The Beautiful Food Garden

A Second Sunday Showcase Event: Three Poets in The Garden!

2012-02-11T20:36:00.000-08:00

A Second Sunday Showcase Event!

Our Three Poets, Jill Lurie, Orchid Black and Tatiana Sulovska, will be reading poetry in The Learning Garden, 2:00 to 3:30 PM. Excellent poets in their own right, having the three of them on one stage is a delight not to be missed.

There is a $15 suggested donation, but no one will be turned away. Come on out, hear the poetry, delight in the garden and be a part of the community of The Learning Garden. It will be a gorgeous Southern California afternoon and you'll be so glad you made it out for this event!

Hope to see you there!

david

The Learning Garden, Venice And Walgrove Blvd. The Garden is on the Northwest corner of the Venice High School campus. Enter off Walgrove, we are the first gate south of Venice Blvd on Walgrove.

Fyll 'er Up! Without Filling Up More Landfills!

2011-12-12T16:21:00.000-08:00

Jenn and Carla have an idea that looks to the future... They've named their enterprise Refyll and you can find them at the Mar Vista Farmers' Market, Sunday mornings on Grandview Avenue at Venice Boulevard.

Jenn and Carla with an unidentified co-

conspirator

A customer can bring a bottle from home and buy cleaning supplies for body or home. All natural ingredients and once you're out, bring your bottle back and get a refill, um, refyll. It's a look at the future of commerce in many aspects - more and more, containers, from cloth bags to glass jars will need to be useful more than once! If you are fresh out of containers, they'll sell you one, but to really take advantage of the idea, bring your own (recycled) container to get filled.

Check out their website - soon I'll have a report on the goods I bought, dish soap, shampoo and laundry soap. Right now I've only used the shampoo and I like how it doesn't strip all the oil out of my scalp! As a beekeeper, I love that I was able to ask for unscented - it really can be a pain (a real pain!) to be working with bees when your hair smells like freesias or sweet peas.

Go see them on Sunday! Tell 'em the gardenmaster sent you.

david

Occupy Your Life

2011-11-30T12:05:00.001-08:00

Hifolks fresh from being evicted by the Los Angeles Police Department,v.2.0.

Someof your are needing bail and some of you are missing stuff and someof you have your pride a little dented, but you were good. All eyeshave been on you for several months and (after a long silence themedia finally figured out you were there and worth reporting). Youmade a big statement about the 99% and the 1%. Now that yourencampment is gone, I wonder what's next for you?

AlreadyI've heard reports that some of you are showing up in a park neardowntown LA with tents and camping gear to carry on delivery of themessage. Some will carry on – and maybe a few new folks will jointhem – but the demonstration, despite your words to the contrary,cannot go on until things change. 'Things' take very long to change. You have lives you must continue and a camping expedition won'tcontain that for very long.

Ihave 'occupied' for a very long time. It's different for me. Ibelieve you when you decry the mon ey inpolitics and the lame economic system that has developed to make therich richer and keep the poor downtrodden and full of sugar and TV. Yet, my occupation has been doing something that allows me to live mylife on a daily basis, participate as little as possible in theoppression you decry and to fight for economic change in a way thatis ongoing and sustainable.

Igarden.

Isave my own seed.

AndI don’t shop where I believe my money is going to further oppresspeople from anywhere in the world. I may not be right all the time,but I make a concerted effort to be informed and try to be right.

Itdoesn't get me on TV and reporters don't come around and poke mics inmy face and ask insipid questions. I am not a media event and what Ido doesn't feel all that revolutionary because I just go about livingmy life. Yet the damage I do to the system is real and sustainableday in and day out. And I'm not alone.

So,dear occupiers, I invite you to join me in an occupy that requiresyou to change as much as the system you want to change, for, in fact,didn't Gandhi say, “Be the change you desire?” The changes thathave to be made have to go beyond using a credit union instead of bignational bank (thank you for that one, by the way). It meanschanging your food market – the way you consume and the way yourecycle and your entertainment source.

Itmeans going local. All the way.

Localbanking. Local food sourcing. Local music – the band down thestreet. Live music from your neighbors. Local art. Local energy. Local travel. Nothing is more local than your own garden. Local iseverything 'they' don't want. Local is real. Local is powerful. Local is hope. Local is community. Local is support when timessuck. Local is celebration when life is abundant. Local is aneconomy. Local is a farmers' market. Local is a seed bank. Localis a party, not affiliated with politics or national agendas. Localis someone you can talk face to face with. Local is kissing. Localis a hug. Local is smelling the flowers. Local is asking why thereare no bike lanes. Local is eating bread fresh from the oven. Local is looking into someone's eyes and touching their core – orletting them touch yours. Local is personal. Local is a solution that solves manyproblems. Local chews up liars and spits them out. Local celebratesthe local garden. Local tastes fresh. Local looks you the face andasks for a buck. Local pats you on the back and says thanks. Localsmells like a rose. Local means you need to stand up for peace andsafety. Local means you can't hide behind being one of the greatunwashed mass. Local means you either really care or you're justfull of shit. Local means you give to your favorite local charity. Local means you can say hi to someone you know (fine, thanks, how 'bout you?). Local means moreMom and Pop shops and less K-mart and Walmart. Local means theprofits stay local. Local means no McDonalds. Local means organic. Local means less is more. Local means economics as though peoplematter. Local means here. Local means now.

Noteverything can be local – just try to get me to give up my coffee. But I can get coffee that shows some respect to the folks that grewit. The bottom line is, we have to live a conscious life. No longercan the boob tube show us an ad and we run out to buy the latestpiece of crap. Today, we honor ourselves and our earth by turningaway from the consumptive creatures of need we have been, intoproducers and creators of the life we wish to live and wish to exportto the world around us.

So,are you willing to truly 'occupy' the spaces of your own life? Areyou?

Thereis much to be done today. Lets get busy!

david

I'm Already Thinking of Tomatoes....!

2011-11-28T16:51:00.001-08:00

Aren't you? The day is not far off when seed starters will be starting seeds of tomatoes (my first seeding out is in January!) and, because I order my tomato seeds online, yes, it is the beginning of tomato season for sure.

I don't count on getting tomatoes like these at The Learning Garden...

Seed Savers Exchange posted a link on Facebook which lead me to another link where I found Tomato Fest online, listing the Top Ten Tomatoes for 2011, based on their sales last year. Before you go there, let me warn you, if you are gardening along the coast (Sunset Zones 22 and 24) you can drool over the beefsteak tomatoes all you want, but be advised, they can be dicey in our ocean influenced climate. Even though I have proven this wrong once, I have proven it right more than once and I still hold to the thought that large tomatoes do not set fruit well in our climate because they need 85° over a 24 hour period to set fruit. That is hard to count on when the ocean flow in the evening often chills us down into the 60's. Having said that, you can now go and lust over these varieties. Hey, buy the seeds and give them to a friend in Pasadena for Christmas. How thoughtful! Then show up in harvest season... Heh heh...

Also note, along with this post at Tomato Fest, there is also a sale on tomato seeds. How convenient! Yes, give tomato seeds for Christmas to everyone (well, at least the locals) and enjoy the excess from several friends and neighbors - take note of what was grown and attend the Seed Library Of Los Angeles meetings (next one December 17th at The Learning Garden) and let them show you how to save the seeds for yourself and the library!

We hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and all are looking forward to a warm and loving December holiday season. For all who want to enjoy a stress free moment in December, The Learning Garden hosts a Winter Solstice celebration, starting 6:30 PM on the 22nd until the fire goes out. Bring something warm to drink (we'll have tea and coffee for those who bring their own cup) and maybe a sweet treat, we'll have a fireplace and a ceremony to enjoy. No gifts, no cards, nothing special to wear (but something warm is a must!), and no stress. Just come out and observe this important end/beginning on the calendar with peace and reflection.

What a concept!

david

A New Seed Saving Seminar With David King!

2011-09-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

It's about time. Last January we had a seed saving seminar with SLOLA Chair and Founder, David King that was thoroughly enjoyed by every one. We have finally pinned the dates down and are very pleased to announce our next offering:

Essentials of Seed Saving

Generations before us understood the importance of saving seeds. It was an essential part of the lives of all our ancestors. This vital connection was lost as we began to purchase our seeds from seed sellers. In recent times, the specter of GMOs and monster corporations controlling the seeds they created and the very real prospect of seed corporations having control over our food supply.

October 20, 27 and November 3, 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM, at

The Learning Garden,

SE corner of Walgrove Avenue and Venice Blvd.

310.722.3656 or greenteach@gmail.com

Saving our own vegetable biodiversity today provides us

those old open pollinated varieties that taste good.
a wider range of vegetable varieties and more control over what we can have.
a closer participation in the cycle of life. In our gardens.
a hedge against personal financial misfortune.
a safeguard against food shortages.
our own way to mitigate against climate change and it's impact on agriculture.
the means to fight our shrinking biodiversity.

Upon completing this short course, participants will know why we urgently need to learn how to save seeds, the basics of saving most vegetable seeds, optimum conditions for seed preservation, how to preserve the genetic lines of different types of seed and short-cuts and tips from someone steeped in the seed saving ethic.

David King began his time in the garden at his Grandfather's knee back in northeast Kansas. He has been an avid gardener for most of his life and has taught gardening and horticulture at UCLA Extension and UC Cooperative Extension. He has been with The Learning Garden at Venice High School for over ten years and is the Chair of the Seed Library of Los Angeles. He has written the LA Garden Blog for over three years as well as several columns for periodical publication. A course of information, delivered with passion and humor is guaranteed.

We have limited seating, reserve your space now!

SLOLA members get a $10 discount - email David for enrollment procedures.

Why Urban Farms Will Save the Economy and Lives

2011-08-27T23:07:00.000-07:00

No longer are we preaching to the choir! The word is out and people are piling on the bandwagon: urban agriculture is in and will empower us to move forward into a new paradigm where food is grown within a few miles and not a few thousand miles of where it is consumed.

We are on the tipping point and our world is changing. This article sums up nicely what we've been saying for years now! We are grateful to see this kind of encouraging news in print!

david

Lies I've Told My Students

2011-08-25T23:13:00.000-07:00

Do You Know What Variety These Big Yellow Tomatoes Are?

You cannot grow large, beefsteak-style tomatoes close to the ocean - the cool off-shore flow and lack of heat will not allow the fruit to set. So, if you try to grow beefsteak tomatoes near the ocean (Sunset Zone 24) you are wasting your time! This is what I read, this is what my experience has proven over and over again. And this is what I have taught my students for about 7 years.

BUT...

These tomatoes were picked yesterday from The Learning Garden in a year that was not one of our warmest! Beautiful and delicious tomatoes. These were grown by the Venice High School students in their gardens without tags. If I had known those vines were supposed to produce this size of tomatoes, I would have yanked the vines back in June. But I didn't know and look at this. Now, if I only knew what variety they were, I'd be saving seeds from them.

david

Join David For Growing Food Class This Saturday

2011-08-01T13:48:00.000-07:00

This Saturday, 06 August 2011, The Learning Garden presents: Growing Food In Southern California with David King. This 9 to 12 workshop centers on what to do in the coming months as Southern California heads into our 'other Spring' and one of our best, and least understood, growing seasons! You'll learn what to plant and how to plant it, what varieties go best here and why and all about getting the best garlic you will ever have! Dress to get into the garden and get dirty, The Learning Garden can be cool even in August, so dress in layers. Coffee and garden-made mint tea will be served please bring your own cup! Email greenteach@gmail.com or call 310.722.3656 for more information. No need to RSVP – class goes on no matter what! $25 at the gate...

david

Bees: An Essential Part of Our Food System

2011-07-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

Ms Bee, Lacking a Horse, Pollinates a Borage Plant

A recent LA Times article detailed the death of a horse and the owner being severely stung by bees has drawn enough attention to warrant a reply.

