose from the roots spreading seeds all over, and don’t put them in your compost! Bag and trash.

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. 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. That helps keep pests and disease from spreading from one to the next.

Happy Imbolc (Gaelic beginning of Spring) Feb 1 & GroundHog Day Feb 2! Happy February Gardening and the very beginning of spring planting!

Updated 1.24.19

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See the entire February Newsletter:

FEBRUARY 2019! Winter Harvests, Soil Preps, First Spring Plantings!

Tomato Varieties! Humble to Humongous & More!
Wilts & Cucumber Beetles, Tomatoes & Cukes!
Squashes! Prolific and Indomitable!
Other Community Gardens – Kale not Jail! 

Upcoming Gardener Events! Mesa Harmony Garden Plant Sale!, Earth Day, the International Permaculture Conference, IPC 2020 Argentina!

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

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

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Senior Veggie Gardening!

Why quit now?! Have a feisty life! Here are some tips that may renew or ignite your passion! If you have a senior in your life and think gardening might be a good part of their lives, read on for some ideas!

Or maybe you have never gardened before! I didn’t start veggie gardening until I was 57! I knew nothing. Never had houseplants…they died if I tried. But it became my time! I learned fast listening to community garden seniors who had gardened all their lives, and seeing 30+ other community gardener’s successes and failures opened my eyes! I intensely scoured the Internet and I asked questions at my local nurseries and every once in awhile at our Cooperative Extension office!

Gardening is one of the most healthy things you can do for yourself! Having gardened in a community garden that is next to a senior community, and becoming a wee bit older myself, I have seen the advantages to senior gardeners first hand!

Get outdoors and get that Vitamin Sunshine! You can eat 100% organic fresh vegetables and fruits! You get excited by a seedling bursting to life, and that seedling’s growth every day. You get invested in its wellbeing. And it’s fun! You learn more things and your mind stays sharp!

Friends! One way or another you get talking with others, making new friends and improving your outlook on life! If you garden with others, there is delightful camaraderie and a wealth of sharing! See if your area has any gardening clubs. If not, start one yourself!

May I introduce the Four Counties Gardening Club of Philadelphia, Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware Counties of the state of Pennsylvania celebrating their 95th anniversary in 2017! Imagine the years of enjoyment that have been shared!

Right now, this spring, get out and start your garden! If you have never done before, you are in for a treat. Your plants don’t care how old you are, they just want some TLC! You will learn as they grow.

Be comfortable!

Choose some great garden shoes or mud boots.

Maybe you haven’t been getting out because you chill down easily. Check out the thrift shop or discount store for a snuggly work shirt, sweater or jacket. Wear layers. Take a thermos of a hot drink you like.

Too hot? Go a little earlier if possible. Take a cool drink with you and stay hydrated. Get a pretty sun hat and cool shades and you be stylin’!

Work easy! Lightweight wheelbarrows, tools and smaller watering cans can help a lot. Rather than working until you can’t, do a bit each day. Select a smaller patch to work. Go for quality.

Be happy! Have a smaller garden space that doesn’t overwork you, you leave feeling great! A lot can happen in a small space. Even a small space can do wonders! Get your plants up in cages and on trellises! Plant small plants, littles, on the sunny side below larger plants. Remove the larger plant’s lower leaves if they shade out the littles. No need for rows. Plant around, among or along the larger plants!

Nor do you need to garden all year. Some gardeners prefer cooler weather, so refreshing it perks you right up! Others love the hot sun, no heavy clothing, so relaxing. If you are in a northern single season area, you garden with vigor, then rest over winter. Same for hot desert areas only in reverse! Coastal, especially SoCal, all year may be quite enjoyable. Do please yourself.

Easy access! If you can’t get down, or back up, then don’t! Have beds on legs or that you can stand or sit at. Containers up on strong secure waterproof bases work well. Either way, no gophers!

You could invest in a self-watering VegePod Garden! It is a fancy container type gismo up on legs with a protective hood that keeps bad insects and animals out and gives shade. You do need to open it when your plants need pollinating and to get more sun when the temps are right. You can order the stands with wheels so you can move them around with the sun! The largest one is 3’X6′. See more details at Fertile Fields! See if any of your local nurseries carry them and support your local nursery. In Santa Barbara area La Sumida carries them! I’ve seen a closely planted super successful one in action! It might take three years to break even with organic veggies, but there is no price for the joy of the gardening and superb health of being outdoors!

Smart choices

You don’t have to plant from seed unless you are used to it and like to. Nurseries take a lot of the worry out of life. Most of them have plants that do well locally at the right time of year. Chains and box stores are chancy. Transplants are easiest to do. Start with easy plants to care for. Plant part of the patch; save room for a second round of planting for a steady table supply. Even then, you may choose not to plant the entire area. Plants take tending and need harvesting. Do what works for you. Less may be an excellent choice.

Save time and energy. Choose efficient plants per square feet of production! Leafy chard and kales, and peas are cool weather winners. And you can plant a lot of beets in a small place – eat their greens and beets both! Summer squash, Zucchini grow enough for giveaways that are refused! Everyone else has too many too! Pole Beans keep making beans. Asian Suyo Long cucumbers grow so many so long so fast you can’t believe it! Lettuces are prodigious and Tomatoes light up our eyes! In addition grow one or two of your own super other favorites!

Container gardening is excellent! You can have as few or as many containers as works perfectly for you!

If you are gardening in the ground, do install gopher wire protection from the get go whether that is the bottom of a raised bed or a patch you dig up and install protective wire. If you are container gardening, no problem.

Teach the youngers the wisdom you have learned! It makes a huge difference to gardeners just getting started. It did to me. Years later now, I still remember them with respect and a little awe.

SAFETY ALWAYS

Get help with heavy lifting – bags of amendments.

Get help with any large scale digging that needs doing.

If you have any health jeopardy, share gardening with a friend or your family so you are not alone. Good health to you both, all of you! Gardens are healing places.

To start your own Veggie Gardening Revolution all it takes is YOU & ONE SEED (or transplant)! May you garden with happy abandon!

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Mother’s Day is May 8, 2018! Here are some wonderful ideas for green and loving gifts! Get living gifts started now! Click here

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

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Clever Seed Planting Tips Indoors or Outdoors!

At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous. – Mirabel Oster 

Starting seeds yourself has two fabulous advantages! Seeds are a lot cheaper than transplants, and you can grow far more varieties of veggies than you can buy at the local nursery! You can buy the best and order the latest they may not have heard about yet. You can experiment and see for yourself. You can touch and taste these special varieties! You can even do a little research and hybridize some of your own!

