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

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

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

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

APRIL through JUNE Planting Timing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natural Disease & Pest Prevention!

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

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

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

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

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

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

May your crops be abundant and your Spirit blessed!

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

Updated 4.2.22

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

Check out the entire April 2022 Newsletter!

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

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

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

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

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Short Day, Long Day, Day Neutral Plants – Photoperiodism!

Light. Some seeds want NO light, others require it to germinate. Some plants prefer light and grow toward it while others like it more cool in the background. Shaded plants that need more light can switch the up button on and can outgrow their neighbor. Some prefer different wavelengths. Roots generally like it good and dark, thank you.

I have seen references to short and long day onions and how you plant them at the appropriate times. I’ve heard of day neutral strawberries that produce any time of year when conditions are right. Little did I know that a Long Neck Garlic means it is a long day garlic; it doesn’t have a long neck! Nor did I know that there are long day and short day Brassicas! I had that discussion with another customer at a nursery! He said the growers know about that and select the right varieties for us per our area. If the variety does well for us, when we decide to plant from seed we buy those varieties, never knowing they were specific to our territory!

Discovered by Charles Darwin and his son about 1880, Photoperiodism triggers flowering – reproduction mode, bulb formation, and dormancy! It’s the light conditions required for vegetative growth, leaves, versus reproductive growth, flowering, or bolting. It allows the plant to sync up with changes in the season. It is also related to other growth-related mechanisms in plants that depend on photoperiod (large cycles of growth and rest, disease and pest resistance, and more). Technically, research shows it is the night most plants go by. Long nights equals short days, less than 12 hours, for bloom formation to occur. Short nights equals long days, more than 12 hours of light needed per day! The importance of knowing if your plant is a short day or long day plant or day neutral, is knowing what type of plant and variety you have and when is best to plant it! That also means it’s critical information for buying the right seeds! Even the different varieties of a plant have different needs! 

Nighttime chemical processes happen until they are interrupted by light. So ‘night’ means the amount of uninterrupted darkness! That is what determines the formation of flowers on most types of plants. Poinsettias are picky! Mike Nuckols says they ‘will not bloom until the plant experiences 14-hours of uninterrupted darkness daily for many weeks. Even 15-minutes of light during the night will keep a poinsettia from flowering.’ So don’t place them where lights will be turned on at any time during the night and don’t go snooping around with a bright flashlight!

It is important to know per the region you live in and whether you will get a crop at all. The number of Days to Maturity also comes into play. It is one thing if you are in Alaska with almost 24 hour summer day lengths, or planting in Washington or Maine, northern US areas, where summers are short but days are longer! Or in Orlando Fl where the day length is much shorter!

Here’s another look at day lengths per latitude! Per Mr Reid, the length of a day changes far more during the year at higher latitudes than at lower latitudes. (Latitudes beyond 66°33′ are not shown because the Sun does not always rise or set at these latitudes.) The graph runs from one winter solstice to the next, with the two equinoxes clearly visible in March and September. Santa Barbara CA is 34N25.

While in Alaska, horticulturist Mike Nuckols found that ‘planting any variety of beets other than the day-neutral variety ‘Boltardy’ would result in only greens and no beetroot, even when growing conditions were otherwise perfect. Other varieties of beet immediately went to seed [bolted] in the long days of summer.’

Planting the right plants at the right time avoids bolting! Yes, bolting happens when there are dramatic weather changes and your plant is fooled into thinking the season is ending and puts up a flower stalk. But planting a long night winter lover, like beets, some Bok Choy, flower, bolt prematurely if planted during long day periods. They think they had winter and it’s time to seed. It would be the same for some night loving winter type lettuces. See more about Bolting

Special notes about BROCCOLI, a SoCal winter favorite. Mike knows his stuff! ‘Flowering vegetables like broccoli are similarly affected by photoperiod. Many older varieties of broccoli perform best when grown in the cool, short-days of early spring and fall. [In SoCal that translates to the shorter days of fall/winter. Keep in mind that Mike is speaking from Watertown NY at 44° North.] If planted during summer, these varieties are more likely to flower before they have grown large leaf and root systems, resulting in spindly heads. Cornell and other universities have conducted considerable research in recent years to develop varieties that are less affected by long, hot days of a typical east-coast summer, potentially opening up a new crop for summer harvest.’

Sonoma County, northern CA, 38N44 at Santa Rosa, Master Gardener Rebecca Goodsell presents this for your consideration: There are two distinct types of broccoli: short-season and long-season. ‘Short’ and ‘long’ refer to the days between transplanting and harvest. Short-season varieties take 60-90 days and can be started from seed between March and July. The long-season varieties take 90-120 days, coming to maturity between December and March. [When these plants are coming to maturity is well past the long day time. They like the cooler weather and start their production in short days times.] These are tall plants, often up to 3’ when the first heads appear. (The short-season varieties, such as Calabrese and De Cicco, are tolerant of summer heat and much shorter – about 1 ½’ tall when the first heads appear.) The days to maturity on seed packs are from time of transplant, not from the seeding date.

Note that spring plantings for the long-season type cross that 12 hour long and short day divide in June, Summer Solstice. Success with those would be best with heat tolerant varieties. Though the days are shorter, July and August are hotter! If you plant a 120 day variety in March while it’s still cool, the 4th month will be June! Right away you are hitting hot weather when your plant starts producing! You will be harvesting June and July for sure, likely August too if your variety has good side shoot production.

Also, if you are growing in an area that gets frost in October, you’re not going to be planting the long season 90+ days to maturity varieties in late summer! There isn’t time! Even if you do indoor starts, the plant has to mature and then there has to be enough time to harvest the main head and subsequent side shoots. Translate that 120 days to 4 months then add a month+ for the harvest. In coastal SoCal, the land of rare frosts to none, you can plant as you wish, though why wait 4 months for your broccoli?! Some of the new hybrids produce large heads much earlier, and often large side shoots at the same time!!! Early Dividend Broccoli comes in at ± 55 days from transplanting! Check out these great tables at Johnny’s Select seed! Note the harvest time is included!

The 10 hour day! Here’s a point to know and remember! Some plants stop growing or grow very slowly with less than 10 hour days. In a greenhouse you can add lighting and that will keep them going. In Santa Barbara CA we get to just under that 10 hrs December and January. At that time some of your lettuces may take a break. Either some supplemental purchases may be needed, or change some of your eating choices for a while…

During the cold months, northern gardeners eagerly wait for the more than 10 hour days to return so they can start planting! Our Stoney Acres, in Riverton UT Zone 6a, recommends heating your soil for early seed planting germinating by covering your soil with clear 10 mil plastic – lasts longer and can be reused, 3 weeks before you intend to plant! Amazing soil temp difference! See more!

Since Broccoli tolerates light frost, you can plant transplants you start at home 4 weeks before the first frost date, soil temps about 50°! Wherever you are, just be sure you start them just after the 10 hour days finish. They will grow slowly in the cold soil temps, but will pick up speed as the soil warms.

Please see the Miles Away Farm Tip 6 for Oregon State University research results and a table showing how important the planting time is!

Johnny’s Selected Seeds says Cauliflower, another Brassica, starts to develop a head when days get shorter. Better to plant earlier in the short days period. If you plant too late, like in SoCal you can, and your plant gets into the long days period, you may never get a head or get a tiny head that turns into a long single flower stem. So cauliflower is an easier crop in the north than in the south. Johnny’s tips us that cooler temperatures during head development also lead to better flavor. In SoCal, optimum shortening cooler days allows early fall planting. Caulis take 50 to 100 days, depending on variety. Carefully pick your days to maturity variety to fit the window you will use or prefer, or wait until the right time to plant!

ONIONS are different, have both short and long day varieties! High Mowing Seeds explains that technically, by definition, ‘…all onions are long-day because they all require >12 hours of daylight to form a bulb. The distinguishing factors are as follows: short-day onions start forming bulbs with 11-12 hours of daylight. Long-day onions need 14-16 hours of daylight to start forming bulbs. Intermediate-day onions need between 12-14 hours of daylight for bulb formation. Thus, if you live in a location where the longest day length hovers around 14 hours but doesn’t get much longer, long-day onions will not perform as well as short-day or intermediate-day onions.’ If your day length is longer, more Northern gardeners will plant only long day varieties, the onions that like long days! They have shorter summers but longer hot days. It’s quite different than Honolulu at 21° N, their longest is 13h 25m! In Honolulu it will be short day varieties only.

Cornell University specifics: In the north, choose long-day varieties which need about 14 hours of light to form bulbs. Short-day varieties, such as the famous Vidalia onions, grow best in the South.

Spring-sown early varieties can be harvested just 60 to 80 days after planting. Storage varieties require 90 to 110 days to mature from direct seeding, and come in yellow, white and purple varieties. Sweet or milder varieties do not store well, and should be eaten soon after harvest. See more details and their varieties list for Cornell in New York at latitude 42N45, longest day lengths June/July 15 hours – long day onions for them!

Short Day Plants require 16 hours of uninterrupted night. No scouting around with your bright flashlight or turning the lights on for a peek!

Many spring and fall flowering plants are short day plants, including African marigolds, celosia, Christmas cactus, chrysanthemums, cosmos, Easter lilies, hibiscus, poinsettias and zinnia.

Crops: Rice, cotton, soybeans, green gram/mung bean, jowar/sorghum.