The reason such a story becomes news is that it is uncommon. For some reason, unclear in the story, the bees attacked this man and his horse. It was doubtful that the attack was unprovoked and, because the man has a reason to not disclose anything he might have done to provoke the attack, we may never know the truth. But, from my personal experience of working with hives of bees and the many years of experience with bees by the people I associate with and our collective memory, we, to a person, allow that this is not consistent with the way we know bees to behave without some serious provocation. Because most Americans simply regard bees as something to be feared and really know very little about them, even preposterous stories about their behavior invoke no intelligent scrutiny.

But, OK. So the bees got pissed off – we don't know why – and they stung the horse to death and sent the owner off to the emergency room. This is only 'news' because it is rare. A horse killed on the freeway would be rare too, but a man sent to the ER because of injuries sustained on the freeway wouldn't be such a big deal – it wouldn't eve make a back page entry in the LA Times on a slow news day.

Bees are wild critters and they will attack anyone deemed to be threatening their hive. That's what they do. Our reaction to bees is, sadly, overwhelmingly based in fear born of ignorance. A healthy respect for all forms of life is imperative when dealing with the various forms of life we encounter – the more a person knows about bees, bears, wolves, or any form of wildlife, the better a person can deal with it and usually the more appreciation they will have for whatever species we have in mind.

My interactions with bees have been almost always positive. I have had two run-ins where I screwed up (both times) and got stung. I do not blame the bees. Each bee that stung me lost her life (all honey bees with stingers are female and the action of stinging disembowels her) and she lost her life protecting her hive with determination and skill. My work with bees has taught me so much about myself and has shown me some of my faults. I have come to admire these wonderful, essential creatures. The bees and the hive are like two living entities – as much as the cells in my body and two different entities – and the cell cannot live without the rest of the body, but the body needs a minimum number of cells to survive. So it is with the hive.

Most, if not all, hype that pumps up the fear about bees and other wild creatures is conscious fear mongering by those who profit from our fears. I have heard interviews with pest control companies where the president of one company vehemently admonished the radio personality to “very afraid of Africanized honey bees.” The purpose of which was nothing more than to drive listeners to the telephone to call his company every time any bee showed up at their property. After all, who can tell if it's an African bee or a European bee – I mean, I haven't been able to check passports on them. The intention was to frighten people to get ALL bees sprayed.

Never mind that the honey bee is in crises and lack of honey bees will severely impact our food supply. Honey bees have been dying at an alarming rate that has already impacted some crops and threatens shortages of many more. One of every third bite we eat comes to us through the pollinating efforts of honey bees. Mind you, there are other pollinators, and it is increasingly evident we will have to employ them in greater numbers while the honey bee populations plummet, but the honey bee has been the revered pollinator of choice for over a century because we have learned how to work with them and they have proven to be reliable partners even when we have abused them.

It appears to me that the survival of the honey bee is dependent on finding refuge in our cities. Our government has no backbone to contest the chemical and GMO farming lobby, so the honey bee is almost certainly doomed in our farmlands. In the city, where GMOs are not raised and pesticide application is confined mostly to lawns (is that sick or what?), honey bees stand a chance to become viable again. Actions taken by brazen law-breakers like Backwards Beekeepers are probably the greatest hope to keep viable populations of honey bees alive.

Got bees? Do not kill them! Contact a person who will keep them and insure those bees survive to breed more bees. Our way of life is dependent on the honey bee and her pollination of crops from apples to zucchini. Let's not take almonds, peaches, apricots, plums and many other fruits and vegetables away from the children of the future by compromising the honey bee's numbers to not be of service to mankind. Let's legalize beekeeping in all our cities and let's learn about the bees and be of service to them as well.

Monsanto News Round Up...

2011-07-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

A non-GMO tomato destined to be a Greek salad in a minute or two.

On Facebook, via the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), there is the news of the Good Food Awards, something we believe is important, because good, edible food is probably one of the most important allies we have in our fight to preserve old varieties of seeds and against Monsanto and agri-biz. Mass produced stuff will never come close to clean, local food in winning the stomachs and taste buds of people. The more people who are exposed to wholesome food, the more folks who are willing to stand with us and pay a little more for the food that is healthier and less destructive to the planet.

The ground swell against genetically modified organisms (GMO's) seems to be growing world wide, even as the United States government rolls over and plays dead doing anything about GMO regulation. Farmers in Hungary are caught in the middle with their crops being plowed under because they planted GMO corn. We hope something will mitigate the destruction of their crops and income, but we applaud Hungary for taking a stand against the evils of GMO plants that are wind pollinated.

The United States Department of Agriculture head,Tom Vilsak, a former employee of Monsanto, on the other hand has all but abdicated any consumer or environmental protection according to what we read today. This is especially hard to take in an administration that many of us had assumed would be less GMO friendly and more environmentally conscious. The approval of GMO alfalfa almost certainly means that non-GMO cattle are going to become much more difficult to grow, putting GMO's in our meats and milk products, because the GMO pollen will infect adjacent fields, the same way GMO corn spreads its pollen far and wide.

Monsanto has lied repeatedly about pollen spreading out of the fields planted with GMO corn - their estimates as to how far corn pollen can spread have been mere wishes in the heads of accountants, there was no corroborating evidence to back it up and current studies have proven that pollen contamination is a reality. A reality that we can't turn back. We will all eat GMO corn from the grocery stores for decades to come even if GMO corn is permanently pulled from the farmers fields today. If you buy prepared foods from any supermarket, including the likes of Whole Foods, you will find it is created using GMO corn and soybeans. If you read 'corn' or 'soy' on the package, simply know it is GMO - we don't get the luxury of choosing because marking 'GMO' or 'non-GMO' on a package isn't legal and if it is from a chain store, there is not enough non-GMO corn and soy being produced to be used consistently across their distribution.

A paper in the AgBio Forum postulates: "Another aspect of the GM debate concerns implications of GM pollen drift. Pollen drift takes place when the pollen (and, subsequently, genes) of one plant is transported, via wind, water, sun, or pollinators such as honey bees, to another plant (Dafni, Kevan, & Husband, 2005). Although pollen drift often occurs in nature and plants have been swapping genes for centuries, it has become a matter of concern in the GM/non-GM crop debate because this type of genetic transfer can lead to "introduction into ecosystems of genes that confer novel fitness-related traits…[and] also allows novel genes to be introduced into many diverse types of crops, each with its own specific potential to outcross" (Snow, 2002, p. 542). Results from this could range from minor to catastrophic and could potentially have major impacts on (a) agriculture, such as the elimination of non-GM seeds from the seed stock; (b) health, if mingling occurs unwitting ingestion of allergens could transpire, and; (c) the economy, since there may be fiscal or legal liabilities associated with selling incorrectly labeled products."

Of course, we believe that this GMO experiment will fall of its own weight - the problem is, how much of a disaster will that be when it does happen?

There are several reasons to believe that it will be a disaster, not the least is the results of the Green Revolution which was always seen as some massive success; a film on the continuing legacy of that disaster is available here. The problem is how measure success - and when. If one looks into the data for the years when the Green Revolution was initiated, the success is so overwhelming that we should be able to rejoice that hunger was solved for all time - of course, we know that isn't the case. The use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides was so overwhelming that farmers laden with new hybrids could not afford these inputs and the loss of diverse plantings of their own local foodcrops (because FAO was only measuring output in commercial crops, crops that could be commodities on the world market, not crops that could actually be eaten by the farmer or traded in the local market) destroyed the local agriculture. The result is that after a five year window, production is not only nothing near the levels we were led to believe, but the lives of the farmers are compromised. We took independent farmers and made them slaves to the same system that is bankrupting our farmers (and has for centuries), giving rise to the lie that you have to 'get big or get out.' The truth is a small farm (or garden) is much more productive per acre than a big farm! (Sourced from Robert Rodale's "Save Three Lives" which should be required reading for anyone interested in solving world hunger.)

Monsanto has proven, secondly, that they are one of the world's biggest and most unfair bullies. The cases against many farmers are a matter of record at this point and are far too numerous to discount. (I heard some Monsanto apologist deride Percy Schmeiser as being a 'scumbag,' and you can say that about an individual farmers, but after a point, how many farmers are scumbags and who's pointing at whom? For the record, I heard Mr. Schmeiser speak once and found him humble and sincere - if he is as bad as Monsanto wishes he were, he deserves an Emmy or something.) There are too many farmers sued or hushed up to take this lightly; Monsanto seems to follow the Church of Scientology's lead on pro-active suing of nay-sayers. Now the Securities Exchange Commission has begun an investigation, of course an investigation proves nothing until the verdict is made. Still, if their past is any indication, Monsanto's own ruthlessness may come home to roost.

Thirdly, the health implications to humans of GMO technology has not been investigated let alone proven one way or another. There are NO long term studies on any aspect of GMO pollution in our bodies or our world. One has to suspect a supposed 'wonderful new technology' that has yet to be vetted in any way long term. If our fears are unfounded, then allow long term testing to go forward FIRST and prove us wrong!

And finally, GMOs are just plain wrong. Even if you can find ways to wiggle out of the environmental damage they will surely create (see the BioAg paper above), they will fail because they can't do what they claim they can do. Already reports are in about failed harvests, harvests that fail to attain anything close to parity with existing crops and now the new super weeds have arrived on the scene - weeds that are immune to Monsanto's RoundUp and that spells doom and gloom for this current formulation. Monsanto's scientists are already working on RoundUp Two, or RoundUp 2012 or whatever they will call it, but it doesn't take an agronomist to see the futility of this conundrum; better herbicides equal better weeds and that's all, with ever increasing pollution and ever increasing questionable health out-comes for the planet and those eating the products of these seeds.

It's apparent our government will not do anything constructive to at least gain us some sort of testing of this technology before foisting it on us. The things we CAN do are limited, and imperfect at best, but we need to try to eat as little of this stuff as possible. That means limiting our eating out to a very small select eateries that buy from small farmers that avoid GMO seeds and eating mostly from our own gardens and the gardens of our friends. That, of course, means, we have to grow gardens - larger gardens and learn to garden for most of our own calories. OK, so we can't do that today? Move in that direction and keep moving in that direction. Learn how to save seeds so we preserve the heritage seeds of the past that are free of GMO technology and will reproduce in your garden. Gardening this way is the way we preserve a future and is the surest way to strike back - it's a duty to the generations behind us and it's revolutionary.

We all need to eat. I think I'm making myself a Greek salad - GMO free!

david

Time To Kiss My Amazon Goodbye...

2011-07-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Amazon,

I think you goofed badly. I don't know of any business model that suggests you terminate your very large sales force that worked hard for you for practically nothing and give them over to your competitors to work against you. And it's a sad thing because many of us were not wanting to switch, we wanted to keep working for you for next to nothing.

But you forced our hands.

