October! Final Summer Harvests, Seed Processing, Glorious Fall Planting!

Brassicas are the winter garden mainstay!

LARGE BRASSICAS

Broccoli is the favorite Brassica and rightfully so per the nutrition it offers. Plants differ in size, head color and shapes, how heat tolerant they are if you intend to let them over summer, and side shoot production. To get value for the room Brocs take up, a lot of gardeners seek varieties that produce a lot of side shoots after the main head is taken. Some newer varieties are already producing side shoots before the main head is taken! These smaller heads are great steamed if large, or tossed with your salad if small. Do as you wish! Research has shown there are less aphids when you plant different varieties of brocs together! Probably true for other large Brassicas as well. More!

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

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

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

Brussels Sprouts are charming. They like a colder climate to make big sprouts. In Santa Barbara SoCal area you need to be prepared to harvest lots of small ones.

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

Cilantro is their best companion! If you like the scent, winter, early spring are good times for cilantro. It doesn’t bolt so fast. Summer it bolts, winters it will freeze, so replants go with the territory. Cilantro makes brocs grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener!

ENJOY LOTS OF SMALL BRASSICAS!

For salads arugula, bok choi, kohlrabi, mizuna, mustard, tatsoi, peppery sweet alyssum! Root crops are Daikon and White Icicle, pretty China Rose and handsome Long Black Spanish radish, turnips, rutabagas! Grow horseradish for fermenting. Plant these tasty small Brassicas in rows, between, among, around, in patches. A few here, a few there! Be artful and enjoy their many flavors at your winter table!

Peas – Flat, Snap or Pod

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

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

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

If you don’t have marauding birds, presprouting your seed peas makes sense! If you do have birds, cover them with aviary wire. PreSprouting peas is super simple. Paper towel on plate, lay out peas an inch apart, fold the paper towel over them, spritz with clean water, keep them moist. By +/- 5 days they will have sprouted. Get them into the ground, carefully so you don’t break the little roots. Presprouting assures no spots will be empty where a seed didn’t come up and you lose production! See more!

Make some Pea & Mint Crostini like at My Husband Cooks (Please do not drool on your keyboard while you are at this site.)

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

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

Lettuces thrive in cooler weather too, but do cover them at threatened freezes. Lay down tomato cages, cover, and secure the cover. Remove when the day warms up. Lettuces come in all kinds of shapes and delicious colors. They do best in rich soil, regular moisture. Winter is the cooler time when tender butter leafs and heading varieties do well.

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

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

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

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

If you haven’t planted already…some of you carry your layout plan in your head, others draw and redraw, moving things around until it settles and feels right. Do add a couple new things just for fun! Try another direction. Add some herbs or different edible flowers. Leave a little open space for surprises! Stand back, take a deep breath and ask yourself why you plant what you plant and why you plant the way you do. Anything been tickling the back of your mind you are curious about? More about Designing Your SoCal Winter Veggie Garden!
 

---

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

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

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

If you are planning for mid January bareroot strawberry planting, be preparing your strawberry patch now if you are planting to plant green manure! The green manure mix I use takes 2+ months to grow. I chop it down when the bell beans flower. Chop it into bits, add acidic (azalea/camellia) compost, worm castings and turn it all under. It takes two to three weeks to decompose, let the soil organisms restabilize, and be ready to plant. That puts us right at mid January!

OR. Strawberry runner daughters can be clipped Oct 10 to 15, stored in the fridge for planting Nov 5ish. Remove any diseased soil where your beds will be; prep your beds with acidic compost like an Azalea mix. Commercial growers replace their plants every year. Some gardeners let them have two years but production tapers off a lot the second year. If you let them have two years, generously replenish the soil between the berries with acidic compost. Last year I laid down boards between the rows where my berries would be planted. The boards keep the soil moist underneath. I planted the berries just far enough apart that they self mulched (shaded the soil). Worked beautifully. I got the idea for the boards from a pallet gardener.

Plant in super soil to get a good start! Clean up old piles of stuff, remove old mulches that can harbor overwintering pest eggs and diseases. Then add the best-you-can-get composts, manures, worm castings. In planting holes, toss in a handful of nonfat powdered milk in for immediate uptake as a natural germicide and to boost their immune system. Throw in a handful of bone meal that will decompose for uptake at bloom time. If you have other treats you like to favor your plants with, give them some of that too! Go lightly on incorporating coffee grounds either in your compost or soil. In studies, what was found to work well was coffee grounds at only 0.5 percent of the compost mix. That’s only 1/2 a percent! See more details about soil building! If you have containers, dump that old spent stuff and put in some tasty new mix!

Winter Feeding Lettuces like a light feed of chicken manure cultivated in. All the winter plants are heavy producers – lots of leaves, some of those leaves are monsters! Cabbages are packed tight, leaf after leaf! They may need a light feed. Remember, it’s cooler now, so their uptake is slower, so give them liquid feeds of things easy for them to uptake. Fish emulsion (if you don’t have predators) or a tasty tea mix – compost, worm castings, manure (no manure tea for lettuces).

Give your berms a check. Restore or add, shift them as needed. Before wind or rain, double check cages and trellises, top heavy plants. Stake them, tie peas to the trellis or cage. Start gathering sheets, light blankets for possible cold weather to come. Keep tomato cages handy.

You don’t have to garden this winter! You can cover it deeply with all the mulch materials you can lay your hands on up to 18′ deep. Believe me, it will settle quickly. Let the herds of soil organisms do their work over winter. That’s called sheet composting or composting in place, lasagna gardening – no turning or having to move it when it’s finished. If you are vermicomposting, have worms, add a few handfuls to speed up and enrich the process. Next spring you will have rich nutritious living layers of whole soil for no work at all! Another wise option is to do something Hugelkultur style!

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

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

Fall Pests & Diseases

• Prevention Drench young plants, ones you just transplanted, with Aspirin solution to get them off to a great start! Drench your seedlings when they get up a few inches. One regular Aspirin, 1/4 C nonfat powdered milk, 1/2 teaspoon liquid dish soap (surfactant), per gallon of water. Aspirin triggers a defense response and stimulates growth! Powdered milk is a natural germicide and boosts the immune system. Be sure to get under the leaves too!
• Brassicas, Peas! Lots of ants and on Brassicas, lengthwise curling leaves are the giveaways for aphids, then whiteflies. Aphids carry viruses. Aphids come in fat gray or small black. Avoid over watering and feeding that makes for soft plants, tender leaves that aphids thrive on, and ant habitat. Spray the aphids away, make the ants leave. Get up under those leaves, and fervently but carefully do the tender growth tips. Do it consistently until they don’t come back. Cinnamon is amazing. Ants don’t like it at all, and when you are starting seedlings it prevents molds and damping off. Sprinkle it on the soil in your six pack. Get it in big containers at Smart and Final. Reapply as needed. ASAP remove yellowing leaves that attract whiteflies.If Whiteflies and aphids/ants come along, give them a bath too! Get a good grip on your hose and swoosh them away when you first see them. Be sure to get hideaways under the leaves and in crevices!
• Chard, Lettuces, Spinach – Slugs and snails are the bane of so many crops, but these especially. Lay down something like Sluggo immediately. Then do it again in a week or so. Kill the parents, kill the children. After about 3 times you rarely need it again anytime soon.
• Biodiversity In general, avoid row planting where disease and pests wipe the plants out from one to the next to the next. Instead or rows, plant in several different spots. If you can’t help yourself, because your family always planted in rows or that’s the way farm pictures show plantings, remember, this is YOUR garden! Also, leave room so mature plants’ leaves don’t touch. Give them room to breathe, get good big leaves that get plenty of sun and produce lots more big leaves and many big fruits! Stunted crowded rootbound plants just don’t perform as well and are more disease and pest susceptible.

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

If you have lots of seeds, over planting is an age old practice. Plant too, too many, then thin them with tiny pointy scissors, aka harvest the young, and eat ’em! Young radish sprouts, teeny carrots, beets, cilantro, arugula, onions, little Brassicas of all kinds are wonderful in a salad! If they get a little big, steam them or add to stir fries and stews. Another way to do it is plant flats of lettuces, mesclun mixes, and mow them! Tender baby greens! They will grow back 3, 4 times.

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

October is the last of Seed Saving time for most of us. Make notes on how your plants did, which varieties were the most successful. These seeds are adapted to you and your locality. Each year keep your best! Start sorting and labeling seed baggies on coming cooler indoor evenings. Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s plantings. Generously gather seeds for upcoming January Seed Swaps!

Santa Barbara’s Seed Swap is January 28! The last Saturday of January every year is National Seed Swap Day! Look in your area for an event, and if you don’t find one, collaborate with your local garden club or permaculture group to get one going!

Plant gift plants or bowls or baskets for the holidays! Make Lavender sachets!

Take a deep breath of this fine fall weather!

See the entire October Garden Newsletter!

Back to top

---

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

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

 

Read Full Post »

September Starts SoCal’s ‘Winter’ Season!

There’s kale and there’s kale! This truly tasty purple curly leaf kale image is by Steve!

Dear Gardeners – due to being gone to see the Eclipse, I am reposting last year’s September! I’ve reread, updated and added a few items. May your SoCal Fall/Winter season get off on a terrific start!

Last Harvests are being collected and stored, seeds saved! Some of you have started seedling nurseries or starts at home, many have prepped their soil and harvested seeds! If you didn’t yet, make your fall planting beds extra yummy – add 5-10% compost, 25% worm castings – seeds germinate better and do especially better with worm castings! Manure amounts depend on the type of manure. Rabbit poop manure can be used immediately with no composting! We want rich soil for those big winter plants. We want lots of those marvelous leaves for greens. Winter plants like brocs, collards, cauliflower, chard, are heavy producers, need plenty of food.