Studies show some plants that grow in northern climates need not only a specific photoperiod but also prolonged cold temperatures to stimulate flowering. This process, called vernalization, is required by cabbage, celery, magnolias and beets. Further significant info on vernalization at Michigan State U! Since we don’t want those particular veggies to flower, unless we want seeds, we don’t mind if they don’t! See also Cold Stratification for Some of Your Seeds to break seed dormancy.

Notice there are no short day standard veggies listed! It is always emphasized the veggies need 6-8 hours of full sun to produce not just flowers, but those fruits too! It takes additional energy to make fruits! What is important is when and where to plant those long day veggies!!!

Long Day Plants need more than 12 hours of light, are stimulated by a flash of light at night! They need the summer pollinators, birds and bees.

Vegetables: Beets, carrots, chard, dandelions, lettuce, radish, tuber formation in potatoes, spinach, sugar beets, turnips.

Grains: Barley, oats, wheat.

Summer blooming flowers: Asters, carnation, coneflowers, California poppies, fennel, irises, petunia, salvia, snapdragon, sunflower.

Day Neutral – flowering does not depend on day length

Amaranth, corn, cucumbers, kale, pea, tomatoes, some sunflowers and some strawberries. Brassicas, Brussels sprouts and cabbage. Geranium, impatiens, and begonia.

Explore further details of category designations at UMass Extension

If you live away from the equator, you have long and short days. Let’s say you are planting humble turnips, a long day bulb plant. In the northern hemisphere you plant in spring, say in May, set to wait your 55 days to maturity. But as the good weather days get longer, and you cross into the short but hot days at Summer Solstice, thinking it’s time to reproduce, it bolts, any turnips you get are likely woody! If you are a seed company, you are happy to get seeds quickly, you collect the seeds. As a gardener growing for food, plant instead in mid August when days are getting shorter and the hottest days have likely passed. You get turnip bulbs because as the days get shorter, it’s not time to reproduce! In SoCal you could wait a tad longer…

In general, root crops love cool weather fall/winter planting when the energy goes more into the ground. The soil stays more moist, the roots are cool. Carrots grow long and develop strong sweet flavor. With beets you get great greens too. Grow parsnips and long winter radish – Daikon, and long cylindra beets.

You can see how horticulturists, farmers and home gardeners can tinker with the timetable. For example, OSU extension horticulturist Ann Marie VanDerZanden says ‘You can bring a long-day plant into bud formation and eventual bloom early before our day lengths surpass 12 hours. Put the plant under grow lights for a few hours a day beyond natural day length for a few weeks. Adding supplemental day length to stimulate early blooming is a common practice in the nursery and fresh flower industry, especially this time of year, for Valentine’s Day and Easter flowers.’

Santa Barbara CA is at 34N25 latitude. June and July days get up to 14.5 hours of sunlight. Table of hours per Latitude

Photoperiodism is crucial to farmers, greenhouse growers and us home style urban veggie growers! There are plenty more details about it, sub categories, ongoing experiments, scholarly studies. If you need that info, check online at Wiki, research sites, universities, progressive seed houses like Johnny’s that grow seeds and do trials and research for farmers.

As Kathy Wolfe writes, ‘There are so many variables to keep track of when growing vegetables: weather-related factors like temperature and moisture; differences in day length at different latitudes; light requirements of different vegetables and even different varietals of the same vegetable.’ Take notes, keep records, keep links that are helpful references, stay up on the latest varieties available. Many of the plants we grow today are the result of successful breeding. In recent times, heat and drought tolerant hybrids from Israel have become especially important and become standards in the US. See Einat Paz-Frankel’s, NoCamels Israeli Innovation News post! The renowned Professor Elwyn M. Meader developed the Royalty Purple Pod Bean due to his wife’s suggestion that it would be easier to pick beans if the pod color differed from the vine color. Delightfully dear.

This is Gurney’s® Blue Ribbon Hybrid Broccoli! This fantastic variety took the blue ribbon in our 2014 trials for its large, healthy plants that produce giant green-blue heads. It continued to produce huge side shoots throughout the season. Early harvest and sweet, non-bitter flavor with buttery-tender texture  from season’s start to finish. 52 DAYS! Photo by Jen Nova/Gardens Alive!

Buying the right seeds, planting at the best time at your location brings plentiful results and great happiness!

As one gardener says, ‘It’s the little changes that make the largest changes!’

Updated 11.27.22

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

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

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February 2021 ~ Winter Harvests, Soil, Planning Your Spring Garden!

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

If you went to a Seed Swap, have gotten your seeds from the catalog or nursery, you are likely itching for the right temps to plant!

Planning now is important because not all spring/summer plants are installed at the same time. Planting in the right places now makes a difference. Companions and biodiversity are key. It’s still chill, but in Santa Barbara we are now beyond the last average frost date! YAY! Bold Souls will be planting Zucchini, cool tolerant tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and corn! They can be started now from seed, in the ground. Make sequential plantings in case of failures. March is a little warmer and early variety plants get a better start. April is most everything – cucumber, pepper, squash, beans, more tomatoes, watermelon. May is the true heat lovers, cantaloupe, okra (June may be better yet), eggplant. Some gardeners wait to plant tomatoes until May and June to avoid the more moist soil fungi of earlier months. I hold that space by planting something temporary there in March. In long summer areas June is especially good for okra, eggplant and long beans!

Summer garden planning tips emphasize needing less water! 

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

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

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

• Cukes & Beans! Plan to put cucumbers up on trellises to save space, keep them disease and pest free, clean, and so they ripen evenly all the way around. Co-plant with beans! Beans above, cukes below. If you will be wanting a lot of each, plant them on separate trellises! Japanese Long cukes give a generous supply per water used, need a lot of space! Natsu Fushinari have exceptional powdery mildew resistance, especially in high heat!

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

• Leave a winter broccoli or two for summer salad side shoots. Mulch deeply under your brocs right now! We want to keep these cool loving plants cool. If you don’t have enough trellis space, plant cukes with your brocs! Broccoli helps repel cucumber beetles, so push the mulch back on the sunny side, make your special cucumber planting mound/basin and plant cucumbers underneath those brocs! Besides keeping the soil cool, the mulch keeps the cukes off the soil, clean and insect free above the bug zone!
• Leave a couple of winter kale to provide over summer greens. Heat tolerant 1000 Headed Kale is a prolific choice that harbors less aphids on its FLAT leaves. Plant lettuces on the sunny side under your brocs and kale.
• Eggplant likes it hot and moist! Radishes with eggplants and cucumbers. Radishes are a trap plant for flea beetles. If your area is a little cool and short seasoned, plant the long skinny Ichiban Japanese eggies rather than the bulbous Black Beauties. Ichiban’s are prolific and quite tasty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pests!

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

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

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

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

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

Diseases – Choose Resistant/Tolerant Varieties

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

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

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

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

Watering & Weeding

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

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

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

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

Happy February Gardening and the very beginning of spring planting!

Updated annually

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January 2021 images images from Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA! Almost always there are surprises and this time is no different!

Check out the entire February 2021 Newsletter!

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

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

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Delicious December ~ Winter’s June 2020! Harvests, Maintenance, Planning & Getting Seeds!

A misty morning at the garden….

We in SoCal are so fortunate that we can plant heartily in ‘Winter!’ Brassicas and Peas are the main story. What I call the ‘littles’ are the understory! Lettuces, root crops like beets, parsnips, turnips, Daikon radish. Smellies like onions and garlic, cilantro and arugula, and herbs like Rosemary and others, protect your garden from certain pests, and make your garden oh so fragrant and your meals so tasty!

If you already have these going, plant your last rounds now so waiting for their harvest doesn’t interfere with earliest spring plantings.

Well, there are several important events in December, LOL.

1. First is being sure everyone who knows you, knows what is on your holiday garden wish list!
2. Plan your spring garden, get catalogs, and order seeds NOW – for the entire year to come!
3. Maintain your garden, keep up with SoCal winter harvesting, enjoy your bounty, try some new recipes!
4. If you wish, plant your last round of winter plants, succession planting – know that if they come in late they may interfere with earliest spring planting space. Place them carefully so tall early spring plants can be installed on time. Or leave those spots open. ‘Open’ might mean just putting some lettuces there.

Harvest Brassicas of all sorts! The big ones, broccoli, cauliflower and if you live in a good chill area Brussels sprouts, have grown big enough now and your earliest varieties are producing handsomely. Harvest your brocs and caulies while the heads are still tight. If you miss that, harvest asap, even the flowers and flower stalks are edible! After you take the main broccoli head, let your plant continue to grow so it will produce smaller side shoots. Some varieties produce large 3 to 4″ mini brocs and later, smaller salad size ones right on through summer! Cauliflowers are a onetime harvest though you can keep eating the greens. To replace them, you might choose to pop in some beautiful chard, a potato patch, or quick growing mini cabbages in the large open spots that become available. Some cabbages, especially the mini and early varieties, are now headed tightly and ready to eat – slaw, steamed, dropped into soups and cold weather stews. You can still replant them with mini cabbies if you love them!

Deliciously fresh and nutritious winter heading lettuces, kale, celery, bok choy, cilantro, arugula and all manner of cut and come agains are in! Table onions scallions, chives and leeks can be snipped or cut off about 2″ above the ground and let to grow back 3 to 4 times! Do the same but at about 3″ with cilantro and arugula. Let some of your cilantro and arugula grow out for flowers to bring the bees, make seeds for the birds and for you to plant more! The simplest way is to scatter some of the seeds where they are needed and let them come up at will!