Some seeds need special treatment before planting. Some need hot or cold treatments or both, some need scarification, slight damage to open the seed. Some of this is easy to do, some has to be done very carefully and can be a tedious labor of love! See Cold Stratification

Plant at the right temps! Seeds are soil temp sensitive. That’s how they know when to come up in nature! The winds may howl one day and the sun be hot the next day, but the soil keeps a more even temp. Seeds know what the temp is they want and after a certain number of days at the right temp, they shake their little booty, break dormancy and germinate!

You can help your seeds by pre-soaking them! There are a lot of important pre-soaking techniques to consider. And it varies a lot seed to seed so check it out for the specific seeds you will be planting. Pre Soaking and Sprouting!

The two main ways to work with seeds are to plant indoors or outdoors! One of the main deciding points is how long your growing season is. If you have a short season, little sun, if possible, do those indoor starts because they give you a six weeks head start! Otherwise, it’s early fast maturing transplant varieties for you!

STARTING YOUR SEEDS OUTDOORS IN THE GROUND

Just like in Mother Nature, outdoor starts are blessed with whole nutrition from their very beginning and they don’t need transplanting! It’s called Direct Sowing when gardeners start their seeds in the ground.

Some plants don’t transplant well, direct sowing is best! In general, root crops and tap root veggies don’t transplant well. Some little plants grow amazing tap roots very quickly. If that main root is damaged, it’s all over. Plants with delicate roots can be damaged in the transplant process. Seeds that favor direct sowing are arugula, beans (short roots need continuous connection with their soil), especially beets and carrots because they have tap roots, cilantro (delicate tap root), dill, melons, peas, radish for sure (they grow too fast to be worth it to move them!), spinach, squashes, turnips, zucchini. Seeds that like being started in trays are basil, celery, eggplant, collards, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, leeks, onion, peppers, scallions, tomato, tomatillo! Now you can bet gardeners disagree on this. I just started some scallions in the ground and they came up quickly and prolifically! But I can sure agree, carrots are better started right where they are going to live! Some plants on the in-the-ground list can be transplanted if transplanted early enough and handled very carefully.

Special notes about planting pea, bean, fava, clover, LEGUME seeds. First, we read that legumes take Nitrogen out of the air, fix Nitrogen nodules on their roots, feed themselves, don’t fertilize them or they will go all to leaf. That is true, only if there is ample Rhizobium leguminosarum, a nitrogen fixing bacteria, available to them. Actually, the bacteria ‘infect’ your plants and cause them to make the nodules. If there is none in the soil, seeds may even be unable to start. Even if you presprout to start your seedlings, they will live, but not have the ability to fix the N they need, are feeble, struggle and produce little. That lack can be why. We can remedy that by applying their inoculant to the soil and/or directly to the seeds. You can’t over do it, so put plenty in the planting hole.

You can see how important it is to know this if you are planting a soil feeding cover crop! If you have a lot of seeds, like when you are planting an area to a soil feeding cover crop, an easy way to inoculate is put your seeds in a plastic bag, add a teensy amount of water, you want your seed to be only barely wet, add the right amount of inoculant, mush the seeds around in the bag. The water and inoculant will make a slight slurry. Plant immediately. With large areas, the seeds are usually broadcast, flung about. Some gardeners poke large seeds like bell beans/favas just into the soil for more contact so they won’t dry out before sprouting. A quick way to do the whole area is to lay a board on the soil and press all the seeds down to get maximum soil contact for all of them. Move the board to the next area until all is done. Keep the seeds moist by heavy misting – no flooding that would wash the inoculant away from the seed. When the plants get mature, you can tell how your plants did by pulling a couple up. If there are no little white pearly nodules, the N fixing didn’t occur. If you got nodules, simply clip the plants off – don’t pull up, or, at the right time, chop the cover crop down. The N in the nodules isn’t released to your soil until about two weeks after the plant dies. More about soil feeding cover crops, Living Mulch!

Before you sow your seeds, amend your soil, up to two inches deep, depending on the depth your seed needs, with worm castings! Castings speed germination and strengthen seedling immunity, increase water holding capacity. Keep that planting space and those castings moist until you are ready to plant. A couple days before planting, water the soil so it is for sure semi moist on planting day.

Plant large hard seeds and seeds that are planted an inch deep before a rain. Wait until after the rain to plant little seeds that could become uncovered, washed away or buried too deeply. Same for seeds that rot easily like bean seeds.

Prevent pests! Put down what you use to end slugs and snails two or three times before you sow your seeds!

While you are waiting for planting day, make tags. I put four things on my tags. 1) I put the planting date on the tag so I know when the plant started! 2) I put the germination date on the tag so I’ll know by when I should be seeing seedlings. That might look like 4-12, 14-21 D (days to germinate) 3) The name of the plant helps so you will know what they are and not a weed! If you are new to planting seeds, don’t worry, you will learn to recognize the little guys. If in doubt, let them grow a bit before you ‘weed’ them out. Look online for baby pictures! 4) The days to maturity, 65 D, cues me to when I should be expecting fruit and how well my plants did. And that varies per time of year, weather, your soil, sun/shade, how well you cared for them.

Mark your planted areas as you go! When I plant the seeds I put a stick at the ends of the row, a triangle of sticks when there is a single area where the seeds are planted. Since I do a lot of interplanting with understories, companion planting special plants where they will do the most good, the sticks keep me from stepping on or disturbing the seeds.

Some seeds are big and fat like beans, others, like poppies and purslane, are so tiny if you dropped them you would never find them!

How far apart?!

• Overplant! This is where planting seeds has a great advantage over transplants! Seedlings are tender and delicious, most are edible. You can plant and mow, just like with mesclun. When you wish for a larger permanent crop, you thin! Decide on appropriate spacing, take out the smaller seedlings until you have the spacing for the plants you will let grow to maturity. In a sense, you get two crops from that space. Keep enough seeds for a 2nd or 3rd planting, in case things don’t go well, or you just want successive crops.
• Safe from disease/pest spread at maturity. Plant big plants like broccoli or tomatoes with plenty of space between. You don’t want mildew or aphids to spread plant to plant, or in the case of tomatoes, the blights/wilts. When your plants come up as babies, they may look a little forlorn on 2′ centers, but those gaps will fill quickly! Also you can plant quickies like lettuce on the sunny side among them as fillers. Biodiversity! Rather than rows, split your plants up around your garden, and alternate varieties! That confuses pests and keeps them from spreading right down a row.
• Root crops like radish, beets, carrots! The necessity is to leave enough root space between plants for the roots to grow! Radish grow so quickly they don’t have time to get pests or diseases. Beet greens are delicious, but leave most of them so the roots get plenty of nutrition and grow quickly. You do have to watch for leaf miners and remove those leaves immediately to stop spread. Root crops are the exception to the requirement for no-leaves-touching mature.

