A misty morning at the garden….
We in SoCal are so fortunate that we can plant heartily in ‘Winter!’ Brassicas and Peas are the main story. What I call the ‘littles’ are the understory! Lettuces, root crops like beets, parsnips, turnips, Daikon radish. Smellies like onions and garlic, cilantro and arugula, and herbs like Rosemary and others, protect your garden from certain pests, and make your garden oh so fragrant and your meals so tasty!
If you already have these going, plant your last rounds now so waiting for their harvest doesn’t interfere with earliest spring plantings.
Well, there are several important events in December, LOL.
- First is being sure everyone who knows you, knows what is on your holiday garden wish list!
- Plan your spring garden, get catalogs, and order seeds NOW – for the entire year to come!
- Maintain your garden, keep up with SoCal winter harvesting, enjoy your bounty, try some new recipes!
- If you wish, plant your last round of winter plants, succession planting – know that if they come in late they may interfere with earliest spring planting space. Place them carefully so tall early spring plants can be installed on time. Or leave those spots open. ‘Open’ might mean just putting some lettuces there.
Harvest Brassicas of all sorts! The big ones, broccoli, cauliflower and if you live in a good chill area Brussels sprouts, have grown big enough now and your earliest varieties are producing handsomely. Harvest your brocs and caulies while the heads are still tight. If you miss that, harvest asap, even the flowers and flower stalks are edible! After you take the main broccoli head, let your plant continue to grow so it will produce smaller side shoots. Some varieties produce large 3 to 4″ mini brocs and later, smaller salad size ones right on through summer! Cauliflowers are a onetime harvest though you can keep eating the greens. To replace them, you might choose to pop in some beautiful chard, a potato patch, or quick growing mini cabbages in the large open spots that become available. Some cabbages, especially the mini and early varieties, are now headed tightly and ready to eat – slaw, steamed, dropped into soups and cold weather stews. You can still replant them with mini cabbies if you love them!
Deliciously fresh and nutritious winter heading lettuces, kale, celery, bok choy, cilantro, arugula and all manner of cut and come agains are in! Table onions scallions, chives and leeks can be snipped or cut off about 2″ above the ground and let to grow back 3 to 4 times! Do the same but at about 3″ with cilantro and arugula. Let some of your cilantro and arugula grow out for flowers to bring the bees, make seeds for the birds and for you to plant more! The simplest way is to scatter some of the seeds where they are needed and let them come up at will!
Winter brings a lot of tasty Root crops. Winter Cylindra Beets are colorful, and have cut and come again leaves too! Long winter radishes like Daikons are spicy! Carrots are splendid to eat at the garden, share with your kids, pup, bunnies, shred into salads, add to winter soups, stews and stir frys. Slice/chop/stick and freeze for later! Grow some Parsnips too! Turnips have so unique a flavor you might want to eat them separately to just enjoy that flavor.
Harvest peas when they get to the size you want them, and be prompt with that harvesting to keep them coming! Plant more rounds if you love peas!
MAINTAINING
Sidedressing is like snacking. Some of your heavy leaf producers and big bodied Brassicas, may need a feeding now and again or just when they start to fruit. If they slow down, or just don’t look perky, slip them a liquid feed out to their dripline, or cultivate in a wee bit of blood meal. Get your long spouted watering can nozzle under those low cabbage leaves. Lettuces love manures. Compost and manure teas, fish emulsion (when there are no digging predators), powdered box ferts, are all good. Winter feeds need to be easy for your plant to take up. Use ½ the strength of your summer feedings. Slow release is a wise consideration. An excellent way to get feeds to the roots is to push in a spade fork no more than 6″ deep. Push it in vertically (so as not to break the main tap roots), wiggle it back and forth just a bit, remove the fork, pour your foods into the holes, close ’em back up. Soil organisms will get right to work, your plant will stay healthy and be quite productive! Worm castings, though not food, work wonders with immunity, soil conditioning and help germination! Mix some in with your liquid feeds you pour around your plant.
The exceptions are carrots, peas and favas. Carrots get hairy and will fork with too much food! Over watering or uneven watering makes them split and misshapen. Your peas and favas are busy gathering Nitrogen from the air, feeding themselves. If they yellow or look peaked, give them a bit, just a sprinkle or two, of blood meal for quick uptake.