The loser in the tax standoff with my state of California is you, Amazon. Because I'm going to move EVERYTHING to Barnes and Noble - not just my referrals, but my wish list and my gift list and all of my business because having one bookstore simplifies my busy life and I don't need anything more complicated. Besides, Amazon, I think it's more than fair that you collect the tax and forward it to my state which is in some financial difficulty - you might have heard about this in the news. I personally believe we should pay our taxes and I believe the country we call the 'best in the world' must be paid for - it is as good as it is because someone paid taxes as much as someone fought in a war. It is more patriotic to pay taxes than it is to wave the flag or suck down beers while watching fireworks. For this and many other reasons, Amazon, you are on the wrong side of history and the shady side of 'right.'

And sooner or later, Amazon, you WILL be collecting sales tax for each state and it won't be nearly as onerous as you claim today, but when that happens, I'll be happy with the Barnes and Nobel interface and I'll not want to come back to you and relearn how to do things your way.

I'm sure I'm not alone. I think you have done one of the most idiotic things a business can do; give thousands of devoted customers to your competitors - customers that have proven they read and they read a lot, customers that are willing to suggest others to go to your site and buy books (or whatever) from you. And, you collect sales tax on purchases for some of the 'stores' inside your corporate umbrella - so you know how to do it and it's not the big smelly dead fish you want us to believe it is.

So, Amazon, I don't get it. You've pissed me off enough to set up my account with Barnes and Nobel - in the coming days, I'll remove my wish lists and all the other bonds I've had with you since 1998. And it'll be goodbye. No more boxes in my mail from you. It's a very sad day for me.

But I'm sure me and my new bookstore will soon understand each other and in a few months, I'll be well on my way to building a twenty year relationship with them and not you.

You see how stupid you were?

david

Garden Rant agrees with me, read Amy Stewart's response to a similar letter.

The Forsaken Garden: The Food Humanity Forgot, Part 3

2011-06-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

The diversity of F1 Two Mary Corn

Years ago, when I first started teaching plant propagation for UCLA Extension, I bought a book called, Breed Your Own Vegetables by Carol Deppe. It proved a bit daunting and I put it down. I didn't care for the lessons in Mendelian genetics. I had taught Mendelian genetics before in a general botany class and, though I understood it, it wasn't my cup of tea and so I put Deppe's book down and it collected dust on my shelf.

Last year, with the seed library idea singing it's siren song in my ear, I pulled the book off the shelf again because of it's full title, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's & Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding & Seed Saving (this is probably about the tenth time I've written about this book in one of my blogs, you get the idea that my copy is well worn!) I pulled the book off the shelf and was immediately impressed with Deppe's writing, filled with warm and engaging descriptions of the seeds and stories she told that illustrated her points. After getting through the seed saving half of the book, I began to stick a toe filled with trepidation in the breeding half.

As I studied seed saving, it was obvious to me that a seed saver is already a defacto plant breeder: It may not be an overtly dedicated breeding program, but simply by saving the seed from plant A (it was taller and had more fruit) instead of plant B, one has bred in favor of the genetic make up of plant A vs. plant B. So all seed savers are plant breeders, even if only 'passive' plant breeders.

After my week long immersion in seed school, I am convinced more than ever that breeding plants for organic food production has got to be the next frontier for me and I hope I can convince a lot more folks to join me. I mean the active kind of plant breeding – the kind that starts at the beginning of the growing season with intention to create a new variety and goes through season after season to achieve the goal of a new variety.

Two Mary Corn

A couple of years ago, we had two Mary's volunteering at The Learning Garden. They met there and became roommates for a time – both were good solid gardeners. One year, they started seeds of corn and after the corn had germinated, found they needed to move and had no place to plant it. They gave about forty growing corn plants to me. I grew them out and the diversity was astounding (first picture, above). I saved that seed, but I was intimidated about breeding corn and never took it forward. Now, I know what to do and I am eager to pull that seed out again and begin to breed it out to be true. That is project number one. It is only to breed out some of the more beautiful corn seeds for a gorgeous corn. The picture of one of the ears can be seen as a heading (L A Garden Blog) or back drop (Record of The Seed Library of Los Angeles) on two blogs I help author. The working name for this corn is Two Mary Corn. Still looking for a good name, but that'll do for my notes.

'Purple Maize''

The one that has totally captured my imagination has a working name of Purple Maize. Sorry, I can't help it. If I am successful, don't worry, it will not be released as 'Purple Maize.' I'll find another name for it before then. This is a corn from the collection of Native Seed/SEARCH, unfortunately an unmarked ear, that is a purple colored dent corn. Dent corn is a combination between a flour corn and a flint corn. I just learned the difference this last week at Seed School. Flour corns are softer and are preferred as the source for flour. Flint corns are harder and can be used like flour corns but they are harder to grind and are therefore not the first choice. However, that hardness insures that they will keep better so most folks dealing with subsistence agriculture were inclined to grow both.

The two come together in a 'dent' corn. A dent corn has the interior of a flour corn with the exterior of a flint. The two dry differently with the flour giving up more moisture than the flint causing the kernel to have a 'dent,' a rather pr0nounced dimple, at the top of the kernel. They have a reputation for being highly productive corns – in fact, from the 1890's to the 1920's, THE corn American farmers grew was Reid's Dent, a charming story I'll write down one day soon. Reid's Dent was superseded by the beginning of the hybrid era which continues through today. This corn, collected from the Native American gardens of America's south west is most assuredly a drought tolerant corn and only a chance cross between a flour and flint corn, in other words, not a stable cross and the resulting seeds are as likely to be a flour or flint as well as a dent.

There is no listing for a purple dent corn in the Native Seed/SEARCH database, but here was this one ear. Purple can be equated with higher levels of anthocyanins. If one could breed a corn that was high in anthocyanins, stored well and produced abundantly, one might have a hit on his hands. Or, in the words of the Tucson gardening community, spoken with a tongue firmly in cheek, “Rich, Rich, Rich! It's going to make us Rich, Rich, Rich!” Of course, nothing in plant breeding does these days and I would be happy enough to breed a useful plant that helps us actually assuage hunger rather than sell more herbicides.

Corn breeding is harder than tomato or pepper breeding, because corn cannot be inbred too much before one gets a very negative feedback from the corn in weak and unproductive plants. I am starting with only a few seeds, so the first year is to grow out enough seeds to begin to experiment – of course, I will only select to plant corn seed that continues to exhibit the purple dent characteristics. It is important to note that I will need 200 or more plants in the second year in order to not experience the negative effects of inbreeding. The good news is that the plants can be located in different gardens. So, I'll be looking around for places I can plant something like forty plants in to achieve my 200 plant minimum.

But we need more plants being bred – we need plants that can survive drought, hotter temperatures (many pollens die at higher temperatures, we need to find look for pollen with more tolerance to heat), plants that remain upright despite harsher storms. All these are likely scenarios in the coming decades because of global climate change. These are plants that will produce the food the world will need in the coming years.

This is the work that will prevent hunger and starvation – not the work of Big Ag and their dependence on oil and patents. If I get a new variety of corn, yes, I WILL patent it. But I'll patent it so it cannot be patented by someone else. I'll give the patent to the Seed Library of Los Angeles or some other philanthropic conscious group.

What would you breed if you had the chance? You probably can do it! And remember, if you fall short, you can still eat the results! I hope you are excited too!

david

The Forsaken Garden: The Food Humanity Forgot, Part 2

2011-06-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

Corn is one of the most hybridized plants in our world today, but most of the hybrids developed in the past 50 years has nothing I want in my garden. This ancient race of corn, at present not precisely identified, from the Native Seed/SEARCH collection does have traits I want: It is a dent corn, meaning it has the keeping qualities of a flint combined with the finer grain of a flour corn. The blue tint holds higher nutrition. One of my projects now is to develop a blue (higher nutrition), dent corn (longer shelf life and finer grain - dents also tend to be among the more productive corn races). I have two corn breeding projects on the books right now.

Even by the time the professionals were breeding plants – before the genetic modification started – the intent was no longer to breed plants for any kind of long term strategy. Just like modern Wall Street, the idea became to get in, make a buck and not be around when the thing imploded. Home gardeners and food consumers became the victims of this make-a-buck strategy. Mind you, the mantra of the promoters of this type of agricultural advancement was: Cheap food – at any price. And no other country bought it up the same way Americans did. And still do. What's the best food store has almost always been the cheapest – a mold that is being broken by Whole Foods Market and that's about the only bone I'll throw them.

It's an odd thing that among 1^st World Countries, Americans are the most likely to think food has to be cheap. And, in that guise, we went along for it. Cheap and easy was our national anthem from way before the American Revolution. But the trade offs were huge! Nutrition and taste were not important and were not considered as a 'desirable' outcome of the research.

During this time, the old kind of plant breeding comprised an ever shrinking portion of the plant breeding. And while modern science was breeding in disease resistance to tomatoes and other vegetables, the open pollinated plants were left alone. “Breeding resistance” into plants is another way to describe “breeding more virulent diseases” because, as the plants become resistant, diseases co-evolve to take on the new, improved plants. The net effect of this is that our cherished heirlooms have been compromised by a lack of disease resistance to diseases that weren't around when our treasured plants were being bred.

Now is the time to move beyond 'saving heirlooms.' That is old hat. We have saved a lot of them. Now, we must begin to move beyond just 'saving' them. We must begin to adapt them to our world. We need to confer disease resistance on these tasty and rich jewels of cuisine if we are going to be able to keep them and if they will be the basis of an agriculture that keeps us from starving when the chemicated, profit driven agriculture turns on us by failing to deliver – which it will do sooner or later.

So the challenge before us is to do the work of breeding disease resistance from the hybrids (not the GMOs – which is a different critter altogether and among our people is considered a contamination. There are many hybrids out there from which we can cull disease resistance or other qualities we find desirable in our food. In other words, the word 'hybrid' cannot be a bad or nasty word – we have come to a place where the word 'hybrid' has been far too demonized. It is true that the recent history of hybrids is tied in with the mad rush for profit, but the word itself simply means the 'product of a cross.' Hence most of our rich diverse, collection of open-pollinated plants are all hybrids; the difference that needs to be noted is that the open-pollinated plants are stable crosses – whereas the hybrids of the dollar are unstable crosses – in other words, they have not been grown out for successive generations to insure the good qualities are there to stay.

This work has begun already. Organic Seed Alliance in Oregon and Practical Farmers of Iowa both have breeding programs, although both are focused on farming crops.

Many organizations have been saving all this marvelous germplasm that is the basis for this work. We need to get busy - not only in continuing to save the germplasm, but also to breed resistance to the delicious tasting food our ancestors left for us. We need to be true to this treasure and the way best to do that is to not only save it as it is, but to breed it to compete in this modern world and produce fruit reliably and honestly for our children and their children.

david

The Forsaken Garden: The Food Humanity Forgot, Part 1

2011-06-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

For all of the history of agricultural civilization, the farmers and gardeners saved their seeds to have something to plant next year. As soon as humankind began to depend on crops grown in tended fields, saving seeds was as much a part of the process as was planting seeds the following growing season.

This is the way it was, each generation of humans selecting the seeds that would be the food of the following year. In this manner, humans were 'breeding' their crops for characteristics they found desirable. Larger grains, resistance to falling apart in the field before they could be harvested and so on. It was not called 'breeding' but it was breeding. Every choice to save one seed over the others in the basket or on the plant was a decision that carried some genetic information forward and left others to be eaten.

We know this is true because ethnobotanists can look into the detritus of past civilizations and tell within a few years of when a crop becomes domesticated. The change from a wild seed crop to a domesticated seed crop is dramatic and fairly rapid. Seed heads become more uniform, the seeds are larger, they don't fall apart easily in the field and other characteristics clearly delineate the departure from 'natural selection' to human selection.