After how far apart should I plant my seeds, probably the most iffy thing about planting seeds is how deep do they need to be planted? General rule is no more than double the width or diameter of the seed, but I can tell you that can vary significantly! Most seed packs have that info on them. Do read it, or look ’em up online!

Chopsticks can be used in a couple helpful ways.

Mark one of your wooden sticks at 1/4, 1/2, and 1″ from the small tip. That way you can get your seeds at the right planting depth. Using your marked stick keeps you mindful. Planting goes fun and faster with less wondering and worrying!

If you are installing delicate sprouts, make a planting hole, and if you are good with chopsticks, grasp the sprout gently, carefully place it the way you want it. Cover and smooth the soil, water, sprinkle gently. Check out Seed Soaking/Presprouting Tips & Ideas!

Teensy seeds are a challenge in so many ways!

First it’s a question of not dropping them. Hold the package over a dish? Something smooth and not wet or sticky. And keep your hands and that package dry! And don’t plant those tiny feathery seeds on a windy day!

Second is how to distribute them the right distance apart. Very carefully. Be careful not to crush or damage them by rolling them or squishing them between your fingers! Use a tiny spoon or tweezers.

Since most tiny light seeds aren’t supposed to be buried, in nature they wouldn’t be, simply very lightly hand pat them to the soil or sprinkle the barest amount of fine soil over them, just enough to anchor them. Some lettuces are like that.

Third is how to keep them from washing away when you water. You can make a tiny ‘trench’ or depression with mild slopes. Sometimes I just hand pat a little depression area with my fingers. Instead of the hose, use your watering can with nozzle that has fine holes. No flooding or standing water. Just moisten. Moisten them maybe 2 or 3 times so the soil gets moist a 1/4 to a 1/2 inch deep. Moisten once, water something else, come back and moisten again so the water can soak in a wee bit deeper. Repeat.

When you are weeding, have you noticed how many seeds come up by the edge of a pathway board, a plot border or a stepping stone? Put down a mini board, wide stick, where you want tiny seeds to grow, preferably in a slightly lower area, a depression that will hold a bit of moisture. Sprinkle the seeds around the board, along the stick. They will have the moisture and shelter they need to get started right at the side of the board or stick! Once they are started, remove the board, transplant some of them if you like.

It may be easier to plant a group of seeds in one place to get them started. That can be their nursery. Plant them far enough apart that you can get a small trowel in there to collect them to transplant. Transplant them where they are needed or to their permanent place when they get their second set of leaves.

Delicate seeds like Marigold need to be carefully laid down and cover the complete seed, but no more than 1/4″. The ‘tail’ of the seed acts like a wick to deliver moisture to the seed. Unprocessed home saved carrot seeds are fuzzy with wicks. They germinate much sooner than the processed naked ones in seed packs!

Lettuce seeds are planted on the surface OR 1/4″ deep depending on the variety. Read your seed pack!

Harder seeds like Cilantro can be exciting to handle since they roll around and jump for it any time they can! They often come up as nearby volunteers! That rolling about can make spacing a challenge. But you can see them and they are big enough to move where you want them. Radish are not exactly round, but they can be unpredictable too! If spacing means a lot to you, you can easily make or buy seed strips!

If you aren’t over planting for greens for thinning, spacing does mean a lot! Plants too closely seeded and not thinned, get rootbound, root plants like radish, beets, carrots can’t make, won’t form their roots – the food part we would like to eat! Too closely planting lessens growth and production, weakens your plants since your plants are literally starving. Plants along the edge of a clump can reach out. Ones at the center can’t get their roots through to food. They are more susceptible to disease and being too close makes it easy for disease to spread.

Beet seeds are unique because each ‘seed,’ corm, is a cluster of three to four seeds! There is no escaping needing to thin them. OR, you can gently hand separate them to get four healthy plants! I separated beets I got from a nursery. When I finished, 3 of the 6-pack compartments had planted out to 36 beets!

Big seeds are easy, but if you aren’t naturally a good measurer, it’s easy enough to plant too deep or not deep enough! Where are those chopsticks? If the seeds are an inch deep, you usually won’t wash them away when you water. Some seeds can be planted too deep to make it, just rot and become compost. With others a little deep means it just takes longer to come up. Too shallow may not keep those seeds moist enough to germinate. 

Some batches of seeds are mixed sizes – maybe your green manure or living mulch mix. Some say broadcasting them is all you need to do – they are light germinating seeds. But soil contact and moisture is important. If you plant during a hot spell, get your soil as level as possible. Fling, toss, drizzle your seeds about. Lay a board or a piece of plywood on the soil to press them down for that contact. Immediately cover with bird net or aviary wire or many will be gone overnight, and birds will take tiny tasty tender seedlings that sprout! Gently water your seeds to keep them moist. In hot weather that may be two or more times a day. Better to wait a few days until cooler weather if you can. You can bury your seeds, but way fewer seeds make it. You only get a thin stand.

Protect your seeds! After your seeds are in, cover with bird netting or aviary wire. Birds love seeds and fresh seedlings! Animals like plowing through your soil looking for insects and seeds. Aviary wire is best for that, or an easily removed wire border so you have access for tending. You can use cloches for small spot plantings. When you can use them, they are excellent because wicked slugs and cutworms can’t get through!

Successive planting in summer heat has its own challenges, but it is doable! Set up shade cloth, use upturned flower pots or laundry baskets, cardboard boxes, or lightweight fabric held aloft with hoops. Shade cloth comes in different densities. You can water through it and it keeps birds and predator insects away. Remove it when your plants are up and strong, especially when pollinators need access. This image has lettuce, but you can start mixtures of other plants this way too. Use it as a nursery then transplant plants where you want them.

STARTING SEEDS INDOORS or IN YOUR COLD FRAME or GREENHOUSE

Starting seeds in a Container is a whole different territory! Your main advantage is getting a SIX WEEK head start on planting! That’s food on your table a month and a half sooner!

It can be as simple as putting a few containers or 6 packs in your kitchen window or on top of the warm fridge, or doing something costly, elaborate and sophisticated! If you like starting seeds, choosing a permanent space, then installing lighting, warmth, and setting up a special overhead watering system on a timer may intrigue you. You might put up a greenhouse! You can install a wonderful bought or homemade cold frame on the sun facing hillside.

You can make your own special seed starter mix; it’s not too hard. But if you don’t want the mess, or don’t have time for that, you just buy a great mix at the nursery! While you are there, get a bag of vermiculite, or when you are at the grocery outlet, get a big container of cinnamon. Read on below….

Starting seeds indoors means there are no predator pests. Yay! Rain doesn’t matter. No drying or damaging winds. No hot scorching sun. No soil pre preps – yet.