BUT NOT CARROTS!  Too good a soil makes them hairy and they fork.  And over watering, irregular watering, can make them split. Build your beds up so they drain well, are above the coldest air that settles low down. PEAS, the winter legume, make their own Nitrogen, so feed only lightly if at all

Some of you carry your layout plan, design, in your head, others draw and redraw, moving things around until it settles and feels right. Do add a couple new things just for fun! Try another direction. Add some herbs or different edible flowers. Leave a little open space for surprises! Stand back, take a deep breath and ask yourself why you plant what you plant and why you plant the way you do. Anything been tickling the back of your mind you are curious about? More about Designing Your SoCal Winter Veggie Garden!

Soil for your winter garden is the foundation for all your planting! See More!

If you need to skip a beat, take some time off from the garden, let it rest, but let nature rebuild while it’s resting!

1. You can cover it deeply with all the mulch materials you can lay your hands on up to 18′ deep. Believe me, it will settle quickly. Let the herds of soil organisms do their work over winter. That’s called sheet composting or composting in place, lasagna gardening – no turning or having to move it when it’s finished. If you are vermicomposting, have worms, add a few handfuls to speed up and enrich the process. Next spring you will have rich nutritious living layers of whole soil for no work at all!
2. You can plant it with green manure. Laying on lots of mulch is a ton of work when you do it, just gathering the materials can be a challenge. Green manure takes some work too, but it has awesome results as well. You broadcast a seed mix of legumes and oats and let them grow. Bell beans, Austrian peas, vetch and oats from Island Seed & Feed Goleta is an excellent choice. Legumes gather Nitrogen from the air store it in nodules on their roots! N is the main ingredient your plants need for their growth! The oat roots break up the soil. They dig deep and open channels for water and air flow, soil organisms.

It’s Brassica time! They are the mainstay of winter gardens! Their nutrition can’t be beat! Kale’s the Queen! Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, Cauliflower and collard greens! Then there are all the mini Bs, the fillers and littles – arugula, bok choy, mizuna, kohlrabi, mustards, radish, turnips. Rather than plant just six packs of transplants, put in seed at the same time when possible and stagger your plantings of the large Brassicas. Rather than all six cauliflower coming in at once, plant two now, two later and so on. Adjust that, of course, if you have a large area available to plant and a lot of people to feed! Another way to do it is to get varieties with early, middle and late maturity dates and plant them all at once! Plant both mini and monster cabbages at the same time! Minis come in sooner, monsters later!

Finicky eaters may enjoy a selection! Fall veggies come in lots of shapes and colors! Kales are renowned for their beauty and varieties – classic curly leaf, flat leaf like in the image (less aphids), Red Russian, Elephant, Red Bor that is really purple are just a few! Cauliflower comes in traditional shape and spiral, classic white and yellow and purple and green! Get seed packs of them all and mix them together! Carrots already come in color mix seed packets! Circus Circus is a fun choice, especially when your kids are planting! Beets are terrific fun! Yellows, reds, pinks, whites and Chioggias (concentric circles of colors)! You can get them in rainbow mixes just like getting rainbow chard mixes! Rather than have your finicky eater say no, open up that catalog or take them shopping a the nursery and let them pick what they would like to try!

More veggies that love cooler weather are beets, carrots, celery, chard, cilantro, leeks, spinach and especially lettuce – tender butter leafs and heading lettuce! If you anticipate a hot Sep, plant more heat tolerant lettuce.

• The winter legume is PEAS! Peas are like beans, they come in bush and pole types. And those come in three main types – shelling, eat-them-whole snap peas and flat China/snow peas! They are super easy to sprout! Dampen the paper towel; spray the towel to keep it moist. Takes 2, 3 days. Pop them into the garden by the trellis – if it is hot, devise some shade for them. You just need to be careful as you plant them so you don’t break the sprout off. Definitely plant some every month or so. They don’t live all season long. When they are done, they’re done. It is true that picking peas, just like picking beans, is labor intensive. I eat a lot of mine before they get home, so I don’t mind. Bush peas come in first and pretty much all at once; pole come on later and continue to produce. On the first round it makes sense to plant both at once!
• Onions For the biggest, sweetest harvests, late summer and early fall are the prime times to sow seeds of short- or intermediate-day onions. Fall-sown short- and intermediate-day onions tend to yield more and are larger and sweeter than those seeded or transplanted in early spring.

Varieties that do better in winter are long beets like Cylindras, long radishes like Daikons, pretty China Rose and handsome Long Black Spanish! Plant small beets like Dutch Baby Ball for quick beets while your Cylindras are growing twice to three times bigger!

Companion planting combos make a difference! Carrots enhance peas, onions stunt peas. Plant the carrots on the sunny side feet of pole beans. Combos can use space wisely! Carrots grow down, peas grow up, perfect! Cabbage babies need to be planted 12 to 28″ apart! A healthy plant will take up much closer to that 28″. They take a long while to grow, head, head tight! Plant lettuces that repel cabbage moths, or other fillers, that mature sooner, in the space between them. You can do this at home amongst your ornamentals, and/or in containers too! Fillers can be onion/chive types, beets. Short quickest growing winter radishes can be among the long slower growing carrots among the slowest growing, your cabbages. Cilantro makes brocs grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller, greener! Research has shown there are less aphids when you plant different varieties of brocs together!

No need to plant patches or rows, unless you want to. Scatter them about on the sunny side between larger plants as an understory! Plant different varieties to keep your table exciting. Don’t plant them all at once, but rather every week or two for steady table supply. If you would enjoy a quick payback for your table, select the earliest maturing varieties.

If you have lots of seeds, over planting is an age old practice. Plant too, too many, then thin them with tiny pointy scissors, aka harvest the young, and eat ’em! Young radish sprouts, teeny carrots, little Brassicas of all kinds are wonderful in a salad! If they get a little big, steam them or add to stir fries and stews. Another way to do it is plant flats of lettuces, mesclun mixes, and mow them! Tender baby greens! They will grow back 3, 4 times.

When planting in hot fall weather, plant your outdoor seeds a tad deeper than you would in spring; soil is moister and cooler an extra inch or two down. It’s the law to keep them moist. If you plant successively for steady fresh table supply, plant a batch in September, again in October. Days will shorten and start cooling, but you are taking advantage of a fast start because your plants will grow quickly in the warmer weather now than later on. Sep plant from seeds, Oct from transplants.

Winter Feeding Lettuces like a light feed of chicken manure cultivated in. All the winter plants are heavy producers – lots of leaves, some of those leaves are monsters! Cabbages are packed tight, leaf after leaf! They may need a light feed. Remember, it’s cooler now, so their uptake is slower, so give them liquid feeds, teas, things easy for them to uptake.

Keep letting your strawberry runners grow for Oct harvest. If you will be planting bareroot berries in January, remove old plants and plant green manure in October. Your green manure will take close to 2 months to maturity, Oct, Nov. Turn it under by the first week of Dec., adding acidic compost at the same time, if your soil needs it, some coir for water holding capacity. If you replace your strawberries, in Santa Barbara area try Seascape, bred at UCSB. Big fill-your-palm plentiful berries, firm, tasty, strawberry spot resistant! They have long roots that gather plenty of nutrition and stay moist at deeper levels. Available at Terra Sol Garden Center – call ahead to get the date they arrive – they go fast and then they are gone!

Pest and Disease Prevention  Drench young plants, ones you just transplanted, with Aspirin solution to get them off to a great start! Drench your seedlings when they get up a few inches. One regular Aspirin, 1/4 C nonfat powdered milk, 1/2 teaspoon liquid dish soap (surfactant), per gallon of water. Aspirin, triggers a defense response and stimulates growth! Powdered milk is a natural germicide and boosts the immune system. Be sure to get under the leaves too!

Brassica pests! Lots of ants and lengthwise curling leaves are the giveaways for aphids. Aphids carry viruses. Aphids come in fat gray or small black. Avoid over watering that makes for soft plants, tender leaves that aphids thrive on, and ant habitat. Spray the aphids away, make the ants leave. Get up under those leaves, and fervently but carefully do the tender growth tips. Do it consistently until they don’t come back. Cinnamon is amazing. Ants don’t like it at all, and when you are starting seedlings it prevents molds and damping off. Sprinkle it on the soil in your six pack. Get it in big containers at Smart and Final. Reapply as needed.

September is still Seed Saving time for some. Make notes on how your plants did, which varieties were the most successful. These seeds are adapted to you and your locality. Each year keep your best! Store your keepers in a cool dry place for next year’s plantings. Generously gather seeds for upcoming January Seed Swaps! If your area doesn’t have a seed swap, start organizing one!

Borage is a beautiful cool season plant with edible flowers, blue for bees! It has a large 3 to 4′ footprint, so allow for that or plan to keep clipping it back. What flower colours do birds and bees prefer?

Plant Sweet Peas for Christmas bloom! Plant gift plants or bowls or baskets for the holidays! 

This is a terrific time to put up a Greenhouse! You can start more seedlings, overwinter sensitive plants – eat tomatoes in December! Greenhouses can be perfect for you – the right size, easy to maintain!

September gardens are a magical time of creativity and transition!

See the entire September Garden Newsletter!

Back to top

---

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

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

 

Read Full Post »

Onion, Garlic, Leeks, Chives – Delicious SoCal Alliums!

Onion growing at Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA
April 2019, beautiful plaited stem ~ Cerena Childress photo

Alliums, the Onion family, have been cultivated for decorative and edible uses as far back as 1594, and wild varieties have been foraged for millennia. The allium family provides at least one of the staple foods in nearly every culture!