It continues this way over all history. Up until about the 1950's. In the late 1800's seed companies sprang up to help people experience other seeds, lending a diversification that gardens hadn't been able to have unless the owner traveled a bit or had connections in other parts of the land. The average gardener didn't have access to anything that wasn't local. But seed companies made a lot of seed available to these gardeners and expanded the ability of regions to grow seed adapted to their areas from other similar climates that may not be nearby.

Still, barring a disaster, once a gardener purchased the seed, the gardener would save seeds for future plantings until some other seed tantalizingly calls to be planted (we all know what that feels like). Seed companies also tried to breed new plants to be able to offer something new each year. This was the heyday of many great American seed companies that became institutions, like Burpee, introductions we are all familiar with were bred at Burpee's Fordhook Farm - including Fordhook Swiss Chard. Other plants were bred by a horde amateur seed breeders - including the mechanic 'Radiator Charlie' who paid off his house with sales of seeds of his "Mortgage Lifter" tomato.

I remember many winters as a child in Kansas, sitting in front of Grandpa's woodstove with snow all over the garden. I went through the Burpee catalog, Park Seeds and many other seed proprietor catalogs underlining dozens of plants I wanted Grandpa to order for the coming year - I read each catalog hundreds of times, memorizing the descriptions and the names and adoring every single variety - the Burpee catalog in those days was many, many more pages long than it is today. Grandpa never did, by the way. He saved his own seeds for the most part and, if he needed more seed, he bought locally. I didn't understand this until I was an adult growing my own seeds and feeling a little sheepish at how demanding I was about ordering seeds that Grandpa didn't want or need.

Up until the 1950's, one thing that was true of ALL plant breeding was done by amateur plant breeders. Sometime around the 1950's breeding began to fall into the hands of college educated plant breeders - people well versed with genetic backgrounds - and the beginning of commercial funding of science research. The focus shifted from regional seed production to national and international seed sales and companies more interested in profit than in 'traditional values' of the older seed breeders. Run on that Republican traditional value politicians!

This became the years of the hybrids and crop yields went through the roof! But the concentration was entirely on bushels per acre and very little else. In many cases the plants required disease resistance in order to produce well and that was bred into the plants. I don't want to disparage many advances made in this time frame because a lot of valuable work was done that should not be thrown out simply because the primary interest was in selling hybrid seeds.

Mind you, to me, the line was crossed with genetically modifying plant seeds. And patenting seeds. This is one more of the incursions the 'industrial' model of agriculture. Once the industrial model was applied to agriculture, and profit became the only motive, agriculture as a whole was set adrift, and no part was more adrift than plant breeding. The point was to make profit and keep making profit for as long as possible. Hence, patents were 'necessary' and positive traits, valuable to individual gardeners and farmers and the eventual consumers (like taste) became lost in the race for profit. By the time I became an adult gardener in the 1980's, seeds no longer were the seeds of my grandfather.

More on this tomorrow: the next frontier for garden seeds.

david

for the Seed library of Los Angeles, SLOLA

Greener Gardens Offered By UCLA Extension in Summer Quarter

2011-06-19T21:25:00.000-07:00

Orchid Black and I on a field trip Spring Quarter 2010, the last time we taught ‘Greener Gardens: Sustainable Garden Practice’

UCLA Extension offers this class in Summer Quarter this year, starting Thursday, June 23, 6:30 PM in Botany 325, on the UCLA campus. People who take this class will get the benefit of the breadth of experience that each of us brings to sustainability in the garden. This class fulfills an elective for the certificate programs in both Horticulture and Global Sustainability.

We will cover sustainable design, soils, swales and earthworks, appropriate use of greywater and rainwater harvesting, along with the basics of native and drought-tolerant planting. All aspects of sustainable backyard food will be addressed.

The UCLA Extension catalog, lists the class as follows:

“Sustainability is today’s buzzword and many people seek to create a lifestyle with a more favorable impact on the environment. From home and school gardens, to commercial sites, our gardens present the perfect place to start. Designed for horticulture students, gardening professionals, educators, and home gardeners, this course focuses on turning your green thumb into a “greener” garden. Topics include composting, irrigation, water harvesting, water wise plants, eating and growing local produce, recycling, and moving away from a consumptive, non-sustainable lifestyle when choosing materials and tools. … “

I taught this course as a half elective on my own for two years before being able to team up with Orchid. Her knowledge and effective teaching puts this class into its own league. Orchid is an award winning designer of California Native gardens, a delegate to the state-wide organization of the California Native Plant Society and did excellent work on the Los Angeles County Native Oak Ordinance Working Group. She has studied water issues for several years and has a keen understanding of the problems we face around that issue. She blogs at Native Sanctuary.

On another front, I return to Los Angeles on Sunday the 26th and be a panelist for the upcoming Dwell on Design event. In the mix of the events right now, I was quoted by the Los Angeles Times in their article on the Seed Library of Los Angeles.

Here’s a link to UCLA Extension page for the class, which still has a few spaces open:

https://www.uclaextension.edu/r/Course.aspx?cn=X+498.10&dc=BIOLGY

david

Resilient Food Systems Begin with Locally Adapated Seed

2011-05-13T17:43:00.000-07:00

I have been reading a The Resilient Gardener, by Carol Deppe - she's the one who wrote 'Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving' which I love so much. Deppe is a wonderful thinker and I love the concept of honing our gardening skills to be better gardeners when times are good so we can carry on when times aren't so good. She makes a good case for this kind of thinking using examples from her own life and from the greater society.

Resilience has become a buzzword because of the Transition Town movement that started in England. I allow that resiliency is a good goal, but it's a tricky one to achieve here in Los Angeles, dependent so much, as we are, on imported water and the electricity it takes to get it here. Still, allowing for that, Fred Kirschenmann has written a blog post on saving seeds as one of the first steps in developing a resilient gardening paradigm.

The blog post and the book are both well worth your time.

david

How Mulch Is Too Mulch?

2011-04-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

A fresh load of compost/mulch was delivered at The Learning Garden and I got to run my fingers through this stuff right off the truck! Gardeners love the way this stuff smells. Mere humans often dislike it. Compost can be a mulch - it is not necessarily 'mulch' but can be used as one.

Jeanne Kuntz is preparing a post for over at Mar Vista Patch using a clever play on the word 'mulch' (Mulch to be Grateful For) so, I couldn't resist getting a little punny here.

A bit of Q & A between myself and Jeanne follows:

JK: How does mulch condition the soil?

When mulch is laid on soil, it stops sun rays from hitting the soil and baking the top layer. The mulch also prevents water evaporation by breaking the water column in the soil. (Water molecules stick together and 'pull' water through the soil. In evaporation, one molecule evaporating causes the next molecule to move towards the surface to evaporated. When the soil medium is no longer homogeneous, i.e. mulch on top has a different consistency than the soil, the water column is broken and evaporation of below- surface water is stopped.)

But mulch's big contribution to the soil is that it provides food for a whole host of critters in the soil that break the mulch down. Mulch feeds the micro and macro life of the soil and THAT increases soil's fertility. One of the main critters chowing down on the mulch is the earthworm. The earthworm makes a tunnel from below to the surface to chow at the mulch banquet, grabbing a plateful, which the earthworm carries below the surface, creating yet another tunnel. Many earthworms = many tunnels - painlessly, effortlessly creating the same delicious soil tilth we used to double dig, breaking out back, to achieve. I've got garden beds that have never been dug and you can easily put your hand into them as though I had spent days out there sweating by double digging.

What is the main difference between the various types of mulch?

Well, 'mulch' is technically anything you put on the surface of the soil to protect it. That includes rocks and plastic and other materials. We are, I think, talking about 'organic mulches' - the ones that used to be plant material (leaves, wood chips, compost or even bagged materials like 'organic compost' or 'planters mix') and they have differing effects on the soil. If it is broken down to the point of being more black than not, it does what I was saying above. The differing mulches will contribute slightly different nutrients to the soil, but, in the main, there isn't much difference in their action - some will break down more slowly and some more quickly, but they will all break down and feed your soil biota.

JK: Is there are difference between how one uses mulch for edibles vs ornamental plantings?

I wouldn't think so. I think mulch in flower borders is much more attractive than dirt - it saves water and cuts down on the need of fertilizers. I add mulch about three inches deep in spring and in fall and that's all I add to my garden, ornamental or veggie.

JK: Is the mulch you have at The Learning Garden at Venice High School available to the public?

The Learning Garden's mulch is from Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation and is delivered to us because we make it available to the community at large.We are open Wednesday through Sunday, from about 10 to about 5:00 - I say 'about' because I'm there alone and if I have to pick something up from the hardware store or go to lunch, that means we're closed for that amount of time.

And by the way The Beautiful Food Garden Blog turns three today! Thank all of you for your support!

david

Loss of a Mentor

2011-02-18T22:28:00.000-08:00

Jim Otterstrom died January 22^nd, his memorial service will be held in his home town of Big Bear.

Jim, and his wife Peggy, became my friends through my association with Orchid Black. They were close friends of hers, living a lifestyle that closely approximates her dreams. I spent only a few hours with Jim and Peggy, but found them to be like-spirits and I too admired their car-less life that had such low impact on the earth. Jim took fantastic photos and posted them to his blog. Peruse some of them if you will.

Orchid will read some poetry and I will play a couple of songs in the memorial service. He had head me play these songs the first night I met him and he approved of them. Music and art of all kinds figured large in Jim's life. The memorial service has been lovingly titled, “Otter-Strum” with a large of host of talented musicians of all flavors.

I wish I had many more hours with Jim in his garden, with his chickens and in their home. It inspired me to press on with my personal vision of how my life will be. I owe him a debt that will probably only be repaid by living the life of my own dreams, in my own way, on my own land.

I am grateful that I was offered the opportunity of knowing Jim Otterstrom.

david

Urban Homestead, Urban Homestead, Urban Homestead

2011-02-18T21:55:00.000-08:00

A 'city-chick' pecks in her 'urban homestead' yard. Doubtless she doesn't care about the controversy and maybe we could take a cue from her.

There are major forces arrayed to stop people from living the homestead dream – in the city and in the country. There are big corporations that believe you need to pay them before you can plant a garden – or that you should not bother to plant a garden at all but buy your food from supermarkets – food that has been grown from trademarked and patented seeds, grown with trademarked and patented inputs like fertilizer and pesticides. The homestead movement, both urban and rural, has a huge fight on its hands everyday of the year against these corporations and the government they control.

On Facebook, the biggest buzz between most of my friends has not been against Monsanto or the Obama administration, or events in Egypt but against one of our own: Path to Freedom, a pioneering family (the Dervaes) project in Pasadena, trademarked the term “urban homestead” and began sending cease and desist letters (NB: OK, so technically they are not 'cease and desist' letters, not actually using those words... However, read what the Dervaes posted - in their own defense - and tell me if that is an unfair characterization.) to other urban homesteaders. It was a shock that one of the leaders in this field had become the 'other' and indulge in the same practices associated with land rapers and profiteers.

Let there be no mistake: It is hard to discount the inspiration, if not applicable information, from the Dervaes family. I got to visit their homestead before they were the famous icon of the movement they became. By that point, tours of the homestead were not on their agenda, they were too busy with increasing productivity. Their blog is often referenced in conversations and many people in the homestead vein relish telling newcomers about the chickens, ducks, goats and amazing productivity of the Path to Freedom project.