A mini task is to keep covering the shoulders of carrots, beets, radishes, parsnips and turnips. They substantially push right up above ground as they grow. Planting their seeds deeper doesn’t compensate. It’s the nature of the veggie! Never hurts to put a handy little pile of extra soil near where you plant them, or plant them in a low sloped trench. When they need covering, pull the sides of the trench down to cover them. Uncovered shoulders look dry, are tough, sometimes bitter, and need peeling before cooking. Uncovered carrot shoulders don’t ripen but stay green, just like exposed parts of potatoes turn green. The green on potatoes is slightly poisonous, not enough to do harm, but it doesn’t look good.
Watering is important even in cool weather. Also, some plants simply like being moist ie chard, lettuce and short rooted peas, beets. No swimming, just moist. Finger check your soil after rains to see if your soil is moist at least 2″ deep. Sometimes it is rain moistened only 1/4″ deep, needs more water! Also, be careful of too much water, that makes for an aphid tasty soft plant. Watch WEATHER reports in case of freezes, heavy winds, rain. Before weather, stake and tie plants that need support. After strong winds check everybody right away to see if any plants need help. See more about rainy days!
Santa Barbara’s average First Frost (fall) date AT THE AIRPORT is December 19, Last Frost (spring) date is (was?) January 22. That can vary from the coastal areas to the foothills, and our climate is changing generally to warmer, so these dates may not be viable guides much longer, if even now. And remember, these are average dates! See great tips – Protect Your Veggies from Freezing
Except for erosion control, in winter, we pull mulch back to let the soil warm up during the short winter days. The only areas we mulch are around lettuces and chard to keep mud splash off the leaves. Also, it’s good to remove pest habitat, let the soil dry a bit between rains to kill off wilts fungi. Bag up, or pile and cover, clean uninfested summer straw, mulches, to use as compost pile layers during winter. Do not keep straw from areas where there have been infestations.
Pests & Diseases, Prevention and removal! Keep an eye out for pests and diseases and take quick action!
BEFORE you put in seeds, sprinkle a bit of Sluggo type stuff around at least two times (to kill the generations) to keep snails and slugs from vanishing upcoming seedlings overnight, making you think they never came up! No, they didn’t let you down. Killing off the creatures ahead of time saves the babies. It stops new transplants from being seriously damaged or entirely eaten while they are small. Do this a few times, to knock off the generations, and there will be no tiny vegetarian predators for a while.
Don’t lose your crops to birds! There is less food for them in winter, and, often, little rain, so they resort to eating tender juicy veggie leaves. Buy pre made covers, or get clever and cover seeded rows with DIY small openings wire tunnels or a patch cover bent that has sides bent to the ground to keep birds from pecking at little leaves or from plucking tiny seedlings right out of the ground! You can also use small plastic bottle sections to make mini sleeves that birds won’t go down into. Or for baby lettuces, make large plastic bottle cloches, though wire covers let more light in and water through! Bird netting is inexpensive, tears easily, but is good to stretch over peas on a trellis. See more about bird, animal and insect above ground protection covers!
A common pest of Brassicas is the larvae of the pretty little Cabbage White Butterfly, Pieris rapae. The green Cabbage Worm, caterpillar, chews large, irregular holes in the leaves. They blend so well you can easily miss seeing them on the undersides of leaves. Per Natural Planet: ‘They lay up to 200 tiny yellow eggs that hatch in 7 or more days. The larvae feed heavily for 15 or more days. There are 3 to 5 overlapping generations each year, as many as 8 in warmer areas. They bore into the center of cabbage heads contaminating them with its fecal pellets. The dark-green pellets can also be found in the crook of leaves near the stem.’ See here for some terrific natural ideas on what to do!
Chard and beets get Leafminers. Where they have eaten looks terrible but the good part of the leaves is perfectly safe to eat. Plant chard so mature leaves don’t touch, or best of all, in different places around your garden, not in rows or clusters. Thin your plants so they have room. Harvest leaves that might touch first. Remove infested leaves immediately to reduce spread! Beets are not a permanent crop, so they are planted closely. Simply harvest them at their leaves’ prime – ahead of the Leafminers.