Alliums are stinky and that’s exactly why we love them! They have a great array of flavors and aromas that call you to the kitchen to prepare meals with them, that call you to a mouthwatering meal! A lot of them can be grown all year long in SoCal, and if you live near the wild, they are deer resistant!

The bulbs are the most commonly eaten part of yellow, red and white garden onions, while scallions are usually harvested for their stalks, although the white base is also edible. Generally all parts of alliums are edible. And the lovely flowers are wonderful bee food!

Onions, Allium cepa, make us cry and give us bad breath but have stupendous flavor! Red onions are sweet. Yellow onions are good all-purpose onions. White onions are best used fresh. Some varieties of onions store better than others.

Table, bunch onions or Scallions Scallions are bunching onions, Allium fistulosum, with a bit less biting flavor. In summer heat, plant these onions in a spot with less sun. Plant all year long and you will always have fresh scallions.

Shallots, Allium cepa var. aggregatum, are a multiplier onion, which means that each shallot bulb you plant will produce a cluster of up to a dozen baby bulbs. They have a sweet and mild (although pronounced) flavor, with a hint of garlic, and lack the bite you get with yellow or white onions. Shallots are smaller and have longer, slimmer bulbs, are more commonly eaten raw.

Hot and dry! I’itoi onion is a prolific multiplier onion cultivated in the Baboquivari Peak Wilderness, Arizona area. This small-bulb type is easy to grow and ideal for hot, dry climates. Bulbs are separated, and planted in the fall 1 inch below the surface and 12 inches apart. Bulbs will multiply into clumps and can be harvested throughout the cooler months. Tops die back in the heat of summer and may return with heavy rains; bulbs can remain in the ground or be harvested and stored in a cool dry place for planting in the fall. The plants rarely flower; propagation is by division.

Leeks, Allium ampeloprasum, are tall, handsome and hefty! And they have that pretty leaf pattern! The leaves are large, flat. Leeks are easy to grow and their sweet, mild flavor and can be enjoyed fresh all year long in SoCal! Summer leek seeds can be sown from January to March to provide the best fall harvest and they overwinter well. You can pull up baby leeks at any time or savor mature leeks when they are about one inch in diameter. They too are a cut and come again. Cut them about one and a half inches from the ground and they grow back quickly 3 or 4 times! Use little ones in salads. Slice mature stems diagonally across and pop into winter soups & stews! The flower heads are elegant, the seeds are easy to harvest. Image by Jan at Jan’s Garden

Too much garlic, aka the stinking rose, Allium sativum and we smell like it! But that doesn’t matter to garlic lovers! There are festivals and restaurants that specialize in only garlic cuisine! It takes little space to produce a large supply of garlic. Elephant garlic, Allium ampeloprasum, makes a bulb about the same size as an ordinary garlic bulb, but it has only three to seven cloves and the flavor is mild.

Garlic is fun to plant! Check weather forecasts and plan to plant before a cold time! Let your garlic cloves or shallots sprout, plant them 6″ to 2″ deep, a 1/2″ if unsprouted. Don’t remove the skin. Plant in slightly moist soil, firm it lightly over the cloves, don’t water or water very little. Too wet and the cloves rot. Plant the biggest and best cloves for the sassiest plants! See more In six to seven months you’ll have beautiful cooking ingredients! Late October, November is likely the best SoCal garlic planting time to get the most cold weather for them. If you don’t mind smaller bulbs, you can also plant in spring.

Sadly, our SoCal warmth doesn’t make our garlic happy. In Santa Barbara our coastal humidity and lack of frosts and freezes like in inland areas let our plants get a lot of rust fungi. It stunts our plants and we get small bulbs. We can grow it, just not with the same jubilant success as happens further north, like at Gilroy CA, where winter frosts naturally kill off the fungi and plants are invigorated and healthy.

Chives, Allium tuberosum – smallest of all the Alliums, garlic chives, Allium schoenoprasum are a perennial (grow year after year). They are great for your baked potatoes or cottage cheese. The flowers are edible too! While easily grown from seed, they take a while to mature. A nursery purchase is easier! Plant them where they can live weed-free for a long time. A pot of chives close to the kitchen is always a treat. Clip the leaves with scissors about an inch above ground level. They grow back! Image compliments of Hudson Valley Seed Library

Ornamental Alliums are used for landscaping and often edible too! Society Garlic though ornamental, has edible flowers and leaves! And it’s a pleasure to mix veggie alliums in your landscape!

GROWING  Most species of these hardy perennials prefer a sunny location, and many require a period of dormancy. That often happens during the dry time of year. Not to worry if your plant dies back for awhile. Don’t pull it, wait for it. It will return and flourish again. These shallow-rooted plants need well-draining soil – no standing water for them! They need slightly fertile to fertile soil because they have those short roots, so the soil has to be good right where they feed! They can take clay soil quite well. They need weeding. They don’t compete well with weeds. Allow the soil to dry out between waterings. Not maybe bone dry, ’cause if you live on the edge and don’t water enough you may lose your plant. Rotating your allium crops can help prevent disease. If you have limited space, and not enough room to rotate, keep your soil fertile by amending with quality well rounded compost, resting your soil for a season, or putting in a green manure cover crop.

Alliums work well as companion plants for roses, carrots and beets, but inhibit the growth of legumes – that’s peas and beans. Otherwise, when grown close to other plants they tend to increase that plant’s resistance to disease and reduce insect infestation. The smell of onions mask the scent of a plant that might be attacked.

Per Plants for a Future ‘You can make a very good tonic spray from onion or garlic bulbs that will also increase the resistance of plants to pests and diseases, and garlic bulbs have in the past been used as a fungicide. Simply chop up the bulbs and soak them overnight in cold water – a few cloves in a pint of water should be adequate, and adding some camomile flowers if available seems to increase the effectiveness. The juice of the common onion is used as a moth repellent. It can also be used as a rust preventative on metals and as a polish for copper and glass. It is possible that other members of the genus can also be used in these ways.’

PLANTING

Seeds: Generally sow in late winter or in early spring. Sow thinly and only cover the seed lightly. Germination is normally quite quick and good. They are so tiny, you may not realize you have them, possibly pulling them thinking they are grass coming up! Wait a few days before you weed an allium planted area. Apply a liquid feed occasionally to make sure that the plants don’t get hungry. A number of species from Mediterranean-type climates usually come into growth in the autumn, flower in the spring and then die down for the summer. You do have to be careful that they don’t damp off.

Most alliums can be planted in the spring (May is still doable) for fall harvest/blooms in the later summer or early fall. Table, bunch onions or Scallions can be planted year round. Garlic likes fall to Winter Solstice plantings.

Onion varieties are region specific, plant the varieties your local nurseries carry, farmers grow, or experiment! For the biggest, sweetest SoCal harvests, late summer and early fall are the prime times to sow seeds of short- or intermediate-day onions. Fall-sown short- and intermediate-day onions tend to yield more and are larger and sweeter than those seeded or transplanted in early spring. If you do plant in spring, sow summer-maturing onions Feb/March/April. In our area, the  1st half of Nov plant seeds of globe onions for slicing. Grano, Granex, Crystal Wax. December/January plant short-day (sweet) globe onions. 

Bulbs! Divide in spring for winter-dormant species, or in late summer for summer-dormant species. The method of division depends the plant. With chives, the bulb is constantly dividing and a clump of bulbs is formed. Dig up the clump, break it into smaller sections, one bulb, replant. In other species, a number of small bulbs, or offsets, are produced at the base of the parent bulb. For rapid increase, dig up the bulbs every year & plant out the offsets.

Rhizomes! A number of species, like Society Garlic, form a clump of rhizome-like roots. In spring, dig up the clump, cut it into sections with a sharp knife making sure that there is at least one leaf- growing point on each section. Or, without digging it up, chop sections away from the part you choose to be the parent. Either way, plant the sections where you want them.

Some species, like the Tree Onion (A. cepa proliferum), and Walking Onion, also produce small bulbs, or bulbils, at the top of the flowering stem. Sometimes these are produced together with flowers, sometimes instead of flowers. Plant them out as soon as they part easily from the flowering stem. Some of the alliums with bulbils can become noxious weeds! Too true!

Transplants are often the easiest for busy gardeners. Carefully separate the little plants. Make a trench where you want to plant them and lay them with their roots outstretched along the edge of the trench as far apart between them as is right for what you are planting. Simply push the soil from the other side of the trench over their roots.

CAUTION! Alliums are poisonous to dogs and cats. Don’t grow these in your garden if your pets can access them, and never give a dog or cat table food that has been seasoned with onion or garlic.

HEALTH! If you are one of the lucky ones and garlic thrives at your micro climate niche, hooray! For humans, raw Garlic, in particular, acts like a natural antibiotic! A Washington State University 2012 study states that a compound from garlic is 100 times more effective than two popular antibiotics used in the treatment of intestinal infections caused by the bacterium species Campylobacter bacterium. Many other scientific research projects suggest that raw garlic has incredible healing properties. It has a substantial history. in France, gravediggers supposedly drank wine mixed with crushed garlic to protect them from the plague. It was also given to soldiers – in both world wars – to prevent gangrene caused by bacterial infection. The healing properties of this spice ranges from anti-infective to antioxidant.

Garlic is amazing! It is the only antibiotic that can actually kill infecting bacteria and at the same time protect the body from the poisons that are causing the infection. Clinical research found garlic’s effectiveness to be comparable to that of penicillin, streptomycin, erythromycin, and tetracycline. In addition, it has proven effective against some resistant bacteria that no longer respond to prescription antibiotics. It has also been reported that the vapor from freshly cut garlic can kill bacteria at a distance of 20 centimeters!