But we now are fighting between ourselves, those of us who are, or wish to be urban – or rural – homesteaders. Most are aligned firmly against the Dervaes' family simply because they recognize that this is headed to wasted energy that should be used in furthering the cause. There is no ultimate 'urban homestead' worthy of the trademarking of the name. There will never be. It, like the people who flock to be homesteaders, is an ever evolving idea, concept. To attempt to trademark the name is as foolish as an attempt to pin the concept to the present time.

Why even try? There was some feeble defense on the Dervaes' blog that they were trademarking it so the term couldn't be co-opted by industrial imitators. Good move. We know how 'organic' and 'natural' mean nothing any more because they have become ad terms describing something more natural, say, than steroid injections. However, if that was the real idea, why did the cease and desist letters go to those who aren't industrial – the Institute for Urban Homesteading, Eric Knutzen who authored, “The Urban Homestead” or Santa Monica Farmers' Market Association when they did a seminar on the subject? If that was honestly the thought behind the trademarking move, it begs even further explanation because the targets ostensibly were on the same side of the Dervaes family's ideology. It doesn't make any sense.

I conclude it was hubris. The Dervaes have done much and much is owed to them. Somehow, though, they seem to feel that they deserve homage more than recognition. They seem to feel that their advances in urban homesteading are so complete and revolutionary that they alone have the right to be 'urban homesteaders.' This is not true. They wish to deny all of those, for hundreds of years, that went before them, with no trademarks on anything they did, and those that will follow and will take the urban homestead to even greater pinnacles.

On their website they state: "We have now secured registered trademarks for certain unique names and images. By protecting our intellectual property we are better able to ensure that our work is presented accurately and contributes to our sustainable living projects and educational initiatives." Unique? Our intellectual property? Our work? Our sustainable projects? They obviously believe that they somehow have come to own 'urban homesteading' which would come as a surprise to the many who have been doing this for years and selfishly wish to protect 'their intellectual property' at the expense of an entire movement. Sorry, no one can own it more than any other can own it.

You cannot trademark this movement. It moves. It is constantly in flux. It grows. It recoils. And it eats those who think they have mastered it. It is a world of individualists that don't pay homage to a leader. In fact, one of the central ideals of homesteading, predating the 'urban' part, is anti-authority. I don't believe that homesteader gives a rat's ass for the legal system to begin with. And then to invoke trademark challenges against your own?

I hope that we can soon return to our normal diatribes against our real enemies. I pray that the Dervaes family withdraws its poorly-conceived trademark ownership and spends its time and money on making a better ideal for all to follow and allows other urban homesteaders to do the same. This is not a battle we need. Under even the best circumstances, the Dervaes family has abdicated their roles as leaders and sadly will be known as 'plays poorly with others' more than for their innovation and hard work in making their own urban homestead a truly innovative site in the homestead pantheon.

While it will move through the courts, here the battle is over. Let's move on. We have real work to do.

david

Seminar: Essentials of Vegetable Seed Saving - Enroll Today!

2011-01-01T19:29:00.000-08:00

Genetic diversity is evident in these ears of corn, all from the same batch of seed... this richness must be preserved!

Happy New Year everyone!

The Learning Garden at Venice High School is offering an exciting new seminar for January 29th, 10:00 to 3:00 (lunch included!): Essentials of Vegetable Seed Saving.

Seed saving has become a 'must-know' skill as people have recognized how utterly essential seeds are to our ability to survive.

Generations before us understood the importance of saving seeds. Saving seeds to plant in the coming year was essential and, long before science showed the why of it, humankind understood we could select the best plants and improve the varieties we depended upon. This vital connection was lost as we began to purchase our seeds from seed sellers making the need to save seed seem less relevant. In recent times, we are confronted with GMOs and monster corporations controlling the seeds they created and with that came the very real specter of seed corporations having control over the food supply.

Saving our vegetable biodiversity today provides us

those delicious open pollinated varieties that were bred to taste good.
a wider range of vegetable varieties that aren't often available through catalogs.
a closer participation in the cycle of life.
a hedge against our own personal misfortune of losing a job or other financial setback.
a safeguard against food shortages caused by natural or man-made disasters.
with our own means to mitigate against global climate change and it's impact on agriculture.
the means to fight our shrinking biodiversity.

Seed saving enhances the gardening experience even more because good gardeners become better gardeners and some will go on to create unique open-pollinated vegetable varieties – adapted to this place!

This is the seminar you need if you are concerned about -

the presence of GMO's in our food.
the preservation of old 'heirloom' vegetable varieties.
equal access to good clean healthy food for everyone regardless of economic status.
our ability in Los Angeles to produce vegetables acclimatized to our local (and very unique) climate.
the future of seeds and food!

You will learn

to plan for your seed saving – things to do to enable success.
how different plants are pollinated and what that means to saving seed .
to identify different plant families and how that affects the seed saving process.
the best time to pick for the best seed viability.
to ensure your seed is kept pure from other varieties and unwanted characteristics.
to clean and dry different seeds and other processes for optimum storage.
the equipment and essential supplies you will have to have if you want to save some seeds and what you won't need for MOST seeds.

Taught by The Learning Garden's Gardenmaster, David King, this seminar will emphasize how to do it and practical examples will show everyone how to best save the more common vegetable seeds with information on saving all kinds of seeds included.

David King is an experienced lecturer, well known for practical seminars that are accessible and informative. The lively lectures, full of quirky humor, move through the topic, getting to the heart of the matter without a lot of extra jargon, but with the data you need to get out and save some seeds!

Lunch will be served enable participants to join in community over the break (12 to 1:00 PM). Pamela Nears, an accomplished organic and 'fresh from the garden' chef, will treat all with a vegetarian stew and other menu items (price included in your registration) that will nourish and enhance the garden experience. Coffee, tea and water will abound.

Weather permitting, the seminar will be held outside. The Learning Garden is usually cooler than any other place in Los Angeles, thanks to the three large trees shading the patio, please dress warmly in January - although if it is too cold, we will be indoors.

Early registration helps us plan and will save you money. Registration at the door is on an 'as available' basis - seating is limited and we expect to fill!

Use the PayPal button below to enroll now. If you have diet concerns (other than vegetarian) please make a note on your registration and we will work something out.

Members of Seed Library of Los Angeles (SLOLA) will receive a $5 discount - all other attendees will become members of the Seed Library of Los Angeles; $5 of your registration fee goes to SLOLA for your membership automatically.

Thank you,
david

As of today, the 25th of January, this seminar is full. If you are interested in a future offering, or wish to be on a wait list for this offering, please leave me a comment and we'll work something out - if we have enough interest, we'll plan a second offering as soon as we can.

Thank you,

david

Visions of What SLOLA Could Be

2010-12-24T12:14:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine shows off a Christmas Lima Bean, named for the bright red and white seeds. A productive Lima bean that persists right through our winters,'Christmas' is on my list of seeds that I hope SLOLA will save - what is on YOUR list?

Right now SLOLA (the Seed Library of Los Angeles) is in a formative stage and we have committees that deal with some things that aren't so interesting for most of us. We have to have rules/bylaws; we need to set standards and create protocols with structure – and we have to do it from whole cloth in order to make this vision of a seed library work and make it work for the generations to follow – if we set something in motion and fail to make it strong as an organization and institution, we could see all the work go for nothing if the seeds cannot be kept with pure genetic lines maintained and attention to all the little details wherein the Devil resides.

But... If you are at all like me, seeds are one of my playgrounds and I love to fiddle with them. When I'm not planting them, I'm dreaming about them and I'm making lists of what I'll plant later this year or what I hope I will be able to plant soon or maybe some rare heirloom that I can't find will obsess me for days until I either find it or give up trying. I grew up in Kansas and during the winter, with snow over the garden, I would page through the seed catalogs, memorizing the ones with the descriptions that captured my imagination, making long lists of the ones I wanted Grandpa to buy. He saved his seeds, so really never did take second note of my long lists, but I learned a lot from those seed catalogs and the fascination of a house-bound ten year old gardener for seeds is still with me today.

At the December meeting I asked everyone to come back to the January meeting (the 15^th) with a list of 25 vegetable seeds they would like to see be a part of the collection of seeds that SLOLA offers. I hope you've been playing with this list; I have! I have about already over shot twenty five, so anyone needing additional suggestions, I'm ready to supply you with several to give you a full list!

But after I had made the list, I began to daydream about the future of SLOLA; a time when there is no real bylaws committee and the database committee is ad hoc, coming together only to solve a problem or to work out a better solution as warranted.

When that time comes, I see a Potato committee, a Lettuce Committee, a Pepper Committee and a Corn Committee and committees for every seed for which there is an interest in carrying on specific traits or creating newer cultivars. Each committee is looking at that plant and the different varieties available and perhaps even making new open-pollinated cultivars that improve the plants we can grow in the Los Angeles Basin. Perhaps in a few years, the L A area could be awash in the just-released “Bonilla Potato” or the “Spitz Red Leaf Lettuce!” Maybe there will be a super-productive red-skinned (and fleshed!) potato called “Rose Spuds” or a “Souper Soup Bean!"

The possibilities could be even more productive than the hybrids we see today – the only reason hybrids have become so much more productive than open-pollinated seeds is the amount of research that has gone into them – and that productivity has been at the expense of other, arguably just as important qualities, like taste or ability to grow and produce well in the micro-climate of the LA Basin. What has been done with hybrids can be approximated with open-pollinated plants. Corporations won't do it because there is no profit in it for them that justifies the research and trials – but a seed library can and should put efforts into breeding more productive stock for our areas.

But we will also need people who have mechanical skills to create appropriately powered machines to help us keep our seeds and make them even more available to more people. I have pondered for years the idea of a bicycle powered grain thresher, a device that would pound the wheat kernel free from the husk that holds it and winnow out the debris of the husk leaving a person with a wheat berries to be ground. Already my mind is turning to a similar contraption that will remove all the corn seeds from a cob without burning blisters into a person's hands.

It's not just wheat seeds that need threshing – several other vegetables can be hard to break out of coverings – and who knows? - maybe one day SLOLA will offer some varieties of wheat that do well in Los Angeles – or perhaps rice or other grain – they do comprise a large part of our diets.

But first veggies. Then I'm very keen on herbs – culinary and medicinal and flowers – edible and medicinal - and even those flowers that are not edible and 'only' good for the spirit, like my favorite, sweet peas. They are 'food for the soul' as some wise person a few years ago said.

The idea that one day we can have a small catalog of seeds available to members that will cover all the major vegetables and a few of the not so major ones as well, is tremendously empowering and exciting. I can't even think of this for a few minutes before I get all enthusiastic and I want to run out and plant another row of something that needs to be saved and dream of a future of a secure food supply, made secure by a few people who saw and acted on their uncommon common sense..

Times that are tenuous are often the times of greatest creativity. Certainly, in a turbulent economic time, faced with the greed of behemoth companies like Monsanto and others, a determined band of Los Angelenos came together to fight back the only way they could; by planting a seed of something that could grow.

I remember the old line: "Hope will never die as long as seed catalogs are printed.” Perhaps we can say, “Hope is ours to plant and harvest; we tend our own hope and hold our own destiny in our hands,” once again like our forebearers once did and we can claim their independence because of the seeds we have planted today.

Long live SLOLA!!