Level starting medium is pretty easy to achieve. Gentle watering is still needed. Seeds and seedlings need to be kept moist.

Making tags is very useful, especially if you put different plants in the 6 pack compartments! You have a start date and you know when they should be up. And you can use the tags when you transplant the babies in the soil outdoors.

When the true leaves come on, the ones after the first two (cotyledons), the seedlings will need to be fed. Spritzing with a dilute liquid feed is the usual answer.

The nemesis is Damping off disease, a sad foe of seedlings. The baby just topples overnight and it’s over. A 2005 North Carolina State University study found it’s not the mixture but what’s on top of the soil that counts most. Damping off differences almost disappeared between commercial organic seed-starting mixtures and various homemade mixtures after all of the seeds were covered with vermiculite instead of a planting medium. Simple fix!

The super simplest prevention is Cinnamon! Just sprinkle it on the soil! Sprinkle on plant injuries and they will heal. It is a rooting hormone. And it repels ants! Mildew, mold, fungal diseases? Mix 4 tablespoons cinnamon in a half gallon warm water, shake it vigorously, steep overnight. Strain through a sieve or coffee filter and put it in a spray bottle. Add ¼ teaspoon liquid dish soap as a surfactant, lightly spritz your plants, undersides and tops of leaves!

You do need to harden off seedlings. They need to be taken outside to get used to cooler temps, a bit of breeze to build their standing up muscles! The author of ‘Grocery Gardening’, Jean Ann Van Krevelen says, “Take your seedlings to a protected location outside for one hour for the first day.” She said, “Do this each day for a week. Add one hour for each day of the process. By the end of the week, you’ll be at 7 hours and the plants will be ready to be transplanted.” She doesn’t recommend direct sunlight or wind. Don’t take them out if it is windy and your seedlings could be broken. Just do it the next day where you left off. Keep your seedlings evenly moist.

Schlepping them back and forth may be a challenge, but doable. But if you grow them on a cart with wheels in the garage or near the patio, you can easily roll them out and back in each day.

Both indoor and outdoor planting have their necessities, special techniques, disadvantages and advantages! There’s no reason why you can’t do BOTH! Getting a healthy start in the ground is terrific! Others would never make it in cold or extreme heat and indoor babying is just right. Preseason indoor starting gets you there that six weeks sooner! And transplants can be put in ground that is too cold for seeds!

Sow Seeds & Sing Songs! Blessings on all your Seedlings!

Updated 2.26.23

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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 newsletter started as correspondence for the Santa Barbara CA USA, Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden. Both of Santa Barbara City’s remaining community gardens are very coastal. During late spring/summer we are 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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January, February Veggie Seeds or Transplants, Pros & Cons, Tips on Why & When!

Starting Sage & Lavender Indoors – Gary Pilarchik

Do both! Seeds and transplants! Here’s why and when!

If you are late planting seeds, it’s off to the nursery for transplants!
Some plants just don’t come in six packs, like radish. Seeds it is.

SEEDS

Watching seeds sprout and seedlings unfurl and grow is divine! It’s a miracle! Many have just never done it and find, to their delight, how easy and inspiring it is! Seeds can be started indoors at home or right where you want them, in the garden!

Pros:

• The beauty of seeds is you can select plants your nursery doesn’t carry!
• You can start them indoors 6 weeks earlier than you can plant seeds in the ground!
• If you planted it right in the ground, you have saved yourself the step of transplanting!
• Some plants just don’t like to be transplanted! Annuals, plants with large seeds, plants that require weathering, plants with fragile root systems and root crops – beets, carrots. Like snapdragons, nasturtiums, spinach, and peas.
  • Root crops like carrots need depth. If their tap root comes in contact with the bottom of a container it will fork or bend. Better to sow directly in your soil.
• Plants that are quick to germinate, get up and get strong, are great to start from seed, like radishes, beans, peas, beets, and turnips.
• If you are growing a lot or in succession, seeds are the most inexpensive way to grow your garden. Save seeds from your best veggies, flowers and herbs each year and you won’t need to buy any more! Plus they will be adapted to you and your soil!
• Be prepared to thin your seedlings, which means pulling out a few plants so your crop is spaced apart enough. Beet seedlings need 2-4 inches apart, but the seed grows in fours, so each plant needs room to make a normal-sized beet. Crowded plants compete for light, water, and nutrients. Also, lack of airflow will encourage diseases. The pro here is those young tender seedlings are perfect in salads!
• Seedlings thinned from over-crowded areas may be moved to fill in bare spots.
• Growing seeds for transplants indoors are protected from the elements and garden pests while you can also control soil, moisture, fertility and heat.
• You can select only the strongest seedlings to transplant.
• All your plants are up when you plant them – no germination failures, empty spaces, no wondering, no replanting necessary, no lost time.
• If you complete the circle by continually keeping the seeds from open-pollinated plants in your garden, you’ll create a vegetable strain (AKA: landrace) that thrives in your particular environment.
• There is well deserved pride in growing your veggies from seed-to-plate!

Veggie Seeds Soil Planting Temps!
Seed Soaking/Presprouting Tips & Ideas!
Soil for Seed Starting! DIY, Pre-made

Cons:

• Seed germination in the ground isn’t guaranteed. You wait to find out and if it doesn’t start, you lose time, possibly it gets beyond the planting window and it was not a plant your nursery carries. Starting a few seeds indoors as backup is wise.
• The number of days to germinate in your garden could be very different than those given on a seed packet due to soil conditions, weather, whereas with a transplant, there’s no guessing.
• Extra tender care and time is needed as seedlings germinate and get going. Transplants are sure, up and ready! All you have to do is go get them…
  • Seedlings need to be weeded so they aren’t overgrown.
  • Sometimes seedlings need protection from birds, pests – especially slugs, and freezes or hot sun.
  • Right watering must be done, you can’t miss.
  • Tomatoes like moving air to development well, if starting indoors you may need a fan.
• Yes, there is a learning curve with seeds. Research is important so you can choose the best for your climate, soil and light conditions, the season – first and last frosts.
• You’ll need a seed germinating space. Regular shop lights are fine for germinating seeds, but there usually is an initial investment of some kind, like maybe that fan!

Super healthy homegrown Pepper seedlings at New Life on a Homestead

TRANSPLANTS

Oh it’s so much fun to select transplants! It gives you the option of trying new plants, varieties, sometimes getting another one if one has failed. While you are shopping, there are marvelous other gardening tools, amendments, flowers you can get! Who knows what you will come back with?! And you can plant in the garden the same day!