HARVEST, Drying! In May garlic, bulb onions, and shallots naturally begin to dry. When the foliage begins to dry it’s time to stop irrigating. Dry outer layers needed for long storage will form on the bulbs. When about half of the foliage slumps to the ground, bend the rest to initiate this maturing. The bulbs will be ready for harvest when the foliage is thoroughly dry and crisp. Some gardeners gather and store the bulbs inside. Others leave them lying on the hot ground for about a week. If you like, plait your onions or garlic!

Onion, Allium Cepa drying bundles by Larry Rettig at Dave’s Garden

STORAGE! 

Image at Masters Produce, Auckland NZ

Besides plaiting onions or garlic, or bulk dry onion storage, make healthy probiotic treats. Conveniently chop and put in freezer bags in the serving sizes or the amount you will add to favorite meal, freeze. Canning and drying are traditional. Dry thinly sliced onions and garlic to spice up a camp stew later on.

Onions IN the Kitchen tips!

Store in a cool, dark, dry place such as your pantry.

No fridge! Cold temps soften their texture plus onions flavour your other produce.

NO plastic bags; they accelerate sprouting and spoilage due to lack of air circulation.

Store onions and potatoes separately! Both give off gases that accelerate spoilage of each other.

SAVING SEEDS is a joy! Let a few of your plants grow out. Put a bag over the seeding flower stalk, bend the stem, whap or shake it, and let the seeds fall into the bag. I use a clear, zipper style plastic bag so I can see it happen and seal the seeds in so I don’t lose them if the bag gets dropped or bumped!

Enjoy the tasty range of shapes, colors, flavors of your alliums. Experiment with different varieties!

---

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

See the March 2017 GBC Newsletter!

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

Read Full Post »

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

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

You went to the Seed Swap, have gotten your seeds from the catalog or nursery, and are itching for the right temps to plant!

Planning now is important because not all spring/summer plants are installed at the same time. Planting in the right places now makes a difference. Zucchini, cool tolerant tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and corn can be started now, by seed, in the ground. March is a little warmer and early variety plants get a better start. April is most everything – cucumber, pepper, squash, beans, more tomatoes, watermelon. May is the true heat lovers, cantaloupe, okra (June may be better yet), eggplant. Some gardeners wait to plant tomatoes until May and June to avoid the soil fungi of earlier months. I hold that space by planting something temporary there in March. June is good for okra, eggplant and long beans!

Summer garden planning tips emphasizing needing less water! Companions!

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

• If you are not going to be canning, indeterminate tomatoes are the excellent choice! These are the vining tomatoes that produce all summer! This saves time and water because determinate, bush tomatoes produce quickly, all at once, then you have to replant and wait for more production. determinate toms do produce sooner, so for an earlier table production, plant them to hold you until your indeterminates are producing. Also, for earlier production, plant cherry tomatoes! Yum! Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of dandelions!
• Choose more prolific plants and varieties of them so you get more production for less water.
• Plant tall plants to the North unless you anticipate a scorching summer. If you think it will be HOT, plant tall to the west to shade shorter plants, keep your soil cooler, use less water.
• Plan to put cucumbers up on trellises to keep them disease free and clean, and so they ripen evenly all the way around. Co-plant with beans! Beans above, cukes below. Japanese Long cukes give a generous supply per water used!
• Next, intermingle mid height plants, bush beans, determinate tomatoes, tall peppers like Big Jim Anaheim or Polanos, zucchini – try the prolific heirloom, star shaped Costata Romanesco! Potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs. Plant Radish ahead of cukes & zukes to repel cucumber beetles. Eat a few, but let several grow up by and through the plants you are protecting.
• Leave a winter broccoli or two for salad side shoots. Mulch well under your brocs right now! We want to keep these cool loving plants in cool. They help repel cucumber beetles, so push the mulch back, plant cucumbers underneath them. The mulch does double duty, keeping the cukes clean off the soil and insect free above the bug zone!
• Leave a couple of winter kale to provide over summer. Heat tolerant 1000 Headed Kale is a prolific choice that harbors less aphids on its FLAT leaves. Plant lettuces on the sunny side under your brocs and kale.
• Snuggle eggplant among tall chards, maybe some curly leaf kale! Radishes with eggplants/cucumbers as a trap plant for flea beetles.
• Lowest are the ‘littles’ or fillers! Mindful of companions, scatter beets and carrots, lettuce, radish, here and there among, alongside, under larger plants on their sunny side. Bunch onions away from beans. Some of them will be done before the bigger plants leaf out. When the bigger plant leaves start shading out the littles, harvest strategic large lower leaves. There isn’t really a need to allot separate space for littles except strawberries! They need a separate patch with more acidic soil to keep them healthy and be more prolific producers!
• If you love cabbages, plant a few more, but they take up a fair footprint for what they produce and they take quite awhile to do it. Plant quick maturing mini varieties.
• SEED SAVING SPACE! Leave room for some arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery to go to flower to bring bees and beneficials! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next plantings. Carrots love being with cilantro and chamomile!
• Pumpkin, melon, winter squash vines require some thoughtfulness. Pumpkin and winter squash vine leaves get as huge as healthy zucchini leaves, easily a foot wide! Mini melons have dainty 2″ wide little leaves, can be trellised, are definitely low to the ground, can be quite smaller than strawberry plants! A healthy winter squash vine can easily be 3′ to 4′ wide, 30′ long plus side vines, and produce a major supply of squash! You can use them as a border, as a backdrop along a fenceline. In SoCal, unless you are a squash lover, or won’t be gardening in winter, there is question as to why you would grow winter squash at all. Greens of all kinds grow prolifically here all winter long, giving a fresh and beautiful supply of Vitamin A.

Super use of your space! As winter plants finish, in spaces needing to be held for later, ie if you are planting okra in June, grow plants that are quick and prolific producers grown for their leaves, until it’s the right time to plant those heat lovers! They produce continuously, and can be removed when you want the space. You will have lush harvests while you are waiting. Think of kales, chard, lettuce, beets, crops grown for their leaves, even mini dwarf cabbages. Perhaps you will leave some of them as understory plants and plant taller peppers like Poblanos or Big Jim Anaheims, and tomatoes among them. When the larger plants overtake the understory, either harvest the smaller plants, or remove or harvest lower leaves of larger plants and let the smaller ones get enough sun to keep producing.

Hardly anyone can resist planting early tomatoes! In this early cooler time, plant your leafies to the sunny side of where the toms will be planted. Pop your tomato seeds in when soil temps are good, or put your transplants in as you get them. That way you have table food soonest and your heart is happy too! Here are a couple tips from James M Stephens at Florida University Extension: Tomato plants 4–5 weeks old grow and yield better than older transplants. He also says when setting your transplant into the soil, do not compress the soil around the roots; gently pour water into the hole to settle the soil around the roots. After the transplanting water has dried a bit, cover the wet spot with dry soil to reduce evaporation. Check! See Tomatoes at Cornell!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring planting soil prep! Add all your amendments at the same time! See more

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

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

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

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

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

Pull away those blotchy sections the leafminers make on chard and beet leaves. Remove whole leaves that are too funky for rescue. Harvest the bigger outer lower leaves more often to stay ahead of the miners. Rather than row plant, interplant here and there. Water a tad less so leaves are less soft and inviting.

Aphids Watch for leaves unnaturally curled along the length of the leaf, particularly broccolis, cauliflowers, kale, cabbages. Hose aphids off chard, kale and brocs. Keep doing it for a few days to catch the ones you missed. A little less water.

• For hard to get at places, down the centers of chard, crinkly kale leaves, get out that spray bottle! Treat once, wait a couple days, treat the ones that got away and newborns.
• I tried it, it WORKS! The simplest is to spray with 2 Parts alcohol, 2 parts water, 1 part  soap. DO NOT use on seedlings, it will kill some of them. Spritz lightly rather than drenching or you may kill your bigger plant too!

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

Do not compost diseased or infested leaves or plants.

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

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

• Thinning is a form of weeding! Thin plants that need it, like beets that naturally start in foursomes! Thin plants you intentionally over planted – carrots, beets, turnips, kale, chard, mustard! If you planted too close together, take out shorter, smaller weaker plants. They are all great in your salads along with small tender Brassica leaves.
• Dust Mulching, cultivation, breaks up the soil surface, keeps water from wicking to the surface and evaporating. If you use a hula hoe you do two things at once! Just a half to one inch depth cuts off weed sprouts. Indeed, it turns the soil a tad, all that’s needed. More weeds will follow, but it’s quick and easy to repeat the process. Two, three times, a few days apart, and there will be little weeds after that for awhile. Get ’em while they are small and easy to do. Smart gardening.

When grass has those frilly little green tops, it is blooming and seeding! Remove it ASAP. Better yet is to remove weeds before they seed! If at the seeding stage, gently pull, don’t shake the soil loose from the roots and spread seeds all over, and don’t put them in your compost!

Have a wonderful February! May your seedlings grow well!

Back to top 

x

x
x

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

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

---

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

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

Read Full Post »

Magnificent Cabbages are Easy to Grow!

Gorgeous Cabbage, Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA Nov 2016 after the rain.

Cabbages have high fiber content, low calories! They have terrific disease-fighting compounds – cancer prevention, are high in Vitamins C and K, and have a host of minerals. They are not a cut and come again veggie like chard, lettuce, or super Vitamin A kale or purslane with its Omega 3s. But they will sometimes grow back in mini foursomes or up to six if you cut the head off close to the bottom of the head, leaving the lower leaves. Work some rich manure into the first inch of soil, then treat your plant like you normally would! The new heads are always smaller. Perhaps it’s better to remove and compost larger lower leaves, restore the soil and plant something new. But if your growing season is too short for multiple crops, this is a way of getting just a little more cabbage, and it is super tender!