Winter brings a lot of tasty Root crops. Winter Cylindra Beets are colorful, and have cut and come again leaves too! Long winter radishes like Daikons are spicy! Carrots are splendid to eat at the garden, share with your kids, pup, bunnies, shred into salads, add to winter soups, stews and stir frys. Slice/chop/stick and freeze for later! Grow some Parsnips too! Turnips have so unique a flavor you might want to eat them separately to just enjoy that flavor.

Harvest peas when they get to the size you want them, and be prompt with that harvesting to keep them coming! Plant more rounds if you love peas!

MAINTAINING

Sidedressing is like snacking. Some of your heavy leaf producers and big bodied Brassicas, may need a feeding now and again or just when they start to fruit. If they slow down, or just don’t look perky, slip them a liquid feed out to their dripline, or cultivate in a wee bit of blood meal. Get your long spouted watering can nozzle under those low cabbage leaves. Lettuces love manures. Compost and manure teas, fish emulsion (when there are no digging predators), powdered box ferts, are all good. Winter feeds need to be easy for your plant to take up. Use ½ the strength of your summer feedings. Slow release is a wise consideration. An excellent way to get feeds to the roots is to push in a spade fork no more than 6″ deep. Push it in vertically (so as not to break the main tap roots), wiggle it back and forth just a bit, remove the fork, pour your foods into the holes, close ’em back up. Soil organisms will get right to work, your plant will stay healthy and be quite productive! Worm castings, though not food, work wonders with immunity, soil conditioning and help germination! Mix some in with your liquid feeds you pour around your plant.

The exceptions are carrots, peas and favas. Carrots get hairy and will fork with too much food! Over watering or uneven watering makes them split and misshapen. Your peas and favas are busy gathering Nitrogen from the air, feeding themselves. If they yellow or look peaked, give them a bit, just a sprinkle or two, of blood meal for quick uptake.

A mini task is to keep covering the shoulders of carrots, beets, radishes, parsnips and turnips. They substantially push right up above ground as they grow. Planting their seeds deeper doesn’t compensate. It’s the nature of the veggie! Never hurts to put a handy little pile of extra soil near where you plant them, or plant them in a low sloped trench. When they need covering, pull the sides of the trench down to cover them. Uncovered shoulders look dry, are tough, sometimes bitter, and need peeling before cooking. Uncovered carrot shoulders don’t ripen but stay green, just like exposed parts of potatoes turn green. The green on potatoes is slightly poisonous, not enough to do harm, but it doesn’t look good.

Watering is important even in cool weather. Also, some plants simply like being moist ie chard, lettuce and short rooted peas, beets. No swimming, just moist. Finger check your soil after rains to see if your soil is moist at least 2″ deep. Sometimes it is rain moistened only 1/4″ deep, needs more water! Also, be careful of too much water, that makes for an aphid tasty soft plant. Watch WEATHER reports in case of freezes, heavy winds, rain. Before weather, stake and tie plants that need support. After strong winds check everybody right away to see if any plants need help. See more about rainy days!

Santa Barbara’s average First Frost (fall) date AT THE AIRPORT is December 19, Last Frost (spring) date is (was?) January 22. That can vary from the coastal areas to the foothills, and our climate is changing generally to warmer, so these dates may not be viable guides much longer, if even now. And remember, these are average dates! See great tips – Protect Your Veggies from Freezing

Except for erosion control, in winter, we pull mulch back to let the soil warm up during the short winter days. The only areas we mulch are around lettuces and chard to keep mud splash off the leaves. Also, it’s good to remove pest habitat, let the soil dry a bit between rains to kill off wilts fungi. Bag up, or pile and cover, clean uninfested summer straw, mulches, to use as compost pile layers during winter. Do not keep straw from areas where there have been infestations.

Pests & Diseases, Prevention and removal! Keep an eye out for pests and diseases and take quick action! 

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

Don’t lose your crops to birds! There is less food for them in winter, and, often, little rain, so they resort to eating tender juicy veggie leaves. Buy pre made covers, or get clever and cover seeded rows with DIY small openings wire tunnels or a patch cover bent that has sides bent to the ground to keep birds from pecking at little leaves or from plucking tiny seedlings right out of the ground! You can also use small plastic bottle sections to make mini sleeves that birds won’t go down into. Or for baby lettuces, make large plastic bottle cloches, though wire covers let more light in and water through! Bird netting is inexpensive, tears easily, but is good to stretch over peas on a trellis. See more about bird, animal and insect above ground protection covers!

A common pest of Brassicas is the larvae of the pretty little Cabbage White Butterfly, Pieris rapae. The green Cabbage Worm, caterpillar, chews large, irregular holes in the leaves. They blend so well you can easily miss seeing them on the undersides of leaves. Per Natural Planet: ‘They lay up to 200 tiny yellow eggs that hatch in 7 or more days. The larvae feed heavily for 15 or more days. There are 3 to 5 overlapping generations each year, as many as 8 in warmer areas. They bore into the center of cabbage heads contaminating them with its fecal pellets. The dark-green pellets can also be found in the crook of leaves near the stem.’ See here for some terrific natural ideas on what to do!

Chard and beets get Leafminers. Where they have eaten looks terrible but the good part of the leaves is perfectly safe to eat. Plant chard so mature leaves don’t touch, or best of all, in different places around your garden, not in rows or clusters. Thin your plants so they have room. Harvest leaves that might touch first. Remove infested leaves immediately to reduce spread! Beets are not a permanent crop, so they are planted closely. Simply harvest them at their leaves’ prime – ahead of the Leafminers.

A typical disease is Powdery mildew. Plant leaving plenty of space for air circulation, water early in the day so they dry before evening. For mildew apply your baking soda mix. The best combo is 1 regular Aspirin, a 1/4 cup nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a teaspoon liquid dish soap per gallon/watering can. Before sunrise drench under and upper sides of the foliage of young plants to get them off to a great start! It takes only an hour for the mix to be absorbed! Do this the same or next day if transplanting. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains. Prevention is so much better than after mildew has set in. See Aspirin Solution. Hose away aphids and whiteflies, mildew. Remove yellowing Brassica leaves. Yellow attracts whiteflies. In general, plant further apart for air circulation, water and feed just a little less to let those leaves harden up a bit. Soft fat leaves are an invitation to aphids and mildew!

Do not compost diseased or infested leaves or plants. Don’t put them in green waste. Put them in the trash. Wash your hands and clippers before you go to other plants.

Windy days are prime time to gather leaves to add to compost or process for Leaf Mold, Mulch or Compost! Leaf Mold is low in nutrients, but makes a superb soil improver, conditioner for vegetable and flower beds. Leaf mulch is free for the making! Leaf Compost processes faster when made the right way! See more!

PLANT JUDICIOUSLY NOW

Per square foot, fast growing cut-and-come-again Lettuce, Chard and Kale are by far the top winter producers! Plant more big plants like brocs and cauliflower, but remember, with cooler weather, they will grow more slowly. That may interfere with early spring plantings in March. Allow enough time to let added compost, manures, worm castings and Sphagnum peat moss (increases water holding capacity) become part of the soil organism community. If you do plant more now, better to get transplants if you can, and shave six weeks of their needed growing time to maturity. Select faster maturing varieties now.

As lettuces tire, and other plants like carrots and beets are removed, add more of them and any ‘littles’ you love on the sunny side and between the big plants. If the littles need more sun, remove large lower leaves of the big plants. Mild tasting littles include bok choy, kohlrabi, garden purslane, arugula, mizuna, watercress, young parsnips and turnips, Daikon winter radishes, and Napa cabbage. For a little more spice, go for those dark green kales, mustard, rutabaga and turnip greens! Try some culinary dandelions for super nutrition! These are plants that will take you through February, March and leave enough time to add compost and to let sit until major spring planting begins in April.

Believe me, you are going to get spring planting fever along about March, so plan ahead for it!!! Start seeds indoors the first three weeks of January for early March plantings! Choose varieties that are cold tolerant and are early maturers for the soonest table eats!

If you have enough seeds, over planting is fair game! Thin your beets, carrots, chard, kale, mustard, turnips. Take out the smaller, weaker plants. They are great in your salads along with small tender Brassica leaves. Plant patches of Mizuna and mow it!

Remember your winter companion planting tips:

1. Carrots enhance peas, onion family stunts peas
2. Carrots thrive when Cilantro, Chamomile (a spring/summer plant), Marigold are planted with them.
3. Onions, leeks and chives help repel the carrot root fly. But remember you can’t put the onion family near peas!
4. Lettuces repel cabbage white butterflies. Plant them generously among your Brassicas.
5. Cilantro enhances Brassicas – broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale and repels aphids on them!

Besides beautiful bareroot roses, decide now where you will be buying any January bareroot veggies you want! Consider: grape vines; artichokes; short-day (sweet) globe onions; strawberries; cane berries such as raspberries (get low-chill types); low-chill blueberries; and rhubarb (be cautious where you plant it, it can be poisonous to humans – children, dogs and chickens), asparagus, and horseradish. Artichoke pups need 3’ to 4’ space, 6′ to 8′ is more a reality! They are hefty growers and live 10 years! If you keep them watered, and there is enough space, they are a great street strip survivor plant!