Here's MY current seed list of seeds I want to save first, subject to change as I think of more, in no particular order:

Queensland Blue Squash
Cannelini Bush Bean
Flammé Tomato
Tango Lettuce
Drunken Woman Lettuce
Merlot Lettuce
Merville des Quatre Saison Lettuce
Nutribud Broccoli
Burpee's Golden Beet
Five Color Silverbeet Chard (AKA Rainbow Chard)
DiCicco Broccoli
San Marzano Tomato
Cherokee Tomato
Pencil Pod Wax Bean
Royal Burgundy Bean
Parris Island Cos Lettuce
Jalapeno Pepper
Corno di Toro Pepper
Scarlet Nantes Carrot
Chioggia Beet
Purple Top White Globe Turnip
Copenhagen Market Cabbage
Winningstadt Cabbage
Country Gentleman Corn
Golden Bantam Corn
Garden Peach Tomato
Fiber Flax
White Cherry Tomato
Gossypium arborense
Gossypium hirsutum
Gossypium barbadense
Christmas Lima Bean
Albino Beet
Bulls Blood Beet
Calabrese Broccoli
Hutterite Soup Bean
Mammoth Red Rock
Early Snoball Cauliflower
Bloody Butcher Corn
Mexican Wedding Corn
Stowell's Evergreen Corn
Armenian Cucumber
Long Red Florence Onion

Hope your list is just as long and varied and I hope we can have all of these in our inventory by this time next year... Oh.. And Merry Christmas (Lima Beans) to you and yours!

david

Combating Hunger: A Growers' Bibliography

2010-10-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

I was approached by a young woman wanting to learn how to teach others how to garden even though she feels she needs to learn more about it herself. Probably no other goal lends itself more to my passion and what I most love to teach. I have often dreamed I would run away from home and join the Peace Corps and go off to grow food in other parts of the world. I have fantasized about being sent to the country of Georgia (home to garlic), or other places where I could learn about the land races of different foods.

Back in the late 1980's I read Save Three Lives by Robert Rodale and Mike McGrath; Rodale was killed before the book was finished. This book galvanized my thinking and long before it was common knowledge that there was no food shortage in the world that couldn't be fixed with political will and transportation, I understood that our government - along with the other imperial powers - perpetuated famine a lot more than they actually relieved it. Since then, The White Man's Burden showed how that problem, in the years since Rodale's book had only gotten worse, not better.

When I went to Guatemala, I took copies Rodale and McGraths' book to give away while I was there - and I have frequently given this book to those I think could use it and grasp its importance. I still refer back to it and it occupies a place of honor on my bookshelf.

I also took Out Of The Earth with me to Guatemala, though it is not a 'how-to' agriculture book. Daniel Hillel has written a truly readable book about mankind's relationship with the soil that approaches poetry in many paragraphs. I have read passages from this book to classes I teach on soils - I have had students from those classes tell me five years on that the one thing they loved the most about my soils class was that I turned them on this book.

But the book I read that first intimated that there are other ways to grow things was J. Russell Smith's Tree Crops. The current reprint is from 1987, but the original manuscript was first published in the first third of the 1900's, reprinted again sometime in the 1950's! This man should have won a bunch of prizes, because, like Small is Beautiful, Schumacher's brilliant essay written far in advance of everything else along that line, Smith at that early date decries the destruction of the rain forest (what would he say today?) and postulates the beginnings of permaculture. And judging by the price on this book at Amazon, I'm going into my office right now and taking my copy home! With this book and Rodale's book provide a solid study on a new way to feed people - especially in lands with erratic rainfall. A term that could be used to describe much more of the Earth now that climate change is so obviously an everyday part of life on this planet.

All these books set the stage for one to appreciate some new ways of frying the same old fish, but for a 'how-to,' one can't go much righter than John Jeavon's How To Grow More Vegetables and Fruits Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine. I do NOT subscribe to Jeavon's double digging, but the crops he plants, the spacings he uses and all the data he has on how many row feet to feed this number of folks a good diet and all the data on compost makes this a reference that is unbeatable on today's market.

Instead of all that double digging, I suggest the regimen first postulated by Fukuoka, in One Straw Revolution, especially when coupled with the work of Emily Hazelip as seen on You Tube videos. She took the Fukuoka method and 'translated' it to a French market garden. Although I have yet to put her methodology into total practice, I try emulate as much as I can and I have a goal to work towards.

Remember, the idea that we need machines, hybrids, fertilizers and insecticides to produce food for the masses is mostly a set of lies designed to sell us products we don't really need. Mind you, I can see where a small tractor and some mechanical assistance would be helpful, but it's not essential. In fact, the most productive way to grow food is not on a farm at all, but in a garden where most of the work is done by hand: calorie for calorie the garden is the most efficient way to produce food. In fact, the bigger the operation, the less efficient the process. The so-called 'economy of scale' does not work for growing food unless one feels no compunction about poisoning the earth, the water or the workers and doesn't mind food grown in stressful conditions.

And food of lesser quality as far as nutrients and taste are concerned. Another bill of goods we have been sold is the idea of the unblemished, perfect fruit. Those fruits that have no marks, no bites from them are only possible as long as heavy doses of poisons are used to kill insects. It is a price Americans need to learn is too high. In fact, the blemished fruit needs to be held up as the epitome of goodness, Mom apple pie and all that is right in the world.

But that's a fight that will have to come later - right now, lets learn as much as we can about how one grows a complete diet at home for one family and understand the urgency and importance of that.

david

Nikolay Vavilov And The Fight Against Hunger

2010-09-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

In the world of hunger prevention and the honest efforts to better mankind's access to enough food for everyone, Nikolay Vavilov's name counts among one of the most important and dynamic pioneers. Unwilling to sit in a lab or in a university office, Vavilov made several very important excursions to areas where the beginnings of agriculture took root and there, where plants were first domesticated by humans, Vavilov sought to find, access and use that genetic diversity to help grow the crops that would feed the Russian people of the newly formed Soviet Union.

That Soviet Union supported Vavilov through out the beginnings of his career and allowed him to go on these international excursions – to Ethiopia, Mexico and the Amazon rainforest. Everywhere Vavilov went, he collected seeds, specimens and data on the many different plants that he came across being used as food for humans. He introduced species to be grown that could adapt to the growing conditions of the Russian farm belt and worked tirelessly to expand the food production capabilities of the Russian farmer.

Stalin's Soviet Union turned on Vavilov and threw him in prison, where, ironically enough, Nikolay Vavilov starved to death. Stalin's regime needed scapegoats and Vavilov would not endorsed the Soviet theory of genetics that Stalin promulgated. During the famines of the 1930's, Stalin undertook to convince the population that good harvests were just at hand because the new 'Soviet genetics' promised immediate changes in food plants' genomes. Of course, it wasn't true and Soviet harvests, just like American harvests, languished through the Great Depression of that decade regardless of propaganda. Vavilov, however, was just as dead as were thousands of Russian peasants who died of starvation as well. But Vavilov's ideas and his plants were not.

In WWII, then known as Leningrad, St Petersburg was besieged by the Nazi army. Scientists working at the Vavilov Institute protected Vavilov's seed collections with their lives – choosing to not eat rather than eat the seeds of Vavilov's work. All this in much greater detail is the narrative of Gary Paul Nabhan's Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine. This small volume, incredibly readable, is one of many books Nabhan has written about our relationship to food. A quick read, it is none-the-less a fascinating tale of a truly gifted researcher who contributed much to our current understanding of food and how we came to have what we have to eat. Nabhan retraces Vavilov's journey on several of his important treks across our globe. It is a highly recommended read if you have any interest at all in eating.

Now, however, once again, the legacy of Nikolay Vavilov is again threatened, not by war, but by greed and development (I think the two words are practically synonymous – no, they don't have to be, they just often are). As reported on NPR a few days ago, the gardens that hold the plants grown from Vavilov's seeds is to be offered to the auction block for development. Please listen to the story. I am looking for a way to register my opposition to the sale of any property that is part of the Vavilov legend.

david

Check This Out: The Seed Library of Los Angeles (SLOLA)

2010-08-17T22:17:00.000-07:00

Vegetable seeds tightly closed in jars to keep them more viable are all from The Learning Garden's growing over the past couple of years. These very seeds could be the beginning of a seed library for the Los Angeles area.

The idea for the Seed Library of Los Angeles (SLOLA) has been brewing for some time and it's still not quite yet soup. However, it is now closer to reality because The Learning Garden at Venice High School has made it one of the projects they are willing to support.

A seed library works very similar to a book library. The main difference – and the big problem to make it viable – is that seeds are living entities with a life expiration. This means stock has to be dated and rotated – and some will have to be thrown out when it's too old to sprout.

As a member of a seed library, you check out seeds just like you would a book. You plant those seeds and grow out the crop, at the end of the season, you return fresh seeds,taken from your crop, to the library. The library benefits from being able to offer the next person fresh seed and you benefit from having free seeds. It's a win/win for you and your neighbors and it keeps Monsanto out of your garden and denies them profit from feeding your family. Furthermore, the seeds gradually become more adapted to our climate and soils. By choosing the best plants from the crop, like farmers used to do, we gently move the genetic makeup to suit our needs better.

The Learning Garden is the perfect place for a seed library because of the wealth of variety of plants grown there. Their gardens include a cornucopia of vegetables, California Natives and medicinal plants from which they can stock the seed library and keep it fresh.
The Learning Garden also has space to grow out seed that is getting too old to germinate.

To make this happen,the needs are, as follows:

volunteers to run the seed library – catalog and inventory the supplies and to run the 'open' days.'
a database complicated enough to thoroughly track the seed and insuring viability for those checking out the seed but simple enough to be used by volunteers – experiments are underway with a free database to see if it would work.
a computer that can run that database – the Garden has an old Windows 2000 machine that might work, but it would be better to have something more up to date.
several cabinets of some kind that can store the seeds.

So, right now, consider this a canvassing for folks who think this is a good idea and find people who want to join the seed library, people who want to help create a seed library and people who would be willing to volunteer one afternoon a month to open the seed library to the community. There may well be a $10 joining fee so the seed library can purchase supplies, but the idea is low cost seeds, so, other than fines for failing to return the seeds, just like a book late fee, there should be no other cost involved.

Let me know if you are interested – and I'll keep you posted as we move forward.

david

Lawns vs. Sanity

2010-04-08T18:30:00.000-07:00

A wooden aqueduct, part of Santa Barbara's original water supply (destroyed in last year's wild fires) is somewhat illustrative of the necessity of fresh water for civilization.

Recently, I was joking with a friend about the presence of lawns in Los Angeles. I think I concluded our conversation with a remark to the tune that, “It is utterly ridiculous to have a lawn in Los Angeles.”

A colleague, someone who teaches in the same horticulture program as I do, standing behind me, heard the comment and erupted into a tirade in defense of lawns and ended by declaring, and I think I'm pretty close to exactly what she said, “If we didn't have lawns, Los Angeles would be a hell hole!”

I was stunned. I thought I'd been transported back to the early 1960's. Such beliefs do not hold sway with the folks I know and I was shocked that a co-faculty member could hold this as a common truth.

Perhaps I'm being a little elastic. Could have been early 1990's. In my mind, wrecking other eco-systems to have green lawns went out of style a long time ago. No matter of the exact approximate date, by 2010 I thought even the village idiot knew that piping water from other places in order to have a lawn to look at was considered, at best, gauche.

After all, I would wager that 90% or more of the lawns in Los Angeles are walked on only when mowed. Like a Hummer H2 they are more to be looked at than driven.