We love that cabbage makes those super heads in a glorious profusion of amazing leaves! It has its own unique crunchy texture. Consider that they do take up a fair footprint for a one time, one head crop, and it takes a while to grow that compact head. Some say cabbage is cheap, why grow it? Cause it’s organic and it tastes terrific right from the ground! To some its sulfurous scent while cooking is overpowering (see below for ways to reduce that); to others it is heaven, what their family has always done! If you love it, you love it, and you might even get used to it if it is new to you!

Cabbage is in the cruciferous family, genus Brassica. The word “brassica” translates in Latin as “cabbage.” Other brassicas are broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens.

Tantalizing Startlingly Different Cabbage VARIETIES!

As climate changes, look for heat and drought tolerant, bolt resistant varieties, like the amazing 1951 All America Selections winner 30-50 lb OS Cross, if you will be growing them over summer.

Classic gorgeous greens are garden gems!

Red cabbage by far outdoes other cabbages in its cancer prevention properties. They have a concentration of anthocyanin polyphenols, which contribute to red cabbage containing significantly more protective phytonutrients than green cabbage. Interest in anthocyanin pigments continues to intensify because of their health benefits as dietary antioxidants, as an anti-inflammatory, and their potentially protective, preventative, and therapeutic roles in a number of human diseases.

Early Maturing Minis or HUGE! Plant what you and your family can eat. Plant early and minis for soonest treats, and, at the same time, longer maturing larger varieties to come in later. A couple delightful minis that can also be grown in containers are green Pixie Baby, and Red Express – 2 to 4 lb head, relatively split tolerant, only 63 days!

Huge varieties you can grow easily are Mammoth Red Rock Cabbage, Stein’s Early Flat Dutch – 8 inch and larger heads weighing 10-12 pounds, a favored variety for kraut. If you really do want to grow giants, up to 80 lbs!, try Flatpol, Northern Giant, Giant Russian, OS Cross or Megaton!

Earthy tasting bumpy Savoys or Super Smooth leaved… 
Savoy cabbage in particular—turns out to be an especially good source of sinigrin. Sinigrin is one of the cabbage glucosinolates that has received special attention in bladder, colon, and prostate cancer prevention research. Savoys are quite frost tolerant, and you get a lot of cabbage per their footprint!

Check out Cornell’s Cabbages Review List! The best are listed right at the top!

Brussels sprouts are the most recent, historically, appearing on our tables by 1785. Really, they are mini cabbages growing  conveniently along a stem! Santa Barbara weather generally doesn’t get frosty enough to make B Sprouts happy, the sprouts are quite small. But if you don’t mind the harvest time per the return, and you just love them, may they grace your table! However, in the last couple years I have seen Sprouts grown successfully to a larger size. It may depend on the variety selected? Just like with artichokes, more will be hybridized to tolerate climate warming.

Surprise! Red/Purple Brusselberry sprouts – a milder, sweeter Brussels sprout! Figure 120 days to harvest from November to January here on the west coast. Harvest from the bottom of the plant upwards. Especially prized for Christmas dinners! You could serve them whole with a creamy white hollandaise sauce to take advantage of the contrasting colors.

Chinese Cabbages are another Brassica, but are not cabbages though they sure look like it! Napa cabbage is SO elegant! Very beautiful, all those long, pale leaves neatly tucked with ruffled edges. Try the beautiful, Scarlette shown just below! Scarlette seeds! Bok Choy, or pak choi, is another leafy upright cabbageish plant eaten fresh in salads, steamed delicately, stir fried. A lot of cabbage lovers love these plants too!

GROWING Your Cabbages!

Cabbages are easy to grow. Those seeds are so tiny you can hardly believe that great big plant came from one! Full sun and fat soil make them happy. In acidic soil, Red cabbage leaves grow more reddish, in neutral soils they will grow purple, while an alkaline soil will produce rather greenish-yellow colored cabbages!

Select your planting area to accommodate your cabbages and their Companions! We have lots of tasty choices!

• Plant lettuces among your cabbages on the sunny side. Lettuces repel cabbage moths.
• Tomatoes and celery repel cabbage worms, but many sites say not to plant cabbies with toms.
• Nasturtium (attracts snails), onions, garlic, dill and borage act as an insect trap or repel harmful insects.
• Mustard greens among cabbage establishes a “trap” for moths and leafwebbers.
• Cabbage is not happy with Strawberries.
• Plant mint near peas, cabbage or tomatoes to improve their health and flavor, and mint oil repels insects. Plant the mint in a container! It’s invasive.
• Chamomile attracts hoverflies and wasps, both pollinators and predators that feed on aphids and other pest insects.
• CILANTRO repels aphids, potato beetles, and spider mites and makes cabbages/Brassicas grow REALLY well, bigger, fuller!

NOTE: Dying parts of the brassica family of plants, includes cabbages, produce a poison that prevents the seeds of some plants from growing. Plants with small seeds, such as lettuce, are especially affected by the brassica poison, so use lettuce transplants among your cabbages. A professor at the University of Connecticut says brassica plants should be removed from the soil after they have produced their crop.

SOIL Prepare your soil well in advance if you are in cold challenged areas. Often soil prep is done in fall rather than losing time getting ready in spring if you have a short summer. In Alaska, long 20 hour days compensate for their very short growing season! In SoCal, you can plant cabbages year round – just select the right varieties for each season. If you want them to be done so you can plant summer plants starting Feb/March, you can plant smaller fast growing varieties as late as early December for delicious results! They do better in cooler fall/winter weather though.

Cabbies are heavy feeders producing all those leaves! They like rich soil and steady attention! Composted manure, Chicken manure, timed-release vegetable ferts are terrific. Cabbages need steady weather and regular watering for steady growth. Too much N (Nitrogen), too much water, makes the plant tender and weak – susceptible to pests like aphids. 1 to 1.5 inches of water per week does the job if it doesn’t rain. But an Alaskan planter says her cabbages will take a gallon of water on a long hot day when fully growing. Depends on where you are, how long your days are, and how big your plant is. She grows giants.

Here’s her cabbage soil planting hole recipe! Peat moss (holds water), a pail of sand (if soil is heavy remove some before mixing), 2 cups bone meal, 4-6 cups of composted steer manure, 2 cups wood ashes, a couple heaping tablespoons of Epsom salt (Magnesium) & powdered milk (calcium), maybe a little lime (to raise pH to deter clubroot). Your soil is likely different and you aren’t likely growing giants, so do your own formula, but if you are raising giants, be generous, they are going to need it plus feedings!

After she plants… When it’s all watered and settled sprinkle a good cup of wood ashes around the new stem and nearby. This helps with bugs early when plants are at first weaker. Then I sprinkle Blood meal around in the moat off and on all summer, as it’s a quick nitrogen fix. I also use a little composted manure soaked in the water can and generous amount of fish emulsion in the summer watering. Fish is a slower acting fertilizer but cabbages seem to love it!

Here’s a tip from UK giant grower David Thomas: Water lodging in the base of the leaf? Rather than removing a huge leaf that contributes to your plant’s growth, his way around this is to simply poke a hole in the lowest part of the leaf (not through the main vein) to let the water drain away .

Alaska State Fair Giant Cabbage Weigh-Off 2013 winners (with placards, left to right): Scott Rob (92.1 pounds), Keevan Dinkel (92.3 pounds) and Brian Shunskis (77.4 pounds). The growers are joined by the cabbage fairies, a group of women who for 15 years have volunteered at the cabbage competition. BTW, Keevan was 10 years old at that time and called the ‘new Kid King of Cabbage!’ And the cabbage’s name is ‘Bob.’ Photo by Clark James Mishler  See more!

SPACING If you are planting minis, 2 to 2 1/2′ spacing is good. Mine grow that big. If you are going for giants, 8′ spacing may be needed! If you want maximum size, give them plenty of room. Crowding stunts plants as they shade each other out. Depending on the variety you plant, done right, in 82 days (3 months) you can get a 30 to 50 lb cabbage! In 2012, Scott Robb of Palmer, Alaska, broke the world record for heaviest cabbage at 138.25 lbs! He holds five current world records for his large vegetables.

Select your seeds. Remember, AAS, All America Selections winners are prime! 2016’s cabbage winner is Katarina F1, an early maturing green 4″ mini, container variety – but you can plant it in the ground too!

Get transplants from your local nursery. Locals are better than box stores because they select varieties that do well in your area and they want your success and your repeat business means a lot to them. Transplanting tips from David Thomas: I tear off all of the roots that are swirling around in the shape of the pot, this sounds a bit drastic and I would never treat a pumpkin plant in this way but on a cabbage it actually increases root growth. I plant the cabbage up to the base of the lowest leaf, the buried stem will also send out roots.

Plant smart! Succession! Plant seeds and transplants of minis and bigger longer maturers at the same time to have a grand succession of fresh cabbages for your table. Plant two or three rounds in case of crop failure and/or to have continuous crop if all goes well!

PESTS

Water regularly, less if it rains. But, too much watering makes for a soft plant that invites sucking pests like those aphids. Keep a look out for any curling leaves. Get in there and look, top and undersides of leaves, and in the new leaf zone in the center. Hose them away immediately and keep doing it day after day until they are gone. If you see ants about tending the aphids sprinkle cinnamon around. When you water, the ant colony may rush out carrying eggs. Let them. When a lot of them are out, sprinkle them generously. That will substantially reduce your ant population and save your plants. Aphids can totally runt your plants, they often don’t recover, so don’t ignore ants and just hope they will go away. See all about them UC – IPM

• Pick off any yellowing leaves that attract whiteflies that get into your other plants. UC – IPM  Worm castings work well against whiteflies.
• Slugs love getting into the lower outer leaves of cabbage heads. The slugs are so protected in there. Grrrr…. Early on lay on a Sluggo like pellet to stop them before they get started! When your cabbage head is right around its maturity date and the head is good and firm, harvest it! When a plant is past prime it dries, loses that bursting flavor, diseases, pests and birds start doing their own harvesting.
• Holes in cabbage’s leaves are a sure sign that cabbage worms or cabbage loopers may be attacking your plant. Look for these camouflaged green pests on the underside, along ribs of leaves and pick them off.
• Tiny holes? Flea beetles – Dust with wood ash or flour dust.