SPRING PREPS

Seeds for Spring & Summer planting! Perfect time to sit with seed catalogs, do online research. Get your summer garden layout in mind. First choose what is good for your excellent health! Next might be how much plant you get per square foot if you have limited space and want to feed several people. When we are in drought conditions, water could be a strong consideration ~ choose heat and drought tolerant varieties. Always look for disease and pest resistance. Get some early varieties, for earliest harvests along with later maturing varieties for a continuous table supply. Earlier variety fruits are generally smaller, but what a treat! Cherry tomatoes come in first. Place your order for the entire year, while seeds are still available.

One of the more unusual spring preps is Cold Stratification for Some of Your Seeds! Seed packs don’t tell you the seeds need it, so you have to know on your own. In nature, as seeds fall to the ground, they overwinter there, sometimes under the snow! Yet they come up perfectly when conditions are right! You can either let that happen, they are the ones we refer to as ‘self seeding’ plants, or put them in the fridge/freezer. Each plant that needs it has specific differences. Some need literally months of chill, others a short time.

Sadly, due to the virus,the Santa Barbara’s 13th Annual Seed Swap is not appearing to be happening in Jan 2021. But do get your seeds ready to share, and prepare your ‘shopping’ list just in case! Remember, a Seed Swap is a random affair. Get your standby favorites from those reliable catalogs. Use Seed Swaps as fun backup source, new things to try, and most importantly, for local seeds. The last Saturday of January every year is National Seed Swap Day! Look in your area for an event, and if you don’t find one, collaborate with your local garden clubs or permaculture group to get one going if you have an appropriate location for safe distancing! If your climate is warm enough, holding it outdoors may work.

For help making your seed decisions see:

• Choosing Seeds: Catalogs to Seed Swaps! I hope you fall asleep with your catalogs and dream of a glorious garden!
• Smart Design for Your Spring & Summer Garden, Seed Selection!
• See also some of the bigger long term Permaculture choices for planning and designing your garden.
• Super SoCal Fall, Winter Veggies Varieties, Smart Companion Plantings!
• 4 Lovely Companion Flowers and What They Do!
• Delicious choices to consider:  Perennial  Heat & Drought Tolerant – per Southern Exposure ~

Summer Lettuce Varieties: In summer you want a stronger lettuce, heat tolerant & slow bolting, tip burn resistance! Lettuce Leaf Red Sails is a beauty. Jericho Romaine from Israel has become the classic summer romaine for warm regions. Sierra, Nevada. Parris Island is slow bolting. Green Towers Romaine tolerates moderate summer heat and has some resistance to tip burn and bolting. Green Star is phenomenal! Super productive, tolerance to hot weather, bolting, and tipburn, so it can be grown all season. High resistance to downy mildew. Black Seeded Simpson. And there are more – try several!

Definitely start building compost for spring planting. You could plant green manure where you will grow heavy summer feeders like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, chilis, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and corn; hungry stalk vegetables like celery, fennel, rhubarb, and artichokes; or continually producing green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, or strawberries. Or plant it if you want a break! Just lay in some green manure seed mix – vetch, bell beans, Austrian peas and oats. In Santa Barbara area get the Harmony mix and inoculant at Island Seed & Feed. Let it grow two to three months to bloom stage. Chop down, chop up and let it lie on the surface about 2 weeks, keeping it moist. Add any amendments you want – additional manure, compost, and turn under. Let it sit two weeks to two months. Your choice. Let the herds of soil organisms do their work! I usually do about 3 weeks. OR, lay on as many layers of compost material as you can get for an up to 18″ deep area where you will be planting. Put in some surface feeding red wriggler worms. The BEST soil enhancer and you will have a tasty raised bed!

WINTER VEGGIES STORAGE

This is such a great post by Anthony Reyes at FarmScape Gardens, here is the link! Winter Vegetable Storage, Part 2

For veggies in your kitchen, here is the UCDavis Quick Guide to Fruits & Vegetables Storage:

Birds and Bees! Plant wildflowers seed now to take advantage of winter rains for early spring flowers! Germination in cooler weather takes longer, so don’t let the bed dry out between rains. If you have space, make habitat for beneficial insects, birds and animals too! Start building now to put your solitary bee home up for wild bees in March or early April! If you already have one, clean it, and if you have an owl house, now is the time to clean it out too. Depending on where you live they are usually empty from Halloween until early December! Nesting site selection starts in January, so build yours and get it up as soon as you can!

Wonderful Gardener Style Holiday Gifts!

Please be generous with your time these holidays. Rather than just serving food, maybe show someone how to grow veggies, give them seeds with instructions, give them and the kids a tour of your garden – eat carrots together!

Layer up, enjoy these crisp days. Let the wind clear your Spirit, the rain cleanse and soften your Soul.

Happy Gardening and Happy Winter Solstice!

Updated Annually

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November images images from Rancheria Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA! Almost always there are surprises and this time is no different!

Check out the entire December Newsletter!

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

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

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March 2020 Planting, Thoughtful Garden Design & Perfect Veggie Choices!

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

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

MARCH through June Planting Timing  

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

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

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

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

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

Outdoors sow or transplant beets, carrots, celery, chard, herbs, Jerusalem artichokes, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuces, green onions, bulb onion seed and sets (be sure to get summer maturing varieties), parsley, peas, peanuts (they do grow here!), potatoes, radishes, shallots, spinach, strawberries, and turnips. Transplant broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, and kohlrabi seedlings. Time for heat tolerant, bolt and tipburn resistant lettuces of all kinds! The fabulous Green Star, Sierra, Nevada, Jericho, Black Seeded Simpson are some. Tips for super Successful Transplanting!

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

PLANT PLANTS THAT REPEL PESTS, WARD OFF DISEASE IN ADVANCE SO THEY WILL BE UP AND WORKING WHEN YOUR SEEDLINGS COME UP OR YOU INSTALL YOUR TRANSPLANTS! Those are radish, cilantro, potatoes, Borage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lower plants like eggplant, like a lot of heat. Put them on the sunny side, slightly in front of every other slightly taller plant. Leave a couple kale that will get taller. But, if they are leafless stalks with pom pom tops, they aren’t going to give any shade, so they could be left anywhere actually. Since they are a winter plant, mulch them deeply or plant lettuces or leafy plants around their base as a living mulch and keep the soil there moist and cooler, and feed them. Or grow the heat tolerant flat leaf kale like Thousand Headed Kale! It has many growing points instead of just one and self mulches!

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

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

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

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

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

Finish your Summer Gardening preparations!

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

Complete your Soil Prep! 

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

Pests Reminders and Home Remedies!

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

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

Do not compost diseased or infested leaves or plants.

Watering & Weeding Wind and sun dry soil quickly and short rooted plants like peas, or seedlings, need to be kept evenly moist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updated annually

 

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Please enjoy these February images at Santa Barbara CA’s Rancheria Community Garden! Soil, tiny Sprouts, magnificent Sage, to gorgeous Snapdragons and a surprise encounter with a Mockingbird, we had a fabulous February!

Check out the entire March 2020 Newsletter!

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

---

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

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

 

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February 2020 ~ Harvests, Soil Preps, Happy First Spring Plantings!

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

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

Planning now is important because not all spring/summer plants are installed at the same time. Planting in the right places now makes a difference. It’s still chill, but in Santa Barbara we are now beyond the last average frost date! YAY! Bold Souls will be planting Zucchini, cool tolerant tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and corn! They can be started now from seed, in the ground. March is a little warmer and early variety plants get a better start. April is most everything – cucumber, pepper, squash, beans, more tomatoes, watermelon. May is the true heat lovers, cantaloupe, okra (June may be better yet), eggplant. Some gardeners wait to plant tomatoes until May and June to avoid the more moist soil fungi of earlier months. I hold that space by planting something temporary there in March. In long summer areas June is especially good for okra, eggplant and long beans!

Summer garden planning tips emphasizing needing less water! Companions!