From the Nursery Pros:

• Nursery transplants take a whole lot less time! You just go get them.
• If you don’t have a place to grow seeds, transplants from the nursery are terrific. You can ask, they may be able to get special varieties you would like.
• Some plants are just plum hard to get started from seed. A transplant is perfect, thanks.
• Starts are especially perfect for beginning gardeners who would like to skip the part that includes vulnerable, infant plants. Starting and babying tiny plants may not be your cup of tea either! Let the experts do it!
• With transplants the seed is germinated, it’s showing vigor and chances for a successful garden are more likely from the outset. This is particularly important when you have a limited number of warm summer days or you are planting late!
• On average, transplants give you a SIX WEEKS jump start on the season, because they will mature sooner and give you an earlier harvest. Transplants give higher early yields, and, one gardener says, in the case of watermelons, give larger fruits.
• Transplants can give you a great boost with succession planting, which means planting the same thing several times per season to ensure continuous harvest. For great results with lettuce, for example, you can start your first succession via transplants, and then follow every 2-3 weeks with lettuce seeds sown directly into your garden.
• If your seeds have failed, you can get transplants at the nursery!
• Transplants can be more resistant to insect pests, because they are more mature and stronger when you first put them into your garden. Many insect pests, like slugs, just love teeny tiny seedlings. Put down Sluggo or something like it even before you transplant, but definitely at the same time you install your plants. An overnight slug fest can remove an entire plant!
• Planting transplants gives you immediate satisfaction. Who doesn’t love starting their garden and seeing all those baby plants?
• Buying transplants can be more cost effective, and provides you with a great way to support local farmers and garden centers.
• Conscientious local nurseries carry starts that are grown specifically for your area. So you don’t have to worry about planting a variety that doesn’t do well in your zone. Box stores are less likely to be region specific.
• Having strong, young plants gives you some leeway per correct planting times. Transplants can be put in the ground earlier than seeds can be planted! If you miss a planting window, go get transplants from the nursery and you are back on time!

From Your Nursery at Home Pros:

• Start 6 weeks before safe outdoor soil planting temps. Head start!
• Sow seeds indoors during cool weather, harden off, then move outdoors, when weather warms up, not before.
• Since the seedbed produces many more plants than needed, choose only the very best plants!
• Reduce loss. The disease and pest free, precise environment of indoor planting is more protected than seeds germinated and seedling growth in the ground.
• You can plant exactly as many as you need.
• You know they are organic all the way, seed and soil, feeds.

Importantly, if you are growing your own transplants indoors, harden them off well. Expose them to slightly cooler temps and some dryer conditions before putting them out. Most transplants have been raised in warm, favorable temperatures, spoiled with plenty of water. They may suffer transplant shock from suddenly changing those conditions. They may wilt or even die with cooler night temperatures, lots of temperature fluctuation, or drier conditions.

How to Transplant for Super Successful Returns!

Cons:

• Starts from the nursery are the most expensive way to plant a garden. Prices can vary drastically depending on where you shop.
• There is a carbon footprint. Yes, most do use plastic containers and you usually drive to the nursery.
• Your variety choices are limited to the plants the nursery or garden center selects from their grower, which may be local or not. Box stores often carry out of season veggies for your locality.
• You have to buy more than you need, they only come in four or six packs.
• The nursery runs out or doesn’t have as many as you need or the plants aren’t in good condition.
• Consider that transplants can introduce weeds, pests and diseases into your garden. Most producers of transplants are very careful about this, especially with respect to diseases, but it is not uncommon to get a little grass or other weed seed into your transplant pack now and then. Carefully check for pests, the undersides of leaves.
• Transplants you start yourself are time and labor intensive, and sometimes the whole batch fails. For more assurance, plant backup seeds every few days. If you end up with too many, share them with other gardeners who will be so grateful!

Veggies easy to direct seed – that’s right in the ground!

• Beans
• Broccoli, Brussel sprouts, Cauliflower, Collards, Kale, Kohlrabi
• Chard
• Corn
• Cucumbers
• Leeks
• Lettuce
• Melons, Watermelon
• Okra
• Peas
• Root crops – beets, carrots, garlic, onion, radish, turnips
• Spinach
• Squashes
• Sunflowers
• Tomato grows rampantly from seed!
• Zucchini

Veggies to transplant or start in trays or get at the nursery!

• Celery
• Eggplant
• Peppers
• Tomatoes are fun to get at the nursery because there are often so many exotic varieties! In Santa Barbara, that nursery is La Sumida!

Know that different gardeners do better with one plant than another! Their peppers always do well, they never get eggplant! Their onions never get big, but they get super big juicy celery stalks!

Garden Magic! Self-sowers & Volunteers

I have a soft spot for volunteers! I love the variety, surprises the birds bring already fertilized and ready to grow! Plants that self seed are a gift! They know where to grow and come up at the perfect time. Let your plants live out their life cycle, make flowers for the bees, butterflies and beneficial insects, seeds for the birds, before cleaning up. Leave a few of your very best tomatoes and cucumbers to decompose in the garden. Let sunflowers, calendula, violas and other annuals drop their seeds and make pretty next year. These plants will have natural vigor. Transplant them to your convenience if you must, but let them grow as they naturally are whenever possible.

Experienced gardeners do a little seed planting in the ground, some grow their own transplants indoors, and at times buy transplants for various reasons! Maybe the nursery got a new plant and you gotta try it!

Back to top 

 

See the entire February Newsletter! (Sign up for it if you like!)

February – Final Plans, Preps, 1st Spring Plantings!
Calendula ~ Edible, Medicinal, Good for Your Garden, Easy to Grow!
January, February Seeds or Transplants, Pros & Cons
Other Community Gardens – Virginia Avenue Community Garden, Washington DC 
Events! CEC EARTH DAY Celebration 2017!
x

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

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic!

Read Full Post »

February – Final Plans, Preps, 1st Spring Plantings!

Fine stout strong cherry tomato seedling grown by Jessica of Bountiful Backyard!

You went to the Seed Swap, have gotten your seeds from the catalog or nursery, and are 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. Zucchini, cool tolerant tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and corn can be started now, by seed, in the ground. March is a little warmer and early variety plants get a better start. April is most everything – cucumber, pepper, squash, beans, more tomatoes, watermelon. May is the true heat lovers, cantaloupe, okra (June may be better yet), eggplant. Some gardeners wait to plant tomatoes until May and June to avoid the soil fungi of earlier months. I hold that space by planting something temporary there in March. June is good for okra, eggplant and long beans!

Summer garden planning tips emphasizing needing less water! Companions!

PLANT PLANTS THAT REPEL PESTS IN ADVANCE SO THEY WILL BE UP AND WORKING WHEN YOUR SEEDLINGS COME UP OR YOU INSTALL YOUR TRANSPLANTS!