SIDEDRESSING If you think they need it, give your cabbies a feed when they start to head up. It may be that if you put a ring of granular nitrogen around cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower plants, you will be able to grow bigger heads of vegetables than you would without the nitrogen. Usually though, your soil will be ample unless you are growing giants.

HARVEST promptly! I put the plant date and days to maturity on my plant id tags so I can check to see when to expect mature heads. The squeeze test tells you if it is firm and ready. Storing them on the plant a short time is okay, but otherwise the slugs, etc., get to them, the leaves start losing their verve, the head dries a bit, loses its shine, and doesn’t have that bursting fresh feel! If you wait too long, or water irregularly, the head may crack or split. If it cracks, take it immediately and salvage what you can. Cut the heads off, don’t bruise them by pulling them.

STORE your cabbies in the fridge! Anthony Reyes at FarmScape Gardens says: Remove any loose surrounding leaves and keep just the compact head. It is important to note that the quality of the stem diminishes after being stored and tends to get slightly woodier the longer it is stored. Therefore, if you would like to eat the stem (which is delicious!) do so before freezing/storing for prolonged periods (it will still be good to eat, just a little bit woodier and sometimes stringy). Place in a paper or plastic bag with some holes in it to let moisture escape. This is important as you want to keep an aerobic environment to prevent excess moisture, condensation from transpiration, and mold from forming.

SEEDSAVING Cabbage must be kept separated from other cole crops by a mile to prevent cross-pollination. That is impossible in a community garden. Better there to buy new seed each year. Another factor to consider is cabbages are mostly self-infertile. For seedsaving purposes they need to be planted in groups of at least 10 or more. For most of us that isn’t going to happen. Then, you need two years to do it! Cabbages, like all the Brassicas – broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts – are biennials. So unless you have some extreme weather shifts, and they flower early, you wait overwinter. A week of hot weather and these cabbages above left quickly bolted from no heads yet to flowering stalks. If you have had the opportunity to save seeds, lucky you! They are viable 2 – 4 years.

Red Cabbage bolting in second year.

In normal conditions, after overwintering, in spring, new cabbage shoots burst strangely out of the unharvested cabbage heads, flower stalks form, then seeds are made in their second year. The seeds are easy to harvest, but get them before the birds do! Poke some holes in a plastic bag. Pop the bag over the drying seed pods and wait until they are entirely dry. Collect the dry seed pods. In a baggie, rub them between your hands to pop them open to release the seeds.

DELICIOUS WAYS TO EAT CABBAGE!

In one recent study (post undated), short-cooked and raw cabbage were the only types of cabbage to show cancer-preventive benefits – long-cooked cabbage failed to demonstrate measurable benefits.

Fresh Coleslaw is best! Make it your way! Your recipe might mix red cabbage, pepper, shredded carrots, onion, grated cheese, pineapple, or apple. Your dressing could be a vinaigrette, mayonnaise, sour cream or cream with celery seed added. Slaw shapes are different – finely minced pieces, shredded strips, or even small squares! Buttermilk coleslaw is a southern United States treat! Or you just might top your salad with a few shreds of red cabbage!

Boiled! If you don’t like that sulfur smell, do it quick! Cut into thin 1/4″ slices or wedges, drop into boiling water, simmer 10 to 15 minutes until just tender ~ or steam. Drain and serve right now! Or if you don’t need it right away, chill in ice water, drain, wrap for later. The European Sour version is to cook your cabbage in apple juice, cider, white wine or water and wine vinegar, using just enough liquid to cover the cabbage. You let the liquid cook away leaving tender richly flavored cabbage! When cooking red cabbage it will normally turn blue. To retain that marvelous red color add vinegar or acidic fruit.

Put chunks in soups & stews, stuff leaves filled with whatever your heart desires, pickle, do classic Sauerkraut or super healthy Probiotics!

I love the subtleties of cabbage. Their colors. Writer Edna Ferber says ‘…always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry.’ Cabbages more or less ‘sit’ compared to other veggies, collecting power from the ground up, expanding slowly and quietly from the inside – called ‘hearting up.’ They are working astonishingly hard making so many leaves! Each leaf harmonizes completely with the leaf next to it so the head is firm.

In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.  Carl Sandburg

Updated 10.27.22

^Top

---

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 in a fog belt/marine layer area most years, locally referred to as the May grays, June glooms and August fogusts. Keep that in mind compared to the microclimate niche where your veggie garden is.

Read Full Post »

Hand Watering Veggies During Drought? Big Yes!

Some people think a drip system is the water saving way to go. That may be true if you have a farm or a permanent landscape. If your garden doesn’t have electricity to set a timer, chances are you are over watering. At our community garden, no electricity, gardeners get working, talking, and forget about the water. In a fast moving small veggie garden hand watering is better for several reasons.

In small gardens, plants are constantly changing as they come and go. Even in a row, some plants grow faster than others, a gopher might grab one, and as they mature are pulled to make room for new ones. Happily, this leaves late maturers for continued table supply. Often new plants added to the row are a different kind of plant as the season progresses. New ones require more water more frequently to get started. Seed beds need wetting daily. Seed beds vary in size and design depending on what’s planted, where you put it, how much you need. 

One advantage of a small garden is you don’t have to plant in rows. Biodiversity calls for putting the same kind of plant in different areas so disease or pests don’t go down a row or through a patch, from plant to plant and you quickly lose them all. Succession planting means you don’t plant the entire area at once, but leave room to plant another round to mature later, to keep a steady table supply. Plants at different stages need differing amounts of water. Hand watering is perfect in these situations.

Leaves don’t need water, roots do! Long water wands let you reach in to water at the root of your plant as each needs it. But take a cue from the leaves! Where the leaves direct the water to is where the surface feeder roots have grown to, searching for water and nutrients! Keep that area moist so the nutrients survive and your plant receives optimum nutrients. Watering at ground level, there is no evaporation from overhead watering or water on foliage. Fuzzy plants don’t like wet leaves, they can’t breathe nor regulate their temperatures properly. Nor herbs. If you live by a busy dusty street, then do wash down your plants occasionally to keep their leaf pores open and dissuade Whiteflies.

Keep the flow low! Choose a water wand with low flow, like the ones they use in nurseries that don’t break the plants. Get one that has an easy to use shutoff valve. Check out this new kind in the image. In a lot of nurseries employees are required to shut off the water while moving from one plant to another! Saves water when you go plant to plant, area to area. Low flow lets the water sink in. The general rule of thumb is water deeply, 1″, once a week. Check that by sticking your finger in the ground. If the soil is dry 1″ down, it’s time to water or water more.

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. Some of your plants may need shade covers.

Plants need different amounts of water. Lettuce and short rooted plants like some varieties of strawberries, green beans, onion, need water about every three days or so unless it is exceptionally hot and/or windy. At super hot times you may need to water once a day, twice a day for seed beds. Lettuce may need water every day to keep fast growth and sweet flavor. Big bodied plants like zucchini, some melons, pumpkins and winter squash need a lot of water to support all that plant. And there are times when plants don’t need any water at all, like when garlic and onions mature. They need to develop their ‘storage skin’ that keeps their innards moist while being stored.

Steady water is critical for beans, a heavy producer with small root, and strawberries. Beans curl and strawberries are misshapen, called cat faced, when watering is irregular. Celery and chard are thirsty plants. They need a lot of compost, soil with water holding capacity. Chard naturally wilts in heat, so check first, poke your finger in the soil, so you don’t literally drown it when it is only doing its midday thing!

What else you can do?!

• Choose heat and drought tolerant varieties! They need less water! Some will keep producing at 85° and above!
• Compost before planting! Compost has serious water holding capacity, saves water.
• To save water consider planting IN wide furrows, where the moisture settles. The reason I say wide is because plants take up moisture and nutrients from surface feeder roots and they need room to do that. Plant crosswise 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 level.* If you make the sides of your trenches low slopes, and water carefully, your furrows won’t degrade as much or as quickly from water washing the sides away. Nor will seeds or plants be buried too deeply. 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.*What do feeder roots do on the surface of the soil? Their main job is to absorb water and minerals. When the feeder roots of trees plants get near the soil surface, they have access to water, nutrients, and oxygen. [This is important because] These elements are more abundant near the soil surface than deep within the soil. (from Gardening Know How)

  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 ultimate planting system for three reasons! Their climate is hot and dry, sometimes windy. 1) The waffle technique is ingenious in that the berms shelter each planting area from every direction. A trench can be a wind channel. Not so in a waffle layout! Each waffle space is protected from every direction. The berms cause drying winds to rise over the waffle and it stays more moist inside. 2) The basins are at soil level, allowing the feeder roots ample growing and feeding room. If you look at some of the old images of waffle gardens, the waffles varied in size in the same garden to accommodate the plants’ needs. 3) Plants are separate enough that they don’t have to compete for water or soil. That equals more production. Similar sunken beds for growing food with less water have been used globally in arid regions, arising independently by Indigenous farmers. See more
  .
  