A typical disease is Powdery mildew. Plant leaving plenty of space for air circulation, water early in the day so they dry before evening. For mildew apply your baking soda mix. The best combo is 1 regular Aspirin, a 1/4 cup nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a teaspoon liquid dish soap per gallon/watering can. Before sunrise drench under and upper sides of the foliage of young plants to get them off to a great start! It takes only an hour for the mix to be absorbed! Do this the same or next day if transplanting. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains. Prevention is so much better than after mildew has set in. See Aspirin Solution. Hose away aphids and whiteflies, mildew. Remove yellowing Brassica leaves. Yellow attracts whiteflies. In general, plant further apart for air circulation, water and feed just a little less to let those leaves harden up a bit. Soft fat leaves are an invitation to aphids and mildew!
Do not compost diseased or infested leaves or plants. Don’t put them in green waste. Put them in the trash. Wash your hands and clippers before you go to other plants.
Windy days are prime time to gather leaves to add to compost or process for Leaf Mold, Mulch or Compost! Leaf Mold is low in nutrients, but makes a superb soil improver, conditioner for vegetable and flower beds. Leaf mulch is free for the making! Leaf Compost processes faster when made the right way! See more!
PLANT JUDICIOUSLY NOW
Per square foot, fast growing cut-and-come-again Lettuce, Chard and Kale are by far the top winter producers! Plant more big plants like brocs and cauliflower, but remember, with cooler weather, they will grow more slowly. That may interfere with early spring plantings in March. Allow enough time to let added compost, manures, worm castings and Sphagnum peat moss (increases water holding capacity) become part of the soil organism community. If you do plant more now, better to get transplants if you can, and shave six weeks of their needed growing time to maturity. Select faster maturing varieties now.
As lettuces tire, and other plants like carrots and beets are removed, add more of them and any ‘littles’ you love on the sunny side and between the big plants. If the littles need more sun, remove large lower leaves of the big plants. Mild tasting littles include bok choy, kohlrabi, garden purslane, arugula, mizuna, watercress, young parsnips and turnips, Daikon winter radishes, and Napa cabbage. For a little more spice, go for those dark green kales, mustard, rutabaga and turnip greens! Try some culinary dandelions for super nutrition! These are plants that will take you through February, March and leave enough time to add compost and to let sit until major spring planting begins in April.
Believe me, you are going to get spring planting fever along about March, so plan ahead for it!!! Start seeds indoors the first three weeks of January for early March plantings! Choose varieties that are cold tolerant and are early maturers for the soonest table eats!
If you have enough seeds, over planting is fair game! Thin your beets, carrots, chard, kale, mustard, turnips. Take out the smaller, weaker plants. They are great in your salads along with small tender Brassica leaves. Plant patches of Mizuna and mow it!
Remember your winter companion planting tips:
- Carrots enhance peas, onion family stunts peas
- Carrots thrive when Cilantro, Chamomile (a spring/summer plant), Marigold are planted with them.
- Onions, leeks and chives help repel the carrot root fly. But remember you can’t put the onion family near peas!
- Lettuces repel cabbage white butterflies. Plant them generously among your Brassicas.
- Cilantro enhances Brassicas – broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale and repels aphids on them!
Besides beautiful bareroot roses, decide now where you will be buying any January bareroot veggies you want! Consider: grape vines; artichokes; short-day (sweet) globe onions; strawberries; cane berries such as raspberries (get low-chill types); low-chill blueberries; and rhubarb (be cautious where you plant it, it can be poisonous to humans – children, dogs and chickens), asparagus, and horseradish. Artichoke pups need 3’ to 4’ space, 6′ to 8′ is more a reality! They are hefty growers and live 10 years! If you keep them watered, and there is enough space, they are a great street strip survivor plant!
SPRING PREPS
Seeds for Spring & Summer planting! Perfect time to sit with seed catalogs, do online research. Get your summer garden layout in mind. First choose what is good for your excellent health! Next might be how much plant you get per square foot if you have limited space and want to feed several people. When we are in drought conditions, water could be a strong consideration ~ choose heat and drought tolerant varieties. Always look for disease and pest resistance. Get some early varieties, for earliest harvests along with later maturing varieties for a continuous table supply. Earlier variety fruits are generally smaller, but what a treat! Cherry tomatoes come in first. Place your order for the entire year, while seeds are still available.