• 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, then you have to replant and wait for more production. determinate toms do produce sooner, so for an earlier table production, plant them to hold you until your indeterminates are producing. Also, for earlier production, plant cherry tomatoes! Yum! Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of dandelions!
• Choose more prolific plants and varieties of them so you get more production for less water.
• 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.
• Plan to put cucumbers up on trellises to keep them disease free and clean, and so they ripen evenly all the way around. Co-plant with beans! Beans above, cukes below. Japanese Long cukes give a generous supply per water used!
• Next, intermingle mid height plants, bush beans, determinate tomatoes, tall peppers like Big Jim Anaheim or Polanos, zucchini – try the prolific heirloom, star shaped Costata Romanesco! Potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs. Plant Radish ahead of cukes & zukes to repel cucumber beetles. Eat a few, but let several grow up by and through the plants you are protecting.
• Leave a winter broccoli or two for salad side shoots. Mulch well under your brocs right now! We want to keep these cool loving plants in cool. They help repel cucumber beetles, so push the mulch back, plant cucumbers underneath them. The mulch does double duty, keeping the cukes clean off the soil and insect free above the bug zone!
• Leave a couple of winter kale to provide over summer. Heat tolerant 1000 Headed Kale is a prolific choice that harbors less aphids on its FLAT leaves. Plant lettuces on the sunny side under your brocs and kale.
• Snuggle eggplant among tall chards, maybe some curly leaf kale! Radishes with eggplants/cucumbers as a trap plant for flea beetles.
• Lowest are the ‘littles’ or fillers! Mindful of companions, scatter beets and carrots, lettuce, radish, here and there among, alongside, under larger plants on their sunny side. Bunch onions away from beans. Some of them will be done before the bigger plants leaf out. When the bigger plant leaves start shading out the littles, harvest strategic large lower leaves. There isn’t really a need to allot separate space for littles except strawberries! They need a separate patch with more acidic soil to keep them healthy and be more prolific producers!
• If you love cabbages, plant a few more, but they take up a fair footprint for what they produce and they take quite awhile to do it. Plant quick maturing mini varieties.
• SEED SAVING SPACE! Leave room for some arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery to go to flower to bring bees and beneficials! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next plantings. Carrots love being with cilantro and chamomile!
• 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, are definitely low to the ground, can be quite smaller than strawberry plants! 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 fenceline. 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.

Super use of your space! As winter plants finish, in spaces needing to be held for later, ie if you are planting okra in June, grow plants that are quick and prolific producers grown for their leaves, until it’s the right time to plant those heat lovers! They produce continuously, and can be removed when you want the space. You will have lush harvests while you are waiting. Think of kales, chard, lettuce, beets, crops grown for their leaves, 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 and let the smaller ones get enough sun to keep producing.

Hardly anyone can resist planting early tomatoes! In this early cooler time, plant your 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. Check! See Tomatoes at Cornell!

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

Hopefully, the weather will warm rapidly. It’s been COLD in Santa Barbara area! The January 30  9 AM ground temp at Rancheria was 48 degrees. Though the soil may become fairly warm quickly in days to come, day length is still important. No matter how early you plant some plants, they still won’t produce fruit until they have enough hours of sun, and for some, warmth including day and/or night and/or ground temps. If they miss their window, they may never produce at all…better to pull and replant. Keep growing those leafy producers – lettuce, chard, kale – in that space and plant the right plants at the right good time! See Best Soil Temps

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!

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, peas – mildew resistant varieties, white potatoes, radishes, shallots, spinach, and turnips. Get bolt resistant/slow bolt varieties, and especially heat and drought tolerant varieties.

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

• Install gopher barriers.
• Get netting or bendable wire like aviary or 1/2″ hardware cloth for bird protection.
• Install or repair pathways, berms. Lay in straw, boards, pallets, stepping stones.
• Waffle Garden, basins & windbreaks, Water Garden. Excellent drought choices.
• Gather cages & trellises
• Terrace slopes to prevent water runoff and topsoil loss
• Build raised beds, Hugelkultur
• Get new containers
• Setup Compost areas – enclosures, area to compost in place
• Organize where you will keep straw bales for summer mulch, compost layers

Spring planting soil prep! Add 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! None for carrots, peas or beans.
• Add 25% worm castings. As little as 10% works. They are potent – increase germination, faster seedling growth, help with plant immunities to disease.
• Adding guanos high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time helps your plants continue to bloom LATE in the season! Jamaican bat is high P phosphorus (blooms) 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!
• Don’t cover with mulch unless you need it for erosion control. Covered soil is cooler. Let your winter cool soil warm up. Do mulch 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 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. See more

One more round of green manure is doable where you will plant late April, May. Grow it where you will grow heavy summer feeders like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, chilis, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and corn; hungry stalk vegetables like celery, fennel, rhubarb, and artichokes; or continually producing green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard. Green manure can be beautiful favas, bell beans, or a vetch mix to boost soil Nitrogen. 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 it begins to flower, whack it down, chop into small bits and turn under. It’s more tender to chop while it’s smaller. Taller is not better. It takes 2 to 2 1/2 months to grow. Cut and turn. Wait two to three weeks then plant, plant, plant!

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!

When 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 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. Rather than row plant, interplant here and there. Water 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. Hose aphids off chard, kale and brocs. Keep doing it for a few days to catch the ones you missed. A little less water.

• 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 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!

White flies Flush away, especially under the leaves. Remove any yellowing leaves, especially on your Brassicas, that attract white fly. Again, a little less water.Prevention  A frustrating typical disease is Powdery mildew. It’s common on Curly Leaf kales. 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 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.

Soil Checks! Especially after our recent rains, check 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, needing peeling, losing the nutrients in their skins. Uncovered carrot shoulders don’t ripen but stay green. Same with potatoes.

Watering & Weeding is important after rains. Winds dry soil quickly and short rooted plants like peas, or seedlings, need to be kept moist.

• Thinning is a form of weeding! Thin plants that need it, like beets that naturally start in foursomes! Thin plants you intentionally over planted – carrots, beets, turnips, kale, chard, 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.
• 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 little weeds after that for awhile. Get ’em while they are small and easy to do. Smart gardening.

When grass has those 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, don’t shake the soil loose from the roots and spread seeds all over, and don’t put them in your compost!

Have a wonderful February! May your seedlings grow well!

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See the entire February Newsletter! (Sign up for it if you like!)

February – Final Plans, Preps, 1st Spring Plantings!
Calendula ~ Edible, Medicinal, Good for Your Garden, Easy to Grow!
January, February Seeds or Transplants, Pros & Cons
Other Community Gardens – Virginia Avenue Community Garden, Washington DC 
Events! CEC EARTH DAY Celebration 2017!
x

---

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

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic!