  Curtis Quam’s waffle garden, which he tends with his family. (Courtesy of Curtis Quam)

• Except for tomatoes and cucumbers, make planting basins below the soil level. For drier fungi free surface soil for tomatoes and cukes, make mounds with the basin on top of it, the bottom of the basin above neighboring soil levels. As soon as you plant, mulch. Use only 1″ deep straw that allows air flow with toms & cukes that need drier soil. For other plants mulch 4-6″ deep! Put a stake in the center of the basin and water only there at the roots of your plant. Your plant gets water, the basin berms or sunken basin prevent wind drying the soil like in waffle gardening. A few days after you start watering, check to see the basin is still in good shape, doing its job. Soil naturally settles, so add more to tomato berms if needed. Clear out sunken basins if they have filled in a bit.
• Make berms along pathways especially in sloping areas. Pathways don’t need water. The berms don’t have to be big and the berms don’t need to be wetted.
• Sprinkle transplant roots with mycorrhizae fungi at planting time. Mycorrhizae increase water and nutrient uptake. In Goleta ask for it at Island Seed and Feed. (Brassicas don’t connect with it, so your over summering kale doesn’t need it.)
• Except for super heat lovers, once your soil is heated up, Mulch like religion to keep your soil cooler, moist longer, less water needed. Use Straw, Self Mulching, a living mulch of understory plants like lettuce, or plant soil feeding legumes!  It stops light germinating weed seeds from germinating! Super heat lovers like melons and winter squash may be the exception. According to Texas A&M University, a well-mulched garden can yield 50% more vegetables! ‘University field tests have shown that mulch can increase (or decrease) yields by as much as 30 percent.’ Either way, 30% or 50% on the plus side is a significant amount!  Mulch Techniques   Also see Mulching right for each plant!
  

Hand watering is kinda Zen. You are ‘with’ your plants, see what they need, what needs doing next. Hummingbirds come. You take in the day, the beauty around you. You feel the Earth under your feet.

Updated 9.4.22

---

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’s two 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.

SUBSCRIBE to the entire newsletter!    Friend on Facebook! 

Top^

Read Full Post »

Waffle Gardens, The Roots of Square Foot Gardening!

Zuni waffle gardens were extensive in New Mexico in 1873, and are still used today. Drought, a hot dry, maybe windy, climate requires creative response. Consider an old proven successful technique!

Photographer: T. H. O’Sullivan. Expedition of 1873. Archive
x
Planting a waffle garden, Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico. Museum of New Mexico photo by Jesse Nusbaum, 1911

The Zuni people developed this waffle-garden design, which is still used today as an ecological method of conserving water. The garden was surrounded by a clay or adobe wall that rose 30-50 cm above the ground. The waffle plot may have had a gravel mulch as well. Both methods served to hold the water in the soil longer, to retard evaporation.

About those walls! Study this little airflow diagram…better to make a porous windbreak!

In a cooler climate, a wall, maybe of berry producing shrubs with dwarf fruit trees behind, can reduce cooling and drying winds, allowing the warmth of a food forest! The waffles still reduce water use. Mulch in summer keeps weeds down and the plant roots cool and moist though the plants are getting lots of heat.

Waffle gardens at the Zuni Pueblo were planted near the Zuni River. Sadly, today, it is an unreliable water source for sustainable farming, but if you live at the bottom of a drainage area, take advantage of it as they did. If you are selecting land, choose wisely.

This Zuni field, below left, takes advantage of the shade of the trees. Notice that the pattern follows the contour of the land, and the waffles are not all square or the same size. Shape them as suits your needs. They don’t have to have straight lines! The rock circle border, below right, indicates the gardener is creating a waffle garden medicine wheel!

OCTOBER 28, 2014 The University of Arizona plans a simple Community Garden that incorporates water conservation structure where the higher ground acts as waffle berms.

June of 2002 the A:Shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center had put in a waffle garden to help the children of Zuni understand the ways of their ancestors. July and August, Zuni usually experiences monsoon season with afternoon thunderstorms coming from the south, a common (hoped for, prayed for!) occurrence. When we visited Zuni in August we found that the garden had changed significantly and that there had been lots of growth to all the crops!

Same garden in August after the rains! The corn is flourishing!

Use and modify your areas to good advantage. High berms deflect the prevailing drying wind. Deep basins hold water where it is needed.

2021! Here is Curtis Quam’s waffle garden in action! He tends it with his family at Zuni Pueblo, NM. It uses less water, increases food security! Please see more at The Resurgence of Waffle Gardens Is Helping Indigenous Farmers Grow Food with Less Water!

Teach! Visit local historic native gardens in your area. In Santa Barbara CA that would be our Mission Garden, called La Huerta, The Orchard. The City of Albuquerque collaborates with the nonprofit Open Space Alliance. Below is the Traditions Demonstration Garden, at the Open Space Visitor Center. It is a hands on volunteer effort learning feature designed to teach about historical foods and methods of farming in the Rio Grande Valley.

Pointers

• Your berms don’t need to be amended.
• You don’t need berms, or very high berms, if you dig down and amend.
• Generally, make your waffle 2′ or smaller square. Make them a size workable for you to comfortably reach across to maintain and harvest.
• Make pathways wide enough between patches so you can safely haul in and unload your amendments, not damage your berms.
• Plant sprawlers like squash, melons, at a corner. They can act as a living mulch.
• Plant corn so it doesn’t shade plants that need full sun.
• Lovely as the Three Sisters sounds, beans climbing corn, squash at the feet of the corn, some say the corn shades out the beans. If your corn is a 10′ tall variety, few can reach the beans to harvest!
• Put up a trellis along one edge if you are ok with breaking tradition a bit. It can also act as a porous windbreak!

Squash and corn starting in a single dug down Waffle! Give it a try! You can do it anywhere!

And that, became this! Happy Planting!

Updated 3.27.22

^Top

---

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!

 

 

Read Full Post »

6th Annual Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap!

Oh, Yes, It’s SEED SWAP time again!

Dear Santa Barbara area Gardeners,
this is an event not to miss!

Chicago Garden friends? Chicago Botanic Garden 2014 Seed Swap info!

Seeds are BIG!  And super important!  They are amazing living beings that carry our best plants forward through time.  Preserving them and saving them from interference, is essential.  The University of Georgia is just one place that has a Seedbank, in their case, the “Southern Seed Legacy.”  You can get seeds and recipes from them!

---

---

Saturday January 25, 6:30 to 8:30 PM  With a theme of plants from the Western Hemisphere & Mesoamerica this year, the Seed Swap kicks off with an evening talk by Lorenz Schaller of the Kusa Seed Society, titled “Modern Science Meets Ancient Maize.” Ancient Mayans had over 300 Maize foods, while the Incas, an advanced agricultural civilization, skillfully developed an amazing variety of plants like quinoa, beans, amaranth and potatoes. They prized Maize above all others as the plant that nourished and allowed their civilization to rise and thrive. Please come and share your examples of plants from the Americas like squash, corn, chayote, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, avocados, guavas, chili peppers, manioc, agave, and prickly pear.

Lorenz Schaller, a longtime Ojai resident,  is a remarkable steward of his environment. Formerly a staff member at the California Institute of Technology (Cal-Tech), Schaller studied and taught the nutritional, culinary, and ecological significance of bio-diverse seed crops for many decades. Kusa is a Sanskrit word meaning sacred grass.

Workshop at SB Downtown Public Library, $5 donation please or more if you can do it! Your generosity will be put to good use.

---

Sunday, January 26, 11 AM to 3 PM
6th Annual Santa Barbara Community Seed Swap!

FREE! Santa Barbara Public Library, Faulkner Gallery, 40 E. Anapamu St, Santa Barbara, CA. If you are from out-of-town but near enough, and enjoy adventurous journeys, come make a day of it in our fair city!

Seed Swaps are wonderful exchanges of local seeds, all for FREE, and offer the magic of trying seeds you would never have bought!

More than 400 people attended last year, sharing seeds and knowledge with other backyard gardeners, plant lovers, and farmers! Come be a part of this seed saving movement! Be sure our locally adapted varieties of seed & plants are passed on to future generations. Children are welcome!  Local groups will table, including the Santa Barbara Seed Saving Guild, who will share valuable seed saving techniques and encourage local gardeners to grow out and harvest some of their best seeds for future gardens and seed swaps, making us a truly food secure community. Seed saving is a fun and easy way to connect to the circle of life.

Bring seeds, plants, cuttings, and garden knowledge to swap.

Don’t have these?
Come anyway and get seeds!
Seeds to sow, grow, harvest!
Grow seeds to save and share next year.
Activities for all ages
Music that will have your toes tapping – Honeysuckle Possums
Special Speakers throughout the day
A gathering of garden friends old and new.

A community program hosted by the Santa Barbara Permaculture Network Non-profit
Event co-sponsors: Island Seed & Feed, Healing Grounds Biodynamic Nursery, & the Santa Barbara Seed Saving Guild, a program of the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County.

Santa Barbara Annual Community Seed Swap on Facebook

Exactly where is MesoAmerica?

---

---

Some tips for swapping your saved seeds:

Pack them in paper coin envelopes or plastic baggies. Label seed packs with botanical and common name, and DATE they were gathered!  Five seeds per pack for larger and common seeds is good. Thirty seeds or so is good for smaller seeds. If you don’t have small coin envelopes or want to buy little plastic baggies, you can cut up junk mail envelopes into smaller envelopes to hold your seeds.

Why seeds?!?  First, a Swap is a fun way to meet other gardeners and people interested in beautifying their communities and growing their own food.  Starting your crops from seed is frugal.  Watching a tiny plant sprout and grow is an incredibly special experience, totally inspiring.  You learn about life while getting plenty of sunshine!  Seeds you get at a local SWAP, are adapted to your area, and will grow super well!

How to select your new seeds! 