One of the more unusual spring preps is Cold Stratification for Some of Your Seeds! Seed packs don’t tell you the seeds need it, so you have to know on your own. In nature, as seeds fall to the ground, they overwinter there, sometimes under the snow! Yet they come up perfectly when conditions are right! You can either let that happen, they are the ones we refer to as ‘self seeding’ plants, or put them in the fridge/freezer. Each plant that needs it has specific differences. Some need literally months of chill, others a short time.
Sadly, due to the virus,the Santa Barbara’s 13th Annual Seed Swap is not appearing to be happening in Jan 2021. But do get your seeds ready to share, and prepare your ‘shopping’ list just in case! Remember, a Seed Swap is a random affair. Get your standby favorites from those reliable catalogs. Use Seed Swaps as fun backup source, new things to try, and most importantly, for local seeds. The last Saturday of January every year is National Seed Swap Day! Look in your area for an event, and if you don’t find one, collaborate with your local garden clubs or permaculture group to get one going if you have an appropriate location for safe distancing! If your climate is warm enough, holding it outdoors may work.
For help making your seed decisions see:
- Choosing Seeds: Catalogs to Seed Swaps! I hope you fall asleep with your catalogs and dream of a glorious garden!
- Smart Design for Your Spring & Summer Garden, Seed Selection!
- See also some of the bigger long term Permaculture choices for planning and designing your garden.
- Super SoCal Fall, Winter Veggies Varieties, Smart Companion Plantings!
- 4 Lovely Companion Flowers and What They Do!
- Delicious choices to consider: Perennial Heat & Drought Tolerant – per Southern Exposure ~
Summer Lettuce Varieties: In summer you want a stronger lettuce, heat tolerant & slow bolting, tip burn resistance! Lettuce Leaf Red Sails is a beauty. Jericho Romaine from Israel has become the classic summer romaine for warm regions. Sierra, Nevada. Parris Island is slow bolting. Green Towers Romaine tolerates moderate summer heat and has some resistance to tip burn and bolting. Green Star is phenomenal! Super productive, tolerance to hot weather, bolting, and tipburn, so it can be grown all season. High resistance to downy mildew. Black Seeded Simpson. And there are more – try several!
Definitely start building compost for spring planting. You could plant green manure where you will grow heavy summer feeders like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, chilis, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and corn; hungry stalk vegetables like celery, fennel, rhubarb, and artichokes; or continually producing green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, or strawberries. Or plant it if you want a break! Just lay in some green manure seed mix – vetch, bell beans, Austrian peas and oats. In Santa Barbara area get the Harmony mix and inoculant at Island Seed & Feed. Let it grow two to three months to bloom stage. Chop down, chop up and let it lie on the surface about 2 weeks, keeping it moist. Add any amendments you want – additional manure, compost, and turn under. Let it sit two weeks to two months. Your choice. Let the herds of soil organisms do their work! I usually do about 3 weeks. OR, lay on as many layers of compost material as you can get for an up to 18″ deep area where you will be planting. Put in some surface feeding red wriggler worms. The BEST soil enhancer and you will have a tasty raised bed!
WINTER VEGGIES STORAGE
This is such a great post by Anthony Reyes at FarmScape Gardens, here is the link! Winter Vegetable Storage, Part 2
For veggies in your kitchen, here is the UCDavis Quick Guide to Fruits & Vegetables Storage:
Birds and Bees! Plant wildflowers seed now to take advantage of winter rains for early spring flowers! Germination in cooler weather takes longer, so don’t let the bed dry out between rains. If you have space, make habitat for beneficial insects, birds and animals too! Start building now to put your solitary bee home up for wild bees in March or early April! If you already have one, clean it, and if you have an owl house, now is the time to clean it out too. Depending on where you live they are usually empty from Halloween until early December! Nesting site selection starts in January, so build yours and get it up as soon as you can!
Wonderful Gardener Style Holiday Gifts!
Please be generous with your time these holidays. Rather than just serving food, maybe show someone how to grow veggies, give them seeds with instructions, give them and the kids a tour of your garden – eat carrots together!
Layer up, enjoy these crisp days. Let the wind clear your Spirit, the rain cleanse and soften your Soul.