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

• If you are not going to be canning, indeterminate tomatoes are the excellent choice! These are the vining tomatoes that produce all summer! This saves time and water because determinate, bush tomatoes produce quickly, all at once – great for canning, then you have to replant and wait for more production. However, determinate toms do produce sooner, so for earlier table production, plant them to hold you until your indeterminates are producing. For earliest treats, plant cherry tomatoes! Yum! Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of Dandelions! The beautiful herb Borage repels Tomato Hornworms!
• Choose more prolific plants and varieties of them so you get more production for less water.
• Plant tall plants to the North unless you anticipate a scorching summer. If you think it will be HOT, plant tall to the west to shade shorter plants, keep your soil cooler, use less water.
• Cukes & Beans! Plan to put cucumbers up on trellises to keep them disease and pest free, are clean, and so they ripen evenly all the way around. Co-plant with beans! Beans above, cukes below. If you will be wanting a lot of each, plant them on separate trellises! Japanese Long cukes give a generous supply per water used! Suyos are a great choice – give them plenty of room.
• Next, intermingle mid height plants, bush beans, determinate tomatoes, tall peppers like Big Jim Anaheim or Poblanos, Zucchini! Potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs. Plant Radish ahead of cukes & zukes to repel cucumber beetles. Eat a few radishes, but let several grow up by and through the plants you are protecting. Let them bloom for pollinators and produce seed pods for your next crops.
• Leave a winter broccoli or two for summer salad side shoots. Mulch deeply under your brocs right now! We want to keep these cool loving plants cool. If you don’t have enough trellis space, plant cukes under your brocs! Broccoli helps repel cucumber beetles, so push the mulch back on the sunny side, make your special cucumber planting mound/basin and plant cucumbers underneath those brocs! Besides keeping the soil cool, the mulch keeps the cukes off the soil, clean and insect free above the bug zone!
• Leave a couple of winter kale to provide over summer greens. Heat tolerant 1000 Headed Kale is a prolific choice that harbors less aphids on its FLAT leaves. Plant lettuces on the sunny side under your brocs and kale.
• Eggplant likes it hot! Plant them where they will be sheltered from prevailing winds. Radishes with eggplants and cucumbers. Radishes are a trap plant for flea beetles. If your area is a little cool, plant the long skinny Ichiban Japanese eggies rather than the bulbous Black Beauties. Ichiban’s are prolific and quite tasty.
• Lowest are the ‘littles’ or fillers! Being mindful of companions, scatter beets and carrots, lettuce, radish, here and there among, alongside, under larger plants on their sunny sides. Bunch onions away from beans. Some littles will be done before the bigger plants leaf out. For those still growing, remove or harvest lower leaves of the big plant when they start shading the littles. There isn’t really a need to allot separate space for littles except strawberries! They need full sun and a separate patch with more acidic soil to keep them healthy and be prolific producers!
• If you love cabbages, plant a few more, but they take up a fair footprint for what they produce and they take a long time to do it. In spring and summer choose quick maturing mini varieties.
• SEED SAVING SPACE! Leave room for some arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery to go to flower to bring bees and beneficial insects! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next plantings. Carrots love being with cilantro, marigold and chamomile. Chamomile is a true super plant! It improves the flavor of any neighboring herb, the flowers make a lovely scent, the tea is sweet, and it is called the Plant Doctor – heals nearby plants!
• Pumpkin, melon, winter squash vines require some thoughtfulness. Pumpkin and winter squash vine leaves get as huge as healthy zucchini leaves, easily a foot wide! Mini melons have dainty 2″ wide little leaves, can be trellised, but they may do better on bare hot ground. Comparatively, it’s cool up on those trellises. A healthy winter squash vine can easily be 3′ to 4′ wide, 30′ long plus side vines, and produce a major supply of squash! You can use them as a border, as a backdrop along a fence line. In SoCal, unless you are a squash lover, or won’t be gardening in winter, there is question as to why you would grow winter squash at all. Greens of all kinds grow prolifically here all winter long, giving a fresh and beautiful supply of Vitamin A for less calories and no storage space!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pests!

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

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

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

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

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

Diseases

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

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

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

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

Watering & Weeding

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

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

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

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

Happy February Gardening and the very beginning of spring planting!

Updated annually 

 

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

Check out the entire January 2020 Newsletter!

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

---

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

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

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

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Happy New Year 2020! Winter Harvests, Soil, Planning Your Spring Garden!

Elegant, nutritious Nero di Toscana Lacinato Kale aka Tuscan, Black or Dinosaur. 

Delicious winter garden harvests continue! You may not feel like eating as many salads in this cooler time, but veggie soups and stews are super nutritious and great for sharing!

Keep an eye on weather reports! We are still in the frost – freeze time in Santa Barbara until the last average frost date January 22 – measured at the airport. Have old sheets, light blankets, old towels handy. If a freeze is predicted, for small plants, like tender lettuces, just lay tomato cages on their sides and put your coverings over them. Secure coverings well so wind doesn’t blow them around and damage your plants or leave them uncovered. Remove them when the sun comes out! No cooking your plants before their time! Dates vary from the coastal areas to the foothills, and our climate is changing generally to warmer, so these dates may not be viable guides much longer, if even now. Find out the frost dates for your Zip Code! See the details – Protect Your Veggies from Freezing!

Be sure your caged, trellised and tall plants are secure before and after the winds of rains. Afterwards, stake any plants that have toppled, check your trellised plants, restore berms. Harvest what can’t be saved.

After rains there are weeds! It’s time for that Hula hoe! Weed, weed, weed! Do it before the roots get bigger and you lose your soil when you pull them out. Weed before taproots get deep and hard to remove. Get those clover roots out all the way down and before grass makes its frilly little seed heads. FIRST, remove any weed that is flowering, soon to make seeds! Anything that is not seeding, healthy and not pest infested, may be cold composted, or you can use them as mulch where there is bare ground not in your garden.

Time to check beds and berms! Install trenches to capture rainwater. Mulch to prevent erosion and soil splash on leafy greens. Add soil on carrot, turnip and beet shoulders and exposed potato bodies. See Rainy Day Tactics for Spectacular Veggies! After a rain, do the finger-in-the-soil check to be sure your plants are getting enough water. A light rain may not be nearly enough…

Once the weeds are out, if the area is clear, you have choices to make. Plant very last rounds of favorite winter plants or start prepping soil for spring planting!

January Plantings  If you love your winter crops, and aren’t necessarily in a rush to do spring/summer, amend your soil immediately and plant one more round, from transplants if you can get them or the starts you have begun on your own, seeds if you must. See December for tips on what to plant. In cooler January weather, plantings will start slowly, but they will mature faster than usual as days get longer. Most January plantings will be coming in March, April. That’s still in good time for soil preps in April for April/May plantings. In April/May there is less fungi in the soil, so plants that are fungi susceptible get a better start – mainly that would be wilt susceptible tomatoes.

Plant MORE of these delicious morsels now! Arugula, beets, brocs, Brussels sprouts if you get winter chill (there are some new purple ones on the market!!!), bunch onions, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, chard, culinary dandelions, garden purslane, kale, kohlrabi, head and leaf lettuces, Mesclun, parsnips, peas, potatoes, radishes – especially daikons, and turnips! Scatter your Breadseed Poppy seeds for gorgeous April, May blooms! Select a place to plant a bee bringing Borage right in the center of a circle of plants so it can serve them all! Give it plenty of room and place it so it won’t shade out shorter spring plants you will be growing.

If you would like some tender little snacking carrots, quick growers to show the kids, or minis for your pup, try early Adelaides from Johnny’s Selected Seeds! They say ‘True baby carrots. Unlike most “baby carrots,” which are harvested at an immature stage before properly filling out, Adelaide is a true baby, meaning it has an early maturity and forms a blunt root tip at 3–4″ long.’ Only 50 days! See all about Carrots!

For us SoCal gardeners, besides beautiful bareroot roses, this month is bareroot veggies time! They don’t have soil on their roots, so plant immediately or keep them moist! Grape vines; artichokes; short-day (sweet) globe onions; strawberries; cane berries such as raspberries (get low-chill types); low-chill blueberries; and rhubarb, asparagus, and horseradish. Bare root planting is strictly a JANUARY thing. February is too late. Many bareroot veggies are highly sought after, so keep checking their arrival date, then when they arrive, drop everything and go get them!

Continue to make the most of winter companion planting! Carrots enhance peas, onion family stunts peas. Cilantro enhances Brassicas and repels aphids on them! Lettuce repels Cabbage moths. Onions, leeks and chives help repel the carrot root fly. Carrots thrive when Cilantro, Chamomile, Marigold are planted with them. Companion planting is also a size strategy. Keep planting smaller plants, especially lettuce, on the sunny under sides of Brassicas! Take off a couple lower leaves to let more sunlight in. Under Brassicas, plant lettuce from transplants, not seeds, since Brassicas are allelopathic, makes biochemicals that inhibit small seeds like lettuce from germinating.

Planting summer crops early isn’t always a gain. Even if the plant lives, some won’t produce fruit until they have enough hours of sun, and for some, warmth including day/night and/or ground temps. And some plants set in too early will never produce. That waiting time for enough sun, enough warmth, interrupts the plant’s natural cycle and the production window is lost. If you take that chance and it doesn’t work, pull and replant. No amount of waiting will do the job.

Peppers are a classic example. For some gardeners peppers take forever…………. For others the standard couple of weeks and seeds are seedlings! If you have experience, you probably know which it is for you. A lot of Latinos start their peppers in January and let them grow slowly until April. If you plant from transplants, I would not try for an early start. Peppers just don’t like cold feet. Whenever you start, plant two rounds, two to three weeks apart. That way you have a better chance of hitting the magic window! Soil Temps are critical for root function. Peppers need 60 degrees + for happiness. A gardeners’ soil thermometer is an inexpensive handy little tool to own.

You can use area that becomes open for temporary plants. Put in quickie leaf crops like lettuces, arugula, bok choy, spinach, chard, kale, until it’s the right time to plant heat lovers. These quickie plants can be removed at any time and you still shall have had lush harvests. Hardly anyone can resist planting early tomatoes, February, March! Another strategy is plant your leafies to one side, leaving room to plant your toms where the toms would be planted if the leafy plants weren’t there. Plant tomatoes on the sunny sides of the leafies so the baby transplants/seedlings, get plenty of sun for a good start! When your big plants get big enough, remove lower leaves that shade your leafies. That way you have table food and your heart is happy too! Depending on how big your open area is, you can also plant your leafies in zig zags then add the permanent heat lovers inside the ‘V’ areas. As soon as possible plant companion plants for the heat lovers you will be growing in each area.