Read Full Post »

August Harvest, Seed Saving, Fall Soil Prep!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! 

Keep harvesting, it keeps your plants producing! Canning, freezing, fermenting, storing, drying are on the agenda! Check up on your winter squashes to see if they are ready to harvest and store. It’s Seed Saving time!

Though crazy busy with harvests, gardeners have fall planting on their minds. Among HOT August days, there are ones that have a hint of fall. Days are a tad shorter; shadows in different places now. As summer plants finish, nursery bed areas are becoming available. The soil is being prepared for first fall plantings now through mid August, especially from seed! Often these special nurseries are made in semi shaded areas, seedlings to be transplanted as they get bigger as spaces become available.

Plant your seeds far enough apart to get your trowel in to pick up your little plants to move them one by one to their new homes. Some are planted under finishing plants to take the finishing plant’s place, like peas under beans. Pop in some baby kale or cabbage between the tomatoes and peppers. Safe in a greenhouse is wonderful too!

Already, get your seed packs for celery, chard, mustard greens, parsley, peas, winter radish varieties, and Brassicas if we don’t have Bagrada Bugs: cabbage, brocs, Brussels sprouts, collards, cauliflower, kale babies, kohlrabi, turnips. See Super Fall Veggies for help on choosing the very best varieties and Fall companion planting! Winter plants that get a good start while there is still some heat, will be producing a lot sooner than plants started while it is cooler, and you will have a much earlier crop. Be sure to leave space to plant additional rounds to keep steady table supply.

If you have Bagrada Bugs, wait until cooler October, when the bugs are gone, to plant Brassicas. That includes arugula, mustards, radish. See more about Bagrada Bugs management.

If you don’t have time to fuss with seeds, will be away at the critical time, keep harvesting, do your soil preps, and wait for September or October transplanting. Labor Day weekend is a favorite big planting time for many gardeners, and that’s only a month away now! At that time you can plant both seeds and transplants for two rounds at once, the seeds coming in six weeks after the transplants!

Summer plants you can still plant for early fall harvests, are beans and early maturing determinate tomatoes and corn. Corn is more disease prone at this time though.

Tuck in your year-round fillers, beets, bunch onions, carrots, summer lettuces, winter radish, to keep a colorful variety for your table.

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

Give your late favorite summer/fall heavy producers you are keeping a good feed (sidedress).  Eggplants have a large fruit, beans put out a ton of beans, tomatoes are big and working hard, peppers can be profuse! They like a tad of chicken manures scratched in, bunny poop and straw (pick up at Animal Shelters), well aged horse manure and compost makes them dance with the faeries in the night time! Fertilizers highest in P, Phosphorus, keeps blooming and fruiting optimum.

• Peppers specially like a foliar feed of non-fat powdered milk (Calcium) and Epsom Salts (Magnesium & Sulfur). They also can use more Potassium. This time of year kelp meal is good source and releases quickly. If you have predators about, don’t get the kind mixed with fish emulsion.
• For deeper root feeding, use a spade fork to make holes about your plant. Push it into the soil, wiggle back and forth a bit, then pour a tasty compost/manure/worm tea down the holes. That will feed at root level and give the soil organisms something to think about!

Keep your watering steady out to the dripline to avoid slowing or stopping production or having misshapen fruits – that’s curled beans, odd shaped peppers, catfaced strawberries. Keep your soil moist. In hot late summer weather water short rooted high production plants like beans, cucumbers, lettuces and strawberries more frequently. Keep them well mulched, especially the cucumbers.  Keep them off the ground to protect them from suffering wilts fungi. I put down straw 1″ deep. You want the soil covered, but able to allow airflow, dry up the wilts.

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

In the cool of summer evenings design your fall garden! Move plants from the nursery area as space becomes available, but have a plan too. Tall plants, trellises, to the North or on the shady side, then plants of graduated sizes to the South or sunniest areas. Peas need a string or wire trellis for their tiny tendrils. They aren’t like beans that twine anything. Few winter plants need support, but big brocs, tall kales sometimes need staking. If they ‘lay down,’ if you have the room and want more plants, they will grow baby plants along their stems! Otherwise, put your plants back up and stake them securely. Build your new raised beds. Install gopher barriers!

Think soil, soil, soil! When an area is done, clear away insect hiding places. Remove and throw away any mulches from under where diseased plants were. If your soil is high for the area, plants there were diseased, and you have plentiful compost, maybe remove the couple top inches of soil and generously lay on some of that tasty new compost! Dig it into the top 4 to 6 inches. Amend your soils per the plant that will be grown in the area per your design. Strawberries need acidic compost IN the soil.

Keep turning your fall compost pile, start one if you haven’t! This warmer weather will help the pile decompose faster, and your plants will be blessed when you give the compost to them! If you aren’t hot composting, remember, thin layers and smaller bits decompose faster. The ratio is 1 wet/green to 2 dry/brown. Throw in whatever kitchen trim, torn tea bags, coffee filters/grounds, crushed eggshells – anything worms can eat will decompose faster.

I’m talking faster because starting now is a little late, so this is what you do to ‘catch up!’ Sprinkle with a handful or two of living moist soil to inoculate your pile, and add handfuls of decomposer herbs like comfrey, yarrow, chamomile. Turn it as often as you can to aerate and keep things humming. Vigorously shovel chop into smaller pieces as you go. Once a day if possible, but do what you can. I do mine anywhere from three days to every two weeks as I have time. Compost improves your soil’s water holding capacity and adds and stabilizes N, Nitrogen!  Yes!

Seed Saving! Allow your healthiest top producers to seed. Seeds are your second harvest! Each year keep your best! Scatter some about if they would grow successfully now! Or just scatter them about and when it’s the right time, even next spring, they will come up. Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s better than ever plantings.  Remember, these seeds are adapted and localized to you! If you are willing, take your extras to a local Seed Bank or Seed Swap! While you are there, pick up some of your fall favorites and some new ones to try out! How to Save Tomato Seeds!

Happy Late Summer Gardening, My Friends!

 

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

See the entire August GBC Newsletter!

August! Harvest, Seed Saving, Fall Soil Prep!
Veggie Seed Saving Plant by Plant!
SoCal Fall/Winter Veggie SOIL Tips for Delicious Returns!
The Veggie Gardening Revolution Continues!
Other Community Gardens – Irvine California’s The Incredible Edible Park 

Events! Soil Not Oil, Fermentation Festival & National Heirloom Exposition in Santa Rosa CA

…and wonderful images of Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden in July!

 

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July Summer Garden Harvesting, Relaxing, Feasting!

Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! 