1. Take your garden plan with you.
2. Take small baggies or small envelopes and a pencil with you.
3. Label what you get when you get it.
4. Take only what you need and a few more in case those fail or you love them and want to plant another round or two!  Leave the rest for others. Try not to get seed greed fever! 🙂
5. Look for the date on the package or container. Ask when seeds were gathered.  Are the seeds still viable?
6. Find out how big that plant will grow, decide if it will really fit in your available space.
7. Is it a summer or winter plant?
8. Ask tons of questions!
9. Have a great time!

See Seeds Rock! Choosing the Perfect Ones for You! 

---

If you don’t live in our area, please check to see when Seed Swaps will be in your area!  If there are none, if you are willing, please, please, please, contact local permaculturists, garden groups/clubs, to see about starting one!  Preserving our heritage, not GMO but heirloom seeds, is vital to our continued nutritious future, and for our children’s healthy futures!

ONLINE SEED SWAPS! As the National Gardening Assn says:  One gardener’s extras are another’s treasures! Here’s how they do it!

---

With great gratitude to you and all our ancestors! 
Happy seed hunting!

Read Full Post »

August – First Fall Plantings!

August is the last of your big harvests!  Harvesting keeps your plant producing.  For some of you, it means canning, freezing, fermenting, storing, drying.  When you decide all is done to your satisfaction, decide which plants were your healthiest top producers and allow them to seed.  Seeds are your second harvest! 

We generally have heat, so keep up with watering, especially your short rooted plants like lettuces, beans, cukes, strawberries.  They are all in high production and need it!

In our hot foothills and further south, watch your melons and pumpkins for their best harvest time – when they ‘slip’ off the vine.  Hold off irrigating melons about a week before they will ripen so their sugars will concentrate. Harvest okra while it is small and tender – bigger is NOT better!  Let your winter squash harden.

Give last feeds to plants you are keeping in production through August, September.  Often summer favorites are kept into October.  Consider, though, that winter plants that get a good start while there is still some heat, will be producing a lot sooner than plants started while it is cooler, and you will have a much earlier crop.  One clever trick, to have it both ways, is to plant baby winter plants beside, among, still producing summer plants!  When your summer plant is done, carefully remove it, not damaging the baby.  Put peas below finishing beans.  Pop some kale between the tomatoes and peppers.

When an area is done, clear away insect hiding places. Remove any mulches from under where diseased plants were.  If your soil is high for the area, plants there were diseased, and you have a plentiful compost stash, maybe remove the couple top inches of soil and generously lay on some of that tasty compost!  Dig it into the top 4 to 6 inches.  Design your fall layout, and amend your soils for fall planting per the plant that will be grown in that area.  Build your new raised beds, make more compost, install gopher barriers!

Time to select more cool temp hardy veggie seeds, especially lettuces.  Lettuces that head prosper in cooler weathers.  ASAP start seeds for transplants in Sep.  Greenhouse style works, or even put in seedling nursery areas in your garden for later transplanting as space becomes available.  Plant your seeds far enough apart to get your trowel in to pick your little plants up to move them one by one to their new home.

Yes, some summer plants thrive right into fall and you can plant last rounds, best in early August.  I’ve seen tomato transplants and bean seeds started in August produce plentiful crops late September, October!  That will be especially true if we have warm temps.

Start from seed  Brassicas/Coles:  Broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collards, cabbage (especially red and savoy types, which resist frost better), turnips and kohlrabi.  The leaves of all of them can be used for greens!  Start peas, bunch onions, lettuces.  Lettuces grow slower in cooler temps, so plant a few more for the same supply as you had in summer, unless you eat less salads in ‘winter.’  If you need to feed an army, plant Fordhook Giant chard!  They grow prolifically and huge, and are a super healthy food to eat!  Culinary dandelions are the highest in Vitamin A!  Beets come in lovely colors and are doubly valuable because the leaves are an edible green too.  Use small young leaves in salads, steam the bigger ones as you would any green.  Celery is crunchy tasty and great stew flavoring.  And what about some carrots?!  Plant a triple row!  Lay in some radish, carrots and kales all together.  The radish grow fast and shallow, the carrots take their time and grow deep.  The kales will be your forever crop!  In SoCal, it is essentially a perennial.  Keep carrot and parsley seeds plenty moist until they come up.  Parsley doesn’t like being transplanted, so put them right where you want them to remain.

Make your  own Seed Strips!  It’s easy, a satisfying evening activity, that saves your back, and seeds, when you are planting!

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

A word about Bagrada Bugs.  They like Brassicas, and Brassicas are THE SoCal winter garden plant!

• What some of the local organic farmers are doing is planting mustards as a trap plant.  The Bagradas prefer them, so they go there rather than your brocs.  Mind you, you still have to remove them by whatever means you prefer, or the brocs are next.  Bagradas are fast reproducers, make virtual swarms, and when they suck juices from your plant toxic disease producing stuff gets in your plant.  In hot days, I’ve seen a plant go down in 3 days.
• I highly suggest biodiversity, interplanting – that’s mixing it up, even interplanting different varieties of the same plant (especially broccolis), rather than monoculturing – a row of a single kind of plant.  With rows of a single plant, the pest or disease simply goes plant to plant and you lose the whole row.  This also stops leafminers (typical on soft leaved chard & beets) from going plant to plant.  Slows them way down.
• Plant so mature plant leaves don’t touch!  Stop the ease of transmission.  If you can’t help yourself, and go monoculture, remove infested or diseased leaves immediately.
• Don’t lay down any mulch until the Bagrada season is OVER.  They hide out in the mulch then climb back up on the plant when you are gone.  I’ve seen it.  Stand very still and wait…sure enough, there they come.
• Use mycorrhizae fungi when you plant.  The fungi network linking your plants is proven that when one plant gets a disease or pest, it warns the neighbor plant.  That plant then boosts its own defenses!

If you have just a small area or are container gardening, select compact varieties known for excellent production.  For example, broccolis are a cut and come again plant!  When the main head is mature, still in tight formation, cut it off the main stem below the head diagonally, let side shoots grow.  There are low growing varieties that make huge 3″ side shoots.  These are a terrific veggie investment!

Read Full Post »

Seed Strips, Make Your Own!

Seeds are your second harvest!

Some of your plants will be finishing in July while others you will still be planting, eking out the last possible summer tasties!  For you SEED SAVERS, note which of your favorite plants gave prolific harvests, the most quality veggies.  They are perfect seed saving candidates!  Tag them, tie a colorful ribbon on them, and let them seed.  Let an arugula, a radish or two, a couple carrots, cilantro, favorite lettuces seed out.  Let them get tall and pretty with flowers, bring the bees, complete their cycle by creating their seeds and turning lovely tans and browns.  These amazing reliable local performers are known as landraces or “folk varieties.”

Making your own Seed Strips is wonderful for so many reasons!

• Size matters!  Big seeds like beans, favas, corn, peas, squash, are easy to handle, to count out per planting space, you can see where you put them and find them if you drop them.  Radish seeds are small, so rolly polly, and have the power to become practically invisible!  Lord help you if you spill them.  Carrot seeds can be clumpy, and odd shaped, so tangle and are hard to distribute evenly.  Seed strips put ’em right where you want ’em, no losses, no wasted seeds!
• If your hands are damp, the little buggers stick to your fingers.  Doesn’t happen with your seed strip.
• Save your back!  At planting time, just lay down that seed strip, cover, water, and you’re done!  And, no more of that over planting thinning!  It is a painstaking, time taking, pain in the patootie!
• The plants you want are not always available on seed strips for purchase, whether it is the variety you prefer, or it’s out of stock.
• If you only have a certain number of seeds or they are expensive and you simply don’t want to waste them, seed strips are the way to go!

The only disadvantage of seed tapes is if a seed doesn’t germinate, you have an empty spot.  At which point, plant a seed there asap, or just let it go.  Using viable seeds in the first place helps a lot.  Know that you are taking a chance if you use too old seeds.

Here’s the simplicity of it!  All you need is seeds, strip material, sticky stuff.

1)  Your strip material can be no color ink newspaper 1″ wide or, 2″ wide recycled, unbleached bathroom tissue (the quickest biodegradable) or paper towels – no color ink.  Lay them out on cookie sheets for easy clean up later and so they don’t stick to anything else when they are drying.  If you are doing mesclun, use paper towel squares!

2)  Sticky stuff can be dots of Elmer’s glue, or mix a paste of 1/4 cup flour with 2 tablespoons warm water.  Make your dots about 1″ apart or as you wish.  Place your seeds on the dots.  Tweezers?  A toothpick helps to poke them in.  If you are using paper towels, apply your dots to one side, then fold the towel over them so you end up with a 1″ wide strip.  One inch apart spacing for radish and carrots.  With lettuce, if you don’t mind a bit of thinning, plant closer than usual.  Thin a few times as they get bigger, ending up with your final plants, doing cut and come again on those.

You can get creative!  Use a toilet paper wide strip.  Put slow growers like carrots along with quick growers like radish.  Or put a more ‘permanent’ cut and come again plant like lettuce, with a quick and gone plant like radish.  The lettuce will fill out, covering the space where the radish was before.     3)  Gifts!  Let the strips dry, label with date and name, roll up loosely and gently.  If a gift, add a color paper around each roll to identify them. Green for lettuce, orange for carrots, red for radish.  Store in an airtight container or in a bag in a cool, dry place, with their seed packet.  Add a little salt to keep the seeds dry.  Make an instruction sheet cover for gift tins.

4)  Plant your strips seed side up, the right depth per plant.  Plant in rows or any creative pattern that suits your fancy!  Newspaper and paper towels biodegrade quickly and help hold moisture so your seeds will germinate well.

Wonderful way to spend an evening, great project to do with kids!

Read Full Post »