Choose early cold tolerant tomato 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!

Summer Garden Design is important right now! You can do diagrams on paper or just give it a good think to see if there are any changes this year, and carry it in your head. That layout is what you need to make your seed list! Seeds from catalogs, seeds from the Santa Barbara Jan 26 Seed Swap! The Seed Swap is free, fun and random, a good way to try plants you might have never considered, and they are adapted to your area! Catalogs give you the best selection and of plants your nursery doesn’t carry or isn’t able to get. Check for drought and heat tolerant varieties or look in dry or humid southern states that match your eco niche or world areas that have heat tolerant desert low-water-needs plants and order up! The seeds of these types may need to be planted deeper and earlier than more local plants for moisture they need. They may mature earlier. Be prepared to do second plantings if needed and use a little water. See Choosing Seeds: Catalogs to Seed Swaps! Smart Design for Your Spring & Summer Garden, Seed Selection! See also some of the bigger long term choices planning and designing your garden.

Before you opt out of planting tomatoes and/or cucumbers due to Fusarium and Verticillium wilts, see more wilt prevention tips! See also Wilts & Cucumber Beetles, Tomatoes & Cukes! for special planting details for successful results!

Later January is time to sow seeds indoors for mid to late March early plantings. If you will be doing succession plantings, sow your seeds in succession, like every 2, 3, 4 weeks depending on which plant it is and how many you need. If those fail, it’s to the nursery you go for transplants! Avoid box stores that bring plants from elsewhere that may not be timely for your area, may be infested or sick. If you do buy there, check them carefully. This is very important in a community garden where pests and diseases can spread quickly. Select local nurseries that order conscientiously for local timing, that try to get quality plants for us. You may pay a tad more, but it is worth it not to lose a plant or infest/infect others. Local people live here and they have your interests at heart since they want your repeat business. Also, they can answer your questions. Establish a good relationship. At the Farmers Market, check with local farmers to see what they plant when. Some feed stores are agriculturally inclined.

Check out Seed Soaking/Presprouting Tips & Ideas! If seeds and tending seedlings aren’t for you, wait and get transplants and pop them right in the ground per their right times! No fuss, no muss.

Prevention  A typical disease is Powdery mildew. Plant leaving plenty of space for air circulation. Apply your baking soda mix. Drench under and upper sides of the foliage of young plants to get them off to a great start! Do this the same or next day if transplanting. A super combo is 1 regular Aspirin dissolved, a 1/4 cup nonfat powdered milk, heaping tablespoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon liquid dish soap per gallon/watering can. Reapply every 10 days or so, and after significant rains. Prevention is so much better than after mildew has set in. See Aspirin Solution. See IPM

Standard Winter Garden Veggie Predators Keep a keen watch for pests and diseases and take quick action!

• Gophers Put in wire protective baskets or barriers, especially now while the soil is softer after the rains. If you see a fresh mound, trap immediately.
• Aphids  Watch for leaves unnaturally curled along the length of the leaf, particularly broccolis, cauliflowers, kale, cabbages. Squish or wash any or the colony away immediately, and keep doing it for a few days to catch the ones you missed. Check the new growth tiny leaves at center top. power spray to remove any aphids there. If that doesn’t work to your satisfaction, get in there with a spray bottle of your favorite mix. I use half and half water and alcohol plus wee bit of liquid dish soap as a surfactant. Remove hopelessly infested leaves. After that, water less and give it less food so plant leaves will be less tender and inviting.
• White flies  Flush away, especially under the leaves. They are attracted to yellow, so keep  those Brassica yellowing, yellowed leaves removed pronto. Again, a little less water and food. Gently and shallowly dig in an inch or so of worm castings in a ‘V’ shape from the stem out to the drip line. Disturb as few of the surface area feeder roots as possible.
• Leafminers  Keep watch on your chard and beet leaves. Pull away those blotchy sections the leafminers make; immediately remove whole leaves that are too funky for rescue. Harvest the bigger outer lower leaves more often to stay ahead of the miners. See Leafminers IPM
• Slugs, Snails BEFORE you put in seeds, transplants, sprinkle a bit of Sluggo type stuff around to keep snails and slugs from seriously damaging or disappearing tiny seedlings or transplants while they are small. Do it twice to kill off the generations. That keeps the creatures from mowing seedlings overnight, making you think they never came up! If you notice tiny children snails or slime trails, lay down another couple rounds.

If you need more robust soil, do something absolutely yummy with it! This is perfect timing to put in some green manure aka cover crop for April plantings. Depending on the type of plants you choose for your green manure, allow +/- 3.5 months for the process. If you want the earliest planting time for spring, plant ASAP! See Living Mulch! Put it where you will plant heavy summer feeders – tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, chilis, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and corn; hungry stalk vegetables like celery, fennel, rhubarb, and artichokes; or continually producing green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard. Or you can ‘rest’ an area by covering it with a good 6 to 18″ deep mulch/manure/straw/compost mix and any other amendments that will help the plants you will grow there! Keep it moist and it will flatten down, make a great low raised bed, in no time at all! Simply let the herds of soil organisms do their work over winter. That’s called sheet composting, sheet mulching or composting in place – 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. Come spring you will have rich nutritious soil for no work at all!

COMPOST always! Soil building is the single-most important thing you can do for your garden. Compost is easy to make, and if you make it, you know what’s in it, 100% organic! Added to your soil, made or purchased, it increases water holding capacity, is nutritious, soil organisms flourish, it helps with immunity, your soil lives and breathes! It feeds slowly, just perfectly! Make it HOT, Cold, or In place! Full sun is best, most active and quick! Dry is dead, so be sure it is always slightly moist.

Sidedressing Hardworking leaf producers and big bodied Brassicas, may need a feeding now. Heading is your cue to help them along. If they slow down, or just don’t look perky, slip them a liquid feed that quickly waters into the root zone. Get your nozzle under low cabbage leaves and feed/water out to the drip line. Lettuces love manures. Compost and manure teas, fish emulsion (when there are no digging predators like skunks), pretty powdered box ferts, are all good, easy for your plants to take up in cooler weather. Use ½ the strength of your summer feedings. Slow release alfalfa pellets are a wise consideration. Worm castings, though not food, work wonders! Also, be careful of ‘too much’ fertilizer, too much water, that makes for an aphid tasty soft plant. That said, another way to get goodness to the roots is push in a spade fork vertically about 6″ or less deep, wiggle it back and forth, remove the fork, pour your foods into the holes, close ’em back up. Soil organisms will get right to work, your plant will stay healthy and be quite productive!

Especially feed your cabbages, lightly, time to time, because they are making leaf after leaf, dense heads, working hard. I often see kales lose their perk. You would too if someone kept pulling your leaves off and never fed you. Feed them too, please, while feeding your cabbages.

It’s a New Year! Some of you will make serious gardening resolutions, others will take it as it comes, one day at a time as usual. But I do recommend you secure your seeds for the year ahead! Some are now less plentiful with droughts, fires and floods, GMO threats, new laws. Recently much needed seed banks, libraries have sprung up. We want to use our seeds with reverence and seed save our best as they adapt to different climate change conditions, assure their goodness for future generations. At Seed Swaps, take only what you need. If many people grow them, there will be more adapted to our localities. Before there were seed shops, seeds were often used as money. They are as precious today as they have always been, maybe even more so.

Happy New Year Gardening and Feasting!

Updated annually 

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

Check out the entire January Newsletter!

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

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

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

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

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Seasonal Soil Care Guide for Veggies!

In Warrenville, IL, Shawna Coronado transformed her front yard to edible landscaping!

Super Soil Makes all the Difference! Great soil grows healthy plant roots and powerful veggies! Here are important seasonal soil care tips…first let’s consider your land.

The Lay of your Land! The shape of your land has a lot to do with the condition of your soil. If you are on a slope, do a little terracing to preserve your precious topsoil from erosion. Use the water saving principles, Slow, Spread, Sink! In lower areas, berms, raised borders, are a simple way to keep your water where it is best used. The berms also allow airflow to go over an area rather than drying the soil there. See Zuni Waffle Gardening! So shape your space! Plant according to what your land can support. Put drought tolerant heat lover plants in drier hotter places. Put water needing veggies in partial shade, in lower water collecting areas, by a spigot. Plant tall heat lovers in the West so not so heat tolerant shorter plants can be shaded from the hottest afternoon sun. If they all like Sun, plant tall to the east and north.

SEASONS

Fall – Put Summer to Bed – Clean up! Remove debris, any infested habitat. Clear places where unwanted pests or diseases might overwinter. Remove mulch so the soil can warm up when the sun is low and there is less day length. In Southern areas, amend your soil for winter planting. See how to prep your soil for super winter growing! SoCal Fall/Winter Veggie Soil Tips for Delicious Returns!

Winter – In SoCal, feed 1/2 strength during cooler weather when uptake is slower. Raise Green Manures/Living Mulch, soil feeding cover crops to restore your soil. See also Living Mulch! Cultivate after rains! It’s an age old technique to aerate soil, let it dry out, kill off soil fungi. It is also called Dust Mulching. Simply cultivate about 2 or 3 inches deep. This disturbs the soil surface, interrupting the wicking of soil moisture from below to the surface and losing it to evaporation. See more at Rainy Day Tactics for Spectacular Veggies!