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.  –  Henry David Thoreau

In July most gardeners are in full swing, tomatoes coming in force! Sidedressing (feeding) to prolong harvests, especially in late July, is garden wise. Harvests need to be regular, happily eaten, stored well, surplus given! Seed saving is on the agenda. Make compost! Soil prep for fall planting is starting as plants finish and space is available, that is unless you want to plant one more round of a summer fav that will produce in October!

If you are just starting, plant a few patches of fast growing, less water needing, heat lovers, lots of summer heat tolerant lettuces for your salads! They may need a little shade cloth protection. Plan out your fall/winter layout, remembering tall to the north, short to the south. Start amending your soil. If you will be planting bareroot strawberries late October or so, reserve that area. Amend that patch with acidic compost – the kind used for azaleas and camellias. Winter plants don’t take up as much food in cooler weather, so use less compost. Remember, nature’s soil is naturally only 5% organic matter, but we are growing veggies, so a little more than that is perfect. Too much food and plants go to all leaf. But then a lot of winter veggies are just that, all leaf! Cabbage, Chard, Kale, Lettuces. Oh, lettuces thrive with manures, so put more in the lettuce patch areas, but none where the carrots will grow. They don’t need it.

In summer you want a stronger lettuce, heat tolerant & slow bolting! Lettuce Leaf and Red Sails are good. Jericho from Israel is great. Sierra, Nevada. Nevada is a Green Crisp/Batavian that grows BIG, doesn’t bolt, and is totally crispy! Parris Island is slow bolting. Green Towers Romaine tolerates moderate summer heat and has some resistance to tipburn and bolting. Check out this page at Johnny’s Seeds!

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

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

At the end of the month, sow carrots (they do best from seed), celery and, if no Bagrada Bugs, Brassicas. If you have the Bugs, wait until it cools in October. Brassicas are arugula, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage (especially red and savoy types, which resist frost better), cauliflower, and kohlrabi, mizuna, mustard, pac choi, radish, rutabaga, turnip. Keep the soil moist and shaded until they’re up, and then gradually allow them more sun over a week’s time.

Start a Nursery Patch  It’s time to get seeds if you don’t already have them! While there is little space for big winter plants, small nursery patches can be planted. Leave enough room between seedlings so you can get your trowel in to lift them out to transplant later when space becomes available! If seeds and nurseries aren’t your thing, wait until your local nursery starts having the transplants that make you happy! Late August they might start trickling in. Labor Day weekend is a favorite planting time for some gardeners. October is just fine too!

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

Do it now to be ready for winter rain! If you garden at home, please look into water capture and gray water systems – shower to flower, super attractive bioswale catchments. In Santa Barbara County there are rebates available! Also there are FREE landscape workshops! And we have FREE water system checkups. Call (805) 564-5460 to schedule today! Check out the Elmer Ave retrofit!

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

Sidedressing

• Manure feeds are great for all but beans, beets, carrots, parsnips, sweet and white potatoes, and tomatoes, or there’ll be more foliage than fruit!
• Give your peppers and solanaceaes, tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, Epsom Salt/Magnesium foliar treatments.
• Every couple of weeks your strawberries would love a light fish emulsion/kelp drench.
• 25% Worm castings help our plants uptake soil nutrients and boost your plant’s immune system. When your plant is taxed producing fruit in great summer conditions, it also is peaking out for the season and fighting pests and diseases are harder for it. And, sometimes a plant is just done. No amount of coaxing will have effect. It worked hard. Thank it and take it to the compost altar.

When your plants start flowering, they need another feed, sidedressing. Late July when some plants are near the end of production, extend their fruiting with a good feed. Pull back any mulch, push in your spade fork, rock it gently, remove the fork leaving the holes. Give them a deep drink of compost, worm or manure tea or kelp/fish emulsion. Or pull back the mulch, scratch in a little chicken manure – especially with lettuces. Or, lay on a 1/2″ blanket of compost and some tasty worm castings out to the dripline! If you prefer organic granulated fertilizer sprinkle it around evenly. Recover with your mulch, straw, then water well and gently so things stay in place. Let that good stuff trickle down those spade fork holes. That’s like giving them manure/compost/worm tea in place. If any of your plants are looking puny, have yellowing leaves, might give them a bit of blood meal for a quick pick me up.

Yes, there are pests, and diseases. Mercilessly squash the cucumber beetles, the green/yellow and black striped jobs. They give your plants diseases. I found refraining from watering my strawberries but once a week, more in exceptionally hot or windy weather, and not mulching under my strawberries keeps the slugs and snails at bay. They don’t like dry soil. I’m growing the Seascape variety that has deep roots, so it works well. Do put down organic slug/snail bait where you will be sprouting seeds and while the seedlings are coming up. Aphids don’t thrive in a dryer environment either. Water the plants susceptible to them a little less. Remove yellowing leaves asap. Yellow attracts whiteflies. Leafminers love the 70s! Remove damaged areas of leaves immediately. Mice and rats love tomato nibbles and they are well equipped to climb! A garden kitty who loves to hunt; keep your compost turned so they don’t nest in it; remove debris piles and ground shrub or hidey habitat. Please don’t use baits that will in turn kill kitties or animals that would feed on a poisoned animal. That includes Gophers. For gophers, install wire barriers. See more!

As summer is peaking, keep your garden clean. Remove finishing weakened plants that attract pests and get diseased. Remove debris, weeds. Remove mulch from under plants that were diseased and replace with clean mulch.

Important Habitat! July is perfect time to let a carrot or two, a celery, arugula and some cilantro bloom out! The blooms will be food for and bring beneficial insect pollinators. Birds will have seeds for food and scour your plants for juicy cabbage worms, whiteflies, aphids, earwigs, grasshoppers, cucumber beetles and grubs fresh for their hatchlings! Chickadees even eat ants!

Seeds are your second harvest, insure the purity of your line. Your plants adapt to you and your unique location! Each year keep your best! Seedsaving is really a no-nonsense game! It’s important to our world community, as Thomas Rainer says, to preserve our garden heritage & biodiversity! Besides, it’s fun! Keep some for you – some as spices & others for planting. Package as gifts, and reserve some to take to the Seed Swap in January!

Think on when you want those October pumpkins, ThanksGiving sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie! And at Christmas time, maybe a sauce over some of those delicious beans you froze or some fresh butterhead lettuce salad topped with cranberries. Plan for it and plant accordingly!

Meanwhile, take advantage of our summer weather and have breakfast at the garden!

 

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

See the entire July GBC Newsletter!

JULY Summer Garden Harvesting, Relaxing, Feasting!
FYI InfoGraphic: Home Gardening in the US
Harvesting & Storage Tips for Our Summer Favorites!
The Veggie Gardening Revolution Starts with YOU & ONE SEED! 

Events!  Soil Not Oil International Conference, National Heirloom Exposition

…and wonderful images of Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden in June!

 

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