But now, we are crossing beyond merely destroying our neighbor's ecosystems to water our pretty, but, worthless lawn. Currently, more and more, we are confiscating ('diverting' in our modern parlance – it means 'stealing') water that used to be used for agriculture. Water from the Colorado River, all up and down its course is being diverted to water lawns in Los Angeles, Tucson and many other cities. This water is not used for food production. That it is used to drink and bathe in cities does not bother me. But to divert this water from the river to indulge in the great luxury of a lawn is decadently selfish and unconscionable.

But to the direct assertion of “Los Angeles would be a hell-hole.” Some folks would argue it is one already and the grass we have has yet to ameliorate it so why the bother? I can only assume her concerns rest on the transpiration of moisture into the air by all this worthless grass. Plants release water into the atmosphere as they photosynthesize and all this grass around us photosynthesizing has to have some beneficial effect on our daily temperature highs. I'm sure she is right.

If you have only to choose between lawn and cement, I think lawn wins on being cooler, but concrete... Concrete has it's own sustainability problems and it's not a choice we have to make, so it's a moot question.

However, all plants release water as they photosynthesize, so grass is only one of thousands of plants we could choose to render us cooler. Only a precursory look, though, renders a conclusion that, of all the choices, grass ranks with other thirsty plants as the least desirable to help achieve this cooling. We have thousands of choices to cool us, and a good portion of those are drought-tolerant species. California oaks, needing no supplemental water in average years release some 280 gallons of water a day to help cool our atmosphere. Let's see: no water, no mowing, shade in the summer, beautiful leaves and 280 gallons in one day. Now, tell me again, why we need lawns in Los Angeles?

If low growing plants are essential to your well-being, then one of many of California's native grasses, sedges and other grass-like plants make lovely undulating lawns that neither drink excessively nor need mowing. They do better with some water, but nothing like the amount of water required by our lawn grasses. And there is a veritable cornucopia of California native plants that will photosynthesize and produce moisture in the air cooling our little 'hell-hole' quite nicely, all using less water than the ubiquitous lawn.

In fact, thousands of pounds (millions?) of good clean, healthy food could be grown in those same spaces and done so beautifully (as described in my upcoming book) using much less water than grass and which you will mow. There is no way to justify the ugly and horrible effects our lawns have on other ecosystems and there is no argument that sways me toward eating grass, even over eggplant!

In my mind, there is no line of reasoning that can be conjured to keep any private lawn. To argue that they are essential for the cooling of our atmosphere is simply a ludicrous proposition I cannot accept. Lawns are a drain on limited resources, provide no benefit that cannot be better provided with less input from other plants and impart only a limited aesthetic appeal. I say yank out the lot of lawns.

If you must have lawn, may I suggest you find a climate that supports your choice. You, and your lawn, are not welcome here.

david

‘Greener Gardens’ at UCLA Extension

2010-04-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

Orchid Black, shown from a recent tour of the Nature Conservancy's Rainwater Harvesting Demonstration site in Tucson, AZ.

I’ll be teaching ‘Greener Gardens: Sustainable Garden
Practise’ at UCLA Extension starting Monday, April 5
with co-instructor Orchid Black. This will be the third time I've
taught this class, although this will be the first time it's being
offered as a twelve week course allowing Orchid to offer a more
thorough treatment (get it?) of water in the garden. We’ll be covering swales and earthworks, as well as appropriate use of greywater and rainwater harvesting, along with the basics of native and drought-tolerant planting. All aspects of sustainable backyard food will be addressed.

Following is a quote from the UCLA Extension website:
“Sustainability is today’s buzzword and many people seek to create a lifestyle with a more favorable impact on the environment. From home and school gardens, to commercial sites, our gardens present the perfect place to start. Designed for horticulture students, gardening professionals, educators, and home gardeners, this course focuses on turning your green thumb into a “greener” garden. Topics include composting, irrigation, water harvesting, water wise plants, eating and growing local produce, recycling, and moving away from a consumptive, non-sustainable lifestyle when choosing materials and tools. … “

Teaching the class with Orchid will be a definite improvement for the course. In the past, she presented one night of water conservation which was obviously not enough depth. The class has been expanded from six sessions to twelve (half an elective to a full

elective) to allow her to develop the important issue of water conservation more fully and allow students to come to a deeper understanding of sustainability in our world.

Here’s a link to UCLA Extension webpage for the class, which is still open:

https://www.uclaextension.edu/r/Course.aspx?reg=V6501

david

The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants

2010-02-12T00:29:00.000-08:00

Jane S. Smith Author

Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 23, 2010)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0143116894

ISBN-13: 978-0143116899

Jane Smith gave a presentation to the Southern California Horticultural Society on her recently published (and soon to be published in paperback) book, The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants. I wish my UCLA Extension propagation class had been there. I bought the book, however, so everyone should expect to be regaled with stories from it over the coming weeks.

Burbank, before the world in general had grasped the implications of Mendel and Darwin's work, was busy putting his intellect into the art of breeding plants. He proved to be a genius at it and the catalog of his introductions over his lifetime is staggering! We owe to him the Burbank potato (over 150 years after its' introduction, it is still the most widely planted potato in the world); Shasta Daisy, a plant with four parents and a staple in cottage gardens world wide; and the Santa Rosa plum (and others) which is probably still the standard against which all red plums are gaged to this day. And MANY more!

His home in Santa Rosa, CA (hence the names of the plum and the daisy) is almost like going to Mecca for those gardeners who admire Burbank's work. This book, not so much a biography of the man as it is directed at his plant breeding, is perfect to understand the motives and the actions of Burbank, who still stirs controversy today. Some folks call him a huckster, some folks call him a charlatan. Others count Luther Burbank a hero and an extraordinary genius, up in the pantheon with Mendel, Darwin and others working in this field.

One story that I thought would be wonderful for a propagation class, involved a banker who had purchased a quantity of land that he wished to plant into orchards of plums. In February, he placed an order for 120,000 plum trees to be delivered that November. Burbank accepted the order and set about to fulfill it.

He planted fields of almond trees, a very fast growing tree in the same family and closely related to the plum. In late summer, Burbank grafted plum buds to all those trees which were dug and sold that November.! Not only was is it quite a cash windfall that Burbank could use, good reputations have been built on a lot less! It heaved Burbank's already god-like status deeply into the stratosphere.

Although I have only started the book, I think it will be a fine read to tear through on a week without a class. And it will be right in tune with teaching propagation to gardeners!

david

Botanical Interests Provides A New Button

2010-02-04T16:50:00.000-08:00

From the seeds given to the Venice High School Horticulture program, I plucked this packet of eggplant to show you the beautiful art work on a Botanical Interests seed packet and to show the price of $1.59 which is a pretty good price for a gram of eggplant seed. Mind you, this packet might be from a previous year's production so eggplant seed might be slightly higher, but still a good deal by any standards. And I've learned you won't be gouged on shipping charges either!

I'm pleased to call everyone's attention to the newly added direct link to Botanical Interests Seeds on each of my blogs. A little bit about Botanical Interests that makes me proud to add this link to my garden writings, besides the fact that they'll give me a small commission on everyone who orders seeds by using that button:

Botanical Interests has signed the Safe Seed Pledge guaranteeing NO GMO seeds in their listings. I consider this to be an essential commitment for any seed seller to get my business let alone my endorsement.
They carry a solid line up of vegetable seeds, usually having one of the best prices in the business per packet. They don't carry all of my favorites, but a darn good lot of them.
Many of the seeds are offered 'conventionally grown' or 'organically grown' when they can get the organic seed. The organic seeds are clearly marked so you can choose them easily if that's what you want.
I like the packets and the information on each packet provides some lovely factoids which, just like one of my lectures, can make you the life of the next party you attend. Just pull out five or six seed packets and you can impress just about anyone who will listen. Never ever be at loss for something to say again.
But the biggest reason I'm happy to put that button up here can be seed looking through the seeds donated to The Learning Garden and Venice High School's horticultural program over the years. Always high in the list of those donated the most seeds I have seen Botanical Interests time and again. Renee's Seeds and Seeds of Change have both sent along a lot of seeds too, but BI's prices nail the others to the ground. And it's quality seed in a bonus good looking, fun reading packet. Maybe one day we'll get them to do a story on the seed packets ala Burma Shave road signs! Wouldn't that be a hoot?

You probably won't find all the seed you want all the time from Botanical Interests, but the ones you do will be high quality and from a dealership you can trust to be honest and ethical. If you don't find all you want, please don't forget Seed Savers Exchange and Native Seed/SEARCH when ordering seeds also, they are the two non-profits I support and urge you too as well.

Hope will never die as long as seed catalogs are printed!

That's an old saw, I didn't make it up, though I wish I had.

david

School Gardens Cultivate A Richness Some Fail To Grasp

2010-01-28T14:28:00.000-08:00

Students at Venice High School's Learning Garden tend their plots on a sunny day last term. The Learning Garden is one of Los Angeles' most successful collaborative school/community gardens in California, turning a one acre eyesore into a learning experience that is trans-generational. David King is the garden manager (Gardenmaster) and teaches for UCLA Extension's Gardening and Horticulture Program.

In a recent article posted online by The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan opines that gardening as a part of a school curriculum is a waste of time and is, as her article is titled, “Cultivating Failure.” Ms. Flanagan has to do some acrobatics to come up with such a conclusion. She has painted horticulture with a brush that only sees it as manual labor and nothing more.

She loads her descriptions with powerful imagery that leaves one feeling she is hell bent on crushing some kind of sour grapes with her words. One could imagine her next article would be about the efficacy of feeding our students McDonald's and forcing them to stay inside for the entire school day. Her charge that a “recipe is easier to write than a coherent paragraph on The Crucible” evidences an elitist leaning and her evident phobia about science – God forbid that humans should be exposed to science, especially in a way that is real and fundamental to the human experience in, of all places, a school!

First and foremost, I want to call Ms. Flanagan's attention to the very real science involved in gardening, the raising of food and the preparation of food. She is evidently unaware that we all must eat and that culture, as Wendel Berry observed, is built on agriculture. She is obviously deluded by the propaganda that all food cultivation is thankless, back-breaking work for the shallow and uncluttered mind.

I wonder what she thinks of the obesity crises and why it is that just feeding a child a decent breakfast can raise test scores by 10 points (the least expensive way our society can raise those test scores!). She seems to hold that test scores are the only judge of worth, although she doesn't seem to think that teaching to test scores will not affect other school programs that I trust she does value.

Flanagan has a palpable distaste for that Chez Panisse and Alice Waters that comes across as almost pathological. I have never eaten at Chez Panisse and the people I work with in school gardens all over Los Angeles, don't strike me as the Chez Panisse crowd. Mostly, we are middle/lower class and we are eat a pretty standard fair for our daily meals.

But we eat better than most Americans of all economic strata because we know how to to grow a lot of our own food and we know the value of fresh, wholesomely grown food. The cheap food that Ms. Flanagan sees her poor Mexican protagonist picking as she opens her sorrowful and misguided tale is not the pinnacle of a modern society. It is an eyesore that needs to be remedied. We, as a society and culture, need to come to a place where the growing of food is no longer the counted as the sweat of the ignorant – but the consumption of such food by the affluent ignorant must end as well. Ms. Flanagan's ignorance permeates her entire article and The Atlantic should be ashamed for stooping to such low standards of journalism.