In SoCal End of Winter, Early Spring

Compost well. Compost has excellent water holding capacity and your seeds need to be kept moist for germination. Homemade compost especially thrives with living organisms. Worms are happy and make castings! Add other amendments you prefer at the same time.

Some plants need slightly acidic soil. When their soil is right, they fend off diseases better and produce like crazy. They like to be moist, so get the right compost, the kind for shade plants, and dig it in. For short rooted plants, shovel-depth deep is plenty.

Now, before you go compost crazy, in Nature, organic matter, our equivalent is compost, only makes up a small fraction of the soil (normally 5 to 10 percent), yet organic matter is absolutely essential. Veggies need a bit more because they are working hard growing fruits! There is various thinking about what the right amount of compost is to use in a veggie garden that is pumping out those veggies! Cornell University says use 3 inches over the surface worked into the top 3-6 inches of soil! Research shows ideal soil contains 5% organic matter by weight, 10% by volume. Like with a lot of gardening, more is not always better, nor necessary, and can even harm your plants!

Depending on what you are planting where, add well aged manure. Hard working leaf crops like lettuces love manure, so do peppers. Heavy feeders like large plants, indeterminate tomatoes, might like a little more. Just be careful not to add so much your crop goes to leaf and no fruits! If you do, there are remedies for that, but you lose production time when that happens. Peas and beans draw their own Nitrogen from the air, and carrots will grow hairy and fork if their soil is too rich. No additional manure is needed for them.

Preparing Planting Beds for Growing Seeds

In addition to the above, incorporate Worm Castings for all your plantings, but, seeds benefit a lot! They germinate more quickly, seedlings grow faster! Leaves grow bigger, more flowers, fruits or vegetables are produced. Vermicompost suppresses several diseases of cucumbers, radishes, strawberries, grapes, tomatoes and peppers, and it also significantly reduces parasitic nematodes, aphids, mealybugs and mites! Who could ask for more?! These effects are greatest when a smaller amount of vermicompost is used—just 10-40% of the total volume of the plant growth medium is all that is needed, 25% is ideal!

See more at Soil Care for Spring Planting! 

At Planting Time – Using these specific ingredients below may not be your personal choice, but consider adding equivalent goodies. Every plant has different needs. Planting holes are truly plant specific spots!

Planting Hole Amendments for Transplants

• Nonfat powdered milk is a natural germicide and immediately boosts plant immune systems. A handful does the job.
• Worm Castings for rapid growth, disease suppression, reduce insect pests! 25% is ideal.
• Bone Meal is high in P, Phosphorus – blooms! Uptake takes about two months, right at bloom time. It is also high in calcium, which helps prevent blossom end rot in tomatoes. I plop in a generous handful.
• Adding Seabird guano high in P, Phosphorus, at planting time helps your plants continue to bloom LATE in the season! Its NPK ratio is 1-10-0.2, takes 4 months to become available to your plants.
• Well aged Manure to boost Nitrogen – especially for manure lovers like eggplant, melons, peppers, big indeterminate tomatoes, winter squash and hard working leaf plants like lettuces.
• Mycorrhizal fungi – Brassicas don’t dance with it, but other plants thrive. It links your plants’ roots with the soil, increases uptake of nutrients. Just sprinkle it on the roots of your transplant and give it a pat so it will stick. The roots and the fungi need to be in contact!
• Compost if your soil needs a little boost right where you are planting. Remember, your plant has a circle of tiny feeder roots out to the mature dripline and sometimes beyond. That’s where the majority of feeding takes place when your plant gets big. Be sure to compost far enough out for them to be well nourished. Your plant will do better longer.
• If your soil has fungi problems, wilts, blights, add a tiny tad of coffee grounds. A 1/2 a percent does the job. Yes, you read right, that is a 1/2 a %!
• Add Green Sand or some such for a long term mineral boost if you think your soil needs it. Kelp works quickly.

In soil with fungi, plant high so the soil drains and dries, the fungi dies. Make basins so the bottom of the basin is above the general soil level. If a plant with a lot of large leaves, put a stake in the center of the basin so you know where to water. Make the basin large enough so the edges don’t degrade from the watering and your large plant is sure to get enough water to its dripline, where the lateral surface roots feed. Many plants uptake more food from these lateral roots than the central deep roots.

Summertime!

When Your Soil Heats Up, Mulch! A two-to-four inch layer of mulch decreases evaporation from the soil by 70 percent or more! Mulch prevents light germinating weed seeds from sprouting. You save your soil nutrients and time in the garden weeding! Nutrients are not leached away by repeated waterings. Water well before applying the mulch, or you will insulate dry soil rather than moist soil. Be garden smart – when possible use a mulch that decomposes and feeds your soil. But if all you have is gravel, use it!

SideDressing – Between summer watering and keeping up with harvesting, sidedressing often is neglected. But your plants work hard and need some chow! Feed your plants at bloom time. They are just about to go into their maximum production. Liquid fertilizers are easy for them to uptake. Teas – compost, worm, manure, fish/kelp – are terrific. Foliar feeding, sprinkling the leaves, upper and undersides, with some Epsom Salts/sulfur mix is super for Solanaceae – eggplant, pepper, tomato, tomatillo, and roses, but especially peppers! This care increases your bounty, extends your growing season.  

High to Late Summer – Replenish low mulch. Remove and trash mulch where plants have had pests or disease; replace with clean mulch. Keep your soil consistently moist. If you are off on vacation, choose a dependable person to tend your plants. Be sure to have them keep your plants harvested so your plants don’t quit producing. Late summer feed your plants if they aren’t looking so perky and if you still want crop. But if your plant is done, no amount of feeding will matter. They know when the days are getting shorter… Late Summer, as cooling starts, remove mulch so the soil is again warmed by the Sun. 

Words on Watering from water challenged Los Angeles! This is written by Master Gardeners representing the University of California Cooperative Extension:

• Use the shovel test to know when to water: soil should be moist to the base of the shovel when inserted into the soil.
• Deep watering is important. Water is not getting deep enough if you sprinkle your garden every day. It is best to water to the point of run-off, and water as frequently as needed to meet the shovel test. Also, with too much run-off, you are wasting water.
• Teach your plants to grow deeply for moisture. In spring, for average soils, water deeply only every 2-3 weeks. By the time that summer’s heat arrives, plant feeder roots will be growing deeply for moisture, and the plants won’t need watering more frequently than once a week during very hot spells.
• One inch of irrigated water will soak down to different depths, depending on how heavy your soil is: 12″ deep in sandy soil, 9″ deep in loamy soil, but only 3″ deep in clay soil. Plant root zones generally reach from 2-12″ down, but larger plants like tomatoes may reach 3′ down. Clay soil, because it is so compact, can be watered a little each day for two to three days to allow absorption down that far, rather than a lot of runoff by watering once for a long time.
• The ideal time to water is in the morning before the sun is high. This avoids evaporation and also gives the plants time to dry off before sunset, which deters mildews.
• Refrain from overhead watering when the evenings remain warm, especially when leaves can’t dry off by sunset. Fungal diseases thrive when temperatures remain between 70 and 80 degrees; and they need only 2-4 hours of moist, warm conditions to develop. Overwatering is the cause of most plants dying. Too much water drowns the roots.
• Occasionally you should overhead water in order to clean both sides of leaves.
• Avoid walking in your garden after watering so that you do not compact the soil. Use stepping stones, boards, or straw or mulch paths. Never step into raised beds. Healthy living soil is 25% air, 25% water. It needs to breathe and be moist for the soil organisms to do their work.

In general, here are some tips for watering in Drought/Desert Conditions: Growing Super Veggies in HOT, Drought, Desert Areas! Convert some of these tips to your situation.

ALL Year Make Compost! It is your single most bestest amendment of all! If you could choose only one, this would be it. It’s nutritious, has super water holding capacity, and steadily releases nutrition to your soil! Composting Methods, Make it Your Way! Especially read the Note!

When your soil looks good enough to eat, you probably have it right! 

Updated 6.25.23

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

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

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Borage, StarFlower, is Such a Winter Spring Beauty!

 

The herb Borage – Borago officinalis, StarFlower, has stunning Blue-for-bees flowers! Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA by Cerena Childress

Borage, aka StarFlower, is grown commercially for its seed oil, but is also a heavenly, cheerful, prolifically blooming plant to dress up your winter/spring home garden! Look at all those buds! It isn’t stopping anytime soon either!

This herb is the highest known plant source of gamma-linolenic acid (an Omega 6 fatty acid, also known as GLA – an anti-inflammatory) and the seed oil is often marketed as a GLA supplement. It is also a source of B vitamins, beta-carotene, fiber, choline, and, of course, trace minerals. In alternative medicine it is used for stimulating breast milk production and as an adrenal gland tonic used to relieve stress.

Borage is thought to have originated in North Africa, went up through Spain, and is now a common warm climate Mediterranean plant. For us SoCal gardeners that means it is right at home here in our Mediterranean climate. It likes our ‘winter’ and grows happily through midsummer. By late summer it looks a little tired and most gardeners pull it.

The magical Star shaped flowers are a bonus to us humans. Don’t be surprised if occasionally there are pink blossoms among your blue blossoms, on the same plant at the same time, or some flowers that are blue and pink! Sometimes blue ones turn pink! Your prolific plant will produce 100s of flowers during its life!

PLANTING & CARE

Some say to plant 12″ apart, but healthy Borage, Borago officinalis, can take up a fair footprint, 2 – 4′ wide, so allow enough space unless you don’t mind clipping it back. However, it is a tad prickly, so you might want to use gloves when you do.

Since it gets 2 – 3′ high, place it so it doesn’t shade out other shorter plants like strawberries.

It prospers in full sun, even partial shade.

Sandy soil is its favorite, some say rich soil, but it adapts to most anywhere as long as there is good drainage. Adding compost gives more flowers!

Seeds do well planted after the last frost date. 1/4 – 1/2″ deep. But when covered by the mother foliage, it self-seeds readily abundantly! You will have little plants to give away or add the young tender leaves to your salad or steam them as greens!

If you are in a cold zone or want an earlier start, sow seeds indoors 3-4 weeks before the last average frost date. Plant more seeds in a week or two or three in case you lose your first plantings in a late frost. Barely cover the seeds and keep them moist. At about 3″ tall, pop them in the ground! It can stand a tad of frost, but that keyword is ‘average.’ Keep a weather watch. Water and cover them if you need to.

During the season, moist is good; soggy is not. When they start to bloom, fertilize with a high phosphorus organic fertilizer. If the flowers drop back later, do it again.

It’s work, but if you want a shorter plant, pinch and prune to encourage branching.

One of its old names was Lungwort, the leaves thought to look like lungs.

At Pilgrim Terrace Community Garden, Santa Barbara CA March 2018 on a rainy morning. Cerena Childress photo

PESTS & DISEASES

Due to its fuzzy nature, Borage has no pests. Another name for it has been common bugloss. Bugloss – we like that! And I’ve never seen it with any diseases. Every part of this plant is fuzzy except for those pretty little baby naked flowers! It’s a pollinator’s paradise and blue is one of Bees’ favorite colors! Borage is a valuable companion plant because it brings bees/pollinators and is a good honey plant! Two of its common names are Bee Plant & Beebread! More bees, more strawberries! Grow some of the bees’ other favorite blue flowers as well – Agapanthus, anise hyssop, crocus, hyacinth, salvias, blue spirea, germander, bog sage, obedient plant, and many others. Your garden will literally be humming.

SUPER COMPANION! Planting borage with strawberries and squash is smart! It attracts bees and increases the yield! Borage also repels pests such as Tomato hornworms, Japanese Beetles, cabbage worms and moths! It aids plants it is interplanted with by increasing resistance to pests and disease. It is also helpful to, and compatible with, most plants. Forget the corners and borders! Plant this beauty right in the middle of your garden, between plants, so it can do the most good. Make it the hub of the wheel!

SEEDSAVING! Self seeds like crazy! The seeds in the image have broken loose, but not yet fallen. Generally there are four black/brown nutlets. They know how to hide in plain sight, the same color as your soil. Expect babies you can transplant or giveaway. Be careful with that – Borage has a taproot, so dig deep enough not to damage it. Transplant early, at 3 to 4″, while that taproot is still short. If you are just starting, get your seeds early spring before the seed houses run out!

Borage oil is made from the seeds. Per Wiki: ‘Borage seed oil has one of the highest amounts of γ-linolenic acid of seed oils — higher than blackcurrant seed oil or evening primrose oil, to which it is considered similar. GLA typically comprises about 24% of the oil.’

Please check these and other sites for extensive details on healthy and medicinal use:

Pros: Mercola, Take Control of Your Health
Pros & Cons: WebMD Watch out for those PAs! Use only products that are certified and labeled PA-free.

Martha Stewart’s Gently Steamed Fish with Cucumber, flavored with Tahini Sauce, topped with sprigs of Cilantro flowers and blue Borage flowers!

EDIBLE! Toss some of those magical sweet flowers on top of your salads to make Borage beauty! This herb can be used in soups, young leaves in salads, dried leaves brewed hot in teas, borage-lemonade, strawberry-borage cocktails, preserves, borage jelly, dips, various sauces, leaves cooked as a stand-alone vegetable, or used in desserts in the form of fresh or candied flowers, flowers frozen in ice cubes to float in your lemonade or cocktails (especially in Pimms Cup – see the very last paragraph of the Pimms post)! If you are Italian, wilt some cut up leaves in a fry pan with olive oil and garlic, cool, roll into little patties, dip in batter and make fritters! Or stuff your ravioli with Borage paste. If you are a beekeeper, leave those flowers alone so you will get Borage Honey!

If you don’t want it in your veggie garden or to use it for food or medicinal purposes, grow it in your Butterfly Garden!

The more common names a plant has, and Borage has many, the more uses it serves, the more loved it is, and the more widespread it is! Borage is beautiful, edible, brings and is food for bees, is a valued companion plant for several reasons, is medicinal, and with that tap root, even makes nutritious compost! In the right location, a row can be a living windbreak. If you want to, you can do business and grow it for its oil! In Permaculture terms serving many functions is called Stacking.

Bee glorious! Plant some Borage!

Updated 1.27.23

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer garden planning tips emphasizing needing less water! Companions!

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

• If you are not going to be canning, indeterminate tomatoes are the excellent choice! These are the vining tomatoes that produce all summer! This saves time and water because determinate, bush tomatoes produce quickly, all at once – great for canning, then you have to replant and wait for more production. However, determinate toms do produce sooner, so for earlier table production, plant them to hold you until your indeterminates are producing. For earliest production, plant cherry tomatoes! Yum! Basil is great with tomatoes, and a pack of dandelions! The beautiful herb Borage repels Tomato Hornworms!
• Choose more prolific plants and varieties of them so you get more production for less water.
• Plant tall plants to the North unless you anticipate a scorching summer. If you think it will be HOT, plant tall to the west to shade shorter plants, keep your soil cooler, use less water.
• Cukes & Beans! Plan to put cucumbers up on trellises to keep them disease and pest free, are clean, and so they ripen evenly all the way around. Co-plant with beans! Beans above, cukes below. If you will be wanting a lot of each, plant them on separate trellises! Japanese Long cukes give a generous supply per water used! Suyos are a great choice – give them plenty of room.
• Next, intermingle mid height plants, bush beans, determinate tomatoes, tall peppers like Big Jim Anaheim or Poblanos, Zucchini! Potatoes with Zucchini to repel squash bugs. Plant Radish ahead of cukes & zukes to repel cucumber beetles. Eat a few radishes, but let several grow up by and through the plants you are protecting. Let them bloom for pollinators and produce seed pods for your next crops.
• Leave a winter broccoli or two for salad side shoots. Mulch deeply under your brocs right now! We want to keep these cool loving plants cool. If you don’t have enough trellis space, plant cukes under your brocs! Broccoli helps repel cucumber beetles, so push the mulch back on the sunny side, make your special cucumber planting mound/basin and plant cucumbers underneath those brocs! Besides keeping the soil cool, the mulch keeps the cukes off the soil, clean and insect free above the bug zone!
• Leave a couple of winter kale to provide over summer greens. Heat tolerant 1000 Headed Kale is a prolific choice that harbors less aphids on its FLAT leaves. Plant lettuces on the sunny side under your brocs and kale.
• Eggplant likes it hot! Plant them where they will be sheltered from prevailing winds. Radishes with eggplants and cucumbers. Radishes are a trap plant for flea beetles. If your area is a little cool, plant the long skinny Ichiban Japanese eggies rather than the bulbous Black Beauties. Ichiban’s are prolific and quite tasty.
• Lowest are the ‘littles’ or fillers! Being mindful of companions, scatter beets and carrots, lettuce, radish, here and there among, alongside, under larger plants on their sunny sides. Bunch onions away from beans. Some littles will be done before the bigger plants leaf out. For those still growing, remove or harvest lower leaves of the big plant when they start shading the littles. There isn’t really a need to allot separate space for littles except strawberries! They need a separate patch with more acidic soil to keep them healthy and be prolific producers!
• If you love cabbages, plant a few more, but they take up a fair footprint for what they produce and they take quite a while to do it. In spring and summer choose quick maturing mini varieties.
• SEED SAVING SPACE! Leave room for some arugula, cilantro, chamomile, a carrot or two, and a celery to go to flower to bring bees and beneficial insects! Besides being beautiful and having lovely scents, let them seed out for seeds for next plantings. Carrots love being with cilantro, marigold and chamomile, and chamomile improves the flavor of any neighboring herb! Chamomile flowers make a lovely scent and the tea is sweet.
• Pumpkin, melon, winter squash vines require some thoughtfulness. Pumpkin and winter squash vine leaves get as huge as healthy zucchini leaves, easily a foot wide! Mini melons have dainty 2″ wide little leaves, can be trellised, but they may do better on bare hot ground. Comparatively, it’s cool up on those trellises. A healthy winter squash vine can easily be 3′ to 4′ wide, 30′ long plus side vines, and produce a major supply of squash! You can use them as a border, as a backdrop along a fence line. In SoCal, unless you are a squash lover, or won’t be gardening in winter, there is question as to why you would grow winter squash at all. Greens of all kinds grow prolifically here all winter long, giving a fresh and beautiful supply of Vitamin A for less calories and no storage space!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PESTS!

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

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

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

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

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

DISEASES

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

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

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

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

Watering & Weeding 

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

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

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

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

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

Updated 1.24.19

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See the entire February Newsletter:

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

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

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

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Subscribe to the Green Bean Connection Monthly Newsletter!

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

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

Read Full Post »