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

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

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

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

APRIL through JUNE Planting Timing

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

While we are waiting for the right temps, do soil preps that may still be needed. Weed out plants that won’t help your summer lovers. Make your soil fluffy with water holding compost, only 5 to 10%, while also adding tasty well aged composted manure, and worm castings too! If you don’t have enough castings, save what you have and add to your planting holes amendments.

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

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

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

Choose heat and drought tolerant varieties when you can. For example, why wait when it gets HOT and your tomato stops setting fruit?! Get heat tolerant varieties the heat doesn’t bother! See Tomatoes are the Fireworks of Your Summer Garden!

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natural Disease & Pest Prevention!

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

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

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

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

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

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

May your crops be abundant and your Spirit blessed!

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

Updated 4.2.22

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

Check out the entire April 2022 Newsletter!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARCH through June Planting Timing 

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

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

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

Cold Stratification for Some of Your Seeds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finish your Summer Gardening preparations!

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

Complete your Soil Prep! 

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

Pests Reminders and Home Remedies!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updated annually

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

Check out the entire March 2022 Newsletter!

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

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

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

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

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Here’s To Terrific February 2022 Gardening For You!

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!

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

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

Summer garden planning tips emphasize needing less water! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Lowest are the ‘littles’ or fillers! Being mindful of companions, scatter beets and carrots, lettuce, radish, here and there among, alongside, under larger plants on their sunny sides. Bunch onions away from beans. Some littles will be done before the bigger plants leaf out to full size. For those still growing, remove or harvest lower leaves of the big plant when they start shading the littles. There isn’t really a need to allot separate space for littles except strawberries! They need full sun and a separate patch 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 a long time to do it. In spring and summer choose quick maturing mini varieties.
• SEED SAVING SPACE! Leave room for some arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery to go to flower to bring bees and beneficial insects! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next plantings. Carrots love being with cilantro, marigold and chamomile. Chamomile is a true super plant! It improves the flavor of any neighboring herb, the flowers make a lovely scent, the tea is sweet, and it is called the Plant Doctor – heals nearby plants! Plant it asap to help vulnerable plants before they get in trouble.
• Pumpkin, melon, winter squash vines require some thoughtfulness. Pumpkin and winter squash vine leaves get as huge as healthy zucchini leaves, easily a foot wide! Mini melons have dainty 2″ wide little leaves, can be trellised, but they may do much better on bare hot ground rather than up in cool breezy airs. A healthy winter squash vine can easily be 3′ to 4′ wide, 30′ long plus side vines, and produce a major supply of squash! You can use them as a border, as a backdrop along a fence line. In SoCal, unless you are a squash lover, or won’t be gardening in winter, there is question as to why you would grow winter squash at all. Greens of all kinds grow prolifically here all winter long, giving a fresh and beautiful supply of Vitamin A for less calories and no storage space!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pests!

BEFORE you put in seeds, sprinkle a bit of Sluggo type stuff around a couple of times, to kill the generations, to keep snails and slugs from vanishing upcoming seedlings overnight, making you think they never came up! No, they didn’t let you down. Killing off the creatures ahead of time saves the babies. It stops new transplants from being seriously damaged or entirely mowed while they are small. When, if, later you see more slimy 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, plant with more space between them. Water and fertilize a tad less so leaves are less soft and inviting.

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

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

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

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

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

Diseases – Choose Resistant/Tolerant Varieties

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

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

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

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

Watering & Weeding

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

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

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

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

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

Updated annually

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

Check out the entire February 2022 Newsletter!

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

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

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

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February 2020 ~ Harvests, Soil Preps, Happy 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. It’s still chill, but in Santa Barbara we are now beyond the last average frost date! YAY! 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 COMPANION 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 treats, plant cherry tomatoes! Yum! Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of Dandelions! The beautiful herb Borage repels Tomato Hornworms!
• Choose more prolific plants and 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 summer salad side shoots. Mulch deeply under your brocs right now! We want to keep these cool loving plants cool. If you don’t have enough trellis space, plant cukes 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 full sun and 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 a long time to do it. In spring and summer choose quick maturing mini varieties.
• SEED SAVING SPACE! Leave room for some arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery to go to flower to bring bees and beneficial insects! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next plantings. Carrots love being with cilantro, marigold and chamomile. Chamomile is a true super plant! It improves the flavor of any neighboring herb, the flowers make a lovely scent, the tea is sweet, and it is called the Plant Doctor – heals nearby plants!
• 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 plants get enough sun to keep producing abundantly. And you can always plant a quick growing legume, green manure, aka living mulch, to feed your soil! In early spring and late summer you can plant White Clover.

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 or June to avoid moist soils.

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

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 wire 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, pathways

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

• Compost! The amount of compost to use varies, depending on your soil’s condition, plant selection, compost quality, and availability. A guideline offered by Cornell University. (Veggies – bottom of Pg 4) says use 3 inches over the surface worked into the top 3-6 inches of soil!
• Add well aged manure as appropriate. Less in spring because you want fruit production, not leaf, unless it is a plant grown for its leaves, like lettuce, kale or cabbage! 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 cool winter 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 slowly released in perfect natural timing! And if you made it, you know what’s in it! Make it HOT, Cold, or In Place! Dry is dead, so be sure it is always slightly moist. See more

One more round of green manure is doable where you will plant late April, May, June. Grow it where you will grow heavy summer feeders like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, okra, chilis, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and corn; hungry stalk vegetables like celery, fennel, rhubarb, and artichokes; or continually producing green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard. Green manure can be beautiful favas, bell beans, and/or a legume mix to boost soil Nitrogen, plus oats to aerate your soil 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 and food.

Diseases

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

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

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

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

Watering & Weeding

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

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

Thinning is a form of weeding! Thin plants that need it, like beets whose seeds start in foursomes! Thin plants you intentionally over planted – carrots, beets, turnips, kale, chard, radish, mustard! If you planted too close together, take out shorter, smaller weaker plants. 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.

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.

Happy February Gardening and the very beginning of spring planting!

Updated annually 

 

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Please enjoy these January images at Santa Barbara CA’s Rancheria Community Garden!

Check out the entire January 2020 Newsletter!

It includes more about soil, unique veggies like Tomatillos and Long Beans! You might like to try them this summer! Also there are some important upcoming garden events!

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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. Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!

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

Feeling inspired? Get the word out! Sharing is caring ~

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