Happy Gardening and Happy Winter Solstice!
Updated Annually
November images images from Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA! Almost always there are surprises and this time is no different!
Check out the entire December Newsletter!
Love your Mother! Plant bird & bee food! Think grey water! Grow organic! Bless you for being such a wonderful Earth Steward!
The Green Bean Connection started as correspondence for the Santa Barbara CA USA Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden. All three of Santa Barbara’s community gardens are very coastal. During late spring/summer we are often in a fog belt/marine layer most years, locally referred to as the May grays, June glooms and August fogusts. Keep that in mind compared to the microclimate niche where your veggie garden is.
Bio-drilling is what happens when you use a cover crop’s natural talents to “drill” into compacted subsoil. For example, you might grow oilseed or daikon radishes as a cover crop where their spear-shaped roots will stab deep into tight subsoil. Bio-drilling action also takes place when deeply rooted cover crop plants penetrate subsoil and die. Then, the next crop grown may actually follow the rooting network mapped out by the cover crop. Maryland researchers were able to track this process using special camera equipment (a minirhizotron), which took pictures of the interactions between cover crop (canola) and crop plant (soybean) roots. As the canola’s deep roots decomposed, soybean roots followed the trails they blazed in the subsoil, hand in glove. In addition to reduced physical resistance, the soybean roots probably enjoyed better nutrition and the good company of legions of soil-dwelling microcritters, compliments of the cover crop.
In addition to starting preseason transplants, in a heated greenhouse you can grow out of season tomatoes, peppers, lettuces, cucumbers, beans, eggplant, zucchini, cantaloupe! Herbs, chard, raspberries and strawberries! And winter crops too if you just have too much snow outside!
Energy efficient attached greenhouses make a lot of sense. The home, and these bricks, help heat the greenhouse for free! Some attached greenhouses are beautiful walkin sunrooms, garden rooms, conservatories!
The super simplest prevention is Cinnamon! Just sprinkle it on the soil! Sprinkle on plant injuries and they will heal. It is a rooting hormone. Mildew, mold, fungal diseases? Mix 4 tablespoons cinnamon in a half gallon warm water, shake it vigorously, steep overnight. Strain through a sieve or coffee filter and put it in a spray bottle. Add ¼ teaspoon liquid dish soap as a surfactant, lightly spritz your plants, undersides and tops of leaves! (In Santa Barbara area buy it in big containers at Smart & Final.) Also, it repels ants!
Shelves and Worktable
Greenhouses made of reused doors and windows are much more green than recycling!
Soak seeds overnight or presprout! Seedlings are established more easily under cool, moist conditions. Start successive plantings at 3 to 4 week intervals until midsummer for a continuous supply. The beet “seed” is actually a cluster of seeds in a dried fruit. Several seedlings may grow from each fruit. See the sprouts at left? Two from one seed is no surprise. Some seed companies are now singulating the seed for precision planting, by dividing the fruit. Plant seeds about 1/2 inch deep and one inch apart. Allow 12 to 18 inches between rows.
push right up above the ground! Plant in low sloped walled mini trenches. That way the seeds stay more moist longer, germination per cent is better. When the beet root starts to get above the soil level pull the sides of the trench onto the beet root shoulders! Avoid planting on a slope where normal watering washes the soil away. You can see in the image how crowding, not thinning, adds to the problem. Exposed areas toughen and have to be peeled, losing nutrients packed in the skin. Harvest sooner and a bit smaller for fresh tender roots! I have grown big 4-5″ beets though, and they are still tender! Just keep them moist and let them grow fast!
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, workers, and equipment. This is one case where AM watering really makes sense to reduce humidity. UMASS Amherst recommends to ‘Avoid overhead irrigation if it will result in prolonged leaf wetness periods (e.g., through the night); irrigate mid-day when leaves will dry fully or use drip irrigation.’ If all that fails, use foliar fungicides. Plant less densely for more airflow, thinnings are tasty! In general, harvest more frequently so leaves don’t surpass their prime health. Planting only every 3 years in the same spot isn’t possible if there is too little garden space, so cultivating, turning and drying the soil between plantings is good. 
A Fistul of Nutrition and Benefits!
Green Bean Connection 