Speaking of 'vacuous,' Ms. Flanagan has no statistics on her side. She quotes one or two folks who tell her that gardens are not on their agenda because they have to get students to score high on those tests. I would argue that the tests are as much an error and a misguided compass as are Ms. Flanagan's conclusions. She bases her conclusions on single instances of school scores (a population of one is not science).

I would argue that no society can be great that has such a disparaging view of agriculture as Ms. Flanagan seems to hold. I would suggest that no nation can be strong if it must import the bulk of its food. I would propose that a nation might have to go to war to insure its continued supply of petroleum from abroad, but such a tactic is doomed to fail if that same nation went to war to guarantee its food supply.

The author's command of science is short and her infatuation with language so bloated that I don't think any serious reading of the article gains a person any understanding of school horticulture and the role it plays or doesn't play in educating children. By her criteria, schools should abandon sports, theater, possibly journalism and any other activity that does not lead to higher test scores. The school must teach the exam and only the exam. With irony, one hears a teacher say to her, “I'm sorry Ms. Flanagan, we don't have time to teach The Crucible, it's not on the standardized exit exam.” I leave it to the many people she didn't quote, the people that heaped all those awards on Alice Waters to know what might be a better path to a well-educated high school student. Ms. Flanagan doesn't exactly have a record of school curriculum advances of her own.

I imagine she is capable of writing diatribes with the intent of provoking, but not actually doing anything. I ascribe to her all the depth of a political pundit who can only tear down the opposition but offers nothing of substance in return. I find her writing lively and lovely, but as shallow as a witty socialite who might declare, “Let them eat cake!”

That the California school system is broken and needs repair, a conclusion that cannot be refuted, cannot be honestly laid at the roots of school gardens. That there needs to be a fundamental overhaul of our schools is obvious in many different ways beyond that exit exam. Unlike Ms. Flanagan, however, I would argue that school gardens are the beacon of a new light that can shine throughout the school system. School gardens could become the beginning of a fresh approach to education that involves students in a learning atmosphere that is compelling and elemental.

It's entirely possible that we won't need farmers for the next sixty years (though I doubt it). Of course, because we all must eat, that food has to come from somewhere. A civilization as divorced from the food chain as Ms. Flanagan appears to be, is a disaster on the verge of crumbling.

This myopia cannot prevail.

david

Invasion of the GMO Frankenfood

2010-01-22T11:16:00.000-08:00

Found on You Tube, from the imagination of Larry Leptin, a funny animated film provides seven minutes and 27 seconds of fun with the threat of GMO's in our food supply. Though a light treatment, it provides a person with 'food for thought' as one of the characters learns, "GMO mutated food really is everywhere..." Thanks to Facebook friend Sharyn Divavox for the link.

david

It's Time To Stand Up And Be Counted Or Become Genetically Modified

2010-01-14T19:51:00.001-08:00

Corn from The Learning Garden shows remarkable genetic variation from one planting. This genetic variation not only looks cool, but could provide the basis for important new corn varieties that might be needed in the coming global-climate-change decades. We cannot risk ruining the living material that makes these colorful kernels.

I have a million things I need to do and I'm not really keen on sitting here and pounding out another blog post on Monsanto, but I'm deeply troubled and it's a trouble, like a bad back, that has kept brewing for a few years. It's way past time for us as a nation and as a society to come to terms with Monsanto; a company that has troubled me often in the past, and, in these past few days, there seems to be a harmonic convergence of information and news about Monsanto. Or would that be a 'disharmonic' convergence. Perhaps 'cacophony' would serve better...

In 2004, I took a trip to Kansas to Wes Jackson's Land Institute, a science based program to create perennial food crops that can grow and not harm the prairie's of the mid-West that modern farming has decimated (together lets all say 'dust bowl' read Timothy Egen's book, The Worst Hard Time for a vivid – and chilling – description of that decade long phenomena). The keynote speaker that year was the award-winning journalist Michael Pollan whose books I have reviewed, recommended and loved. And while I knew Wes Jackson (Becoming Native To This Place, a marvelous book that shaped me profoundly in the early 1990's) and others, one man was an unknown.

When I begin to describe Percy Schmeiser, tears well up in my eyes because no man in the civilized world should have to live the hell he lived, losing his farm and his livelihood in Monsanto's race to becoming Forbes magazine's 'company of the year' in a recent issue.

Schmeiser's fields, where he had been saving his own seed for over 20 years, became contaminated with Monsanto's Roundup Ready canola. Monsanto representatives trespassed onto his land, took samples of the plants and deemed that he was in violation of their patent (you can patent life nowadays, did you know that? One of Monsanto's most notorious avenues to get to be top dog in the seed business) and sued him for all he was worth – and in this case, that isn't just an expression. Mr Schmeiser had to file bankruptcy and lost everything he owned, including his farm, in the legal battle to protect his name and try to strike a blow for what he believed to be right. (Up to date information was broadcast today by National Public Radio's 'All Things Considered' for further indictment of Monsanto's business practice in the farming world.)

This Monsanto campaign is well known in farming circles and has been documented in several films that have shown the disturbing tendency of Monsanto to sue the pants off anyone who doesn't play their game. Farmers who did not plant Monsanto seed are being sued by Monsanto for patent infringement if they don't pay onerous indemnity to Monsanto for their 'violations.' There are two salient points to this problem. The first I alluded to above in that Monsanto was able to patent their seeds, when US Patent Law was changed in the 1950's. Seeds are living things. They are not bowling balls or transistors or weed killers. They are life. No other country in history has ever granted patents for life itself. I can't put my finger on it, but my gut says 'this is WRONG.'

The other salient fact is that these plants are WIND pollinated. That means, a good gust of wind from your neighbor's farm could send pollen into your field, and even though you did not plant Monsanto seeds, the seeds your plants produce would have the telltale genetic markers for a Monsanto product. As reported in a research article in Euphytica, “Oilseed rape pollen has greater capacity for long-range dispersal than had been suggested by small-scale field trials. “ (Canola is the consumer word for the brassica plant that is otherwise called 'rapeseed.' Most of the rape seed oil is produced in Canada and so the name Canola was invented to make the oil more palatable to consumer sensibilities.)

I have often thought that Monsanto was cunningly astute in working with wind pollinated plants. They could contaminate much larger areas with their technology and, after the fact, announce that it was now impossible to retract the genie, “oh oops... look what we did!” Of course, the genie is not retractable and that is precisely why this is UNPROVEN technology. The twenty year trial to see what will really happen on down the road is happening now; in our stomachs, in our fields, on our children's immune systems and in the ecology of the entire planet. Never before (like the patenting of life itself), has the world been provided with such forbidding possibility of a disaster wrecking so many different facets of our lives. Monsanto's genetically modified corn was found in the wilds of Mexico. Monsanto hadn't planted it there – how did it get there? And worse, how much of that rich genetic material that is the heritage of all people who love corn was contaminated? What is the effect of rampant genetically modified pollen in the wild environment? What will happen (over generations) to the corn races of Mexico, the birth place of corn and home to the widest variation of wild genetic 'bloodlines' of corn from which we might need to draw in a future world facing global climate change or other disasters that are just bad 'business decisions' today?

What if this technology eventually is proven to kill off all the butterflies? Or the bees? Remember that it took over two decades to understand that DDT was killing off the eagle and other birds. What if this technology is the cause of immune system problems that take more time to understand? We won't know this until it's too late and Monsanto's directors have made a killing (would that be a 'too-appropriate' word?) in profits by ruining lives, ecologies and societies?

In fact, there is evidence that Roundup kills more than weeds. That is the very title of an article in the January 2010 issue of Mother Earth News. “French researchers have released a series of studies showing that glyphosate-based herbicides are toxic to human reproductive cells.” Over 100 million pounds of glyphosate are in use around the world in 2002 (last year with available numbers – it's surely higher today). (Glyphosate is the chemical name for the active ingredient in Roundup.)

“Most of the food we eat that contains corn or soy was sprayed with glyphosate herbicide, and we’re being exposed to higher and higher levels of residue. In response to petitions from Monsanto, the EPA has approved up to 20-fold increases in the legal residue limits for food crops.” So, you are eating this stuff every day – a lot more if you are eating processed foods, eating in chain restaurants (goodbye Norm's...), fast food or your school cafeteria. Read the article.

Now this might be just the beginning of a lot more disturbing news. Or it might not. But why were we allowed to be the test population for Monsanto's inventions? Monsanto and big Pharma work with the same business model as Union Carbide (remember Bhopal?): Make us the money now because we'll be bankrupt when it's time to clean up our mess. It is tiring to have to face off with people who have the ethics of a rabid dog constantly. But will we just wring our hands and mutter to ourselves?

In my earlier post, I listed companies that are Seminis seed dealers – Seminis is the name of Monsanto's seed business – and I asked everyone to not buy from those companies. Off line I was given a little flack because companies like Johnnies Selected Seeds really does sell a lot of seeds and it can be hard to get some of the old hybrids many of us have come to love (not on my lists of favorites, but F1 hybrids that many home gardeners love, like Big Boy or Early Girl tomatoes) because Seminis has bought up the companies holding the rights to those hybrids. I contend that giving ANY money to Monsanto feeds the giant and is only one of our few tools available to us.

Join the Organic Consumers Association's campaign against Monsanto. Plant open pollinated seeds in your garden (and join Seed Savers Exchange while you are there!) and grow as much of your own food as you can. Go to farmers' markets and ask the farmer what he grows, supporting only those who will look you in the eye and say they aren't growing GMO food. Write Forbes magazine and ask them what the hell were they thinking in making a rapacious and unethical monopolizing Goliath of evil their 'company of the year.'

It would be symbolic, but I have thought that the County of Los Angeles should follow Mendocino County in outlawing the growing of gentically modified organisms. Unfortunately, we have lives to live and I think the most radical thing of all is to grow our own and opt out of the poison-as- solution mentality that has ruined American farmland in these last fifty years.

Last note, because it will come up: We do NOT need Monsanto and it's technology to feed the world. That is a lie and has always been a lie. We do not need Roundup just like we did not need the so-called Green Revolution to feed the world. If this were true, the United States would not have over 10 million hungry people as estimated by a new study from Cornell University and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

david

The Garden in January

2010-01-01T22:46:00.000-08:00

Rain on a broccoli, and the photographer and his camera.
We are grateful for the rain - even this so-called 'negligible precipitation.' This year, 2010, is shaping up to be our fourth year of drought.

One of the wonderful things of living in Southern California, this close to the Pacific Ocean is the wonderful mild weather we enjoy. This is both a blessing and a curse. Further inland and on almost all of the North American continent, 'gardening' this time of year means looking in the seed catalogs that have begun to fill your mailbox. If you aren't getting seed catalogs on a regular basis, you haven't been gardening a long time.

One of the truisms I will emphasize will be to garden with passion. For me, gardening means doing it yourself and learning what works and how it works. This time in my garden is exciting. On days it isn't raining, the cool weather makes some of the more strenuous work a little less onerous. So this is the time to think about a general garden cleanup, if you haven't done it already.

It is also still a time to look after perennial food. Right now, I begin to contemplate pruning my fruit trees. I will contemplate this for as long as I can procrastinate actually doing it! If you have no experience at it, do your trees a favor and order a pruning handbook from University of California’s Agricultural and Natural Resources Division (ANR) or purchase a pruning book from a reputable source. Remember that these trees will live a lot longer than a typical pet and we wouldn't treat our cats or dogs with the indifference many people show towards trees. Pruned correctly, an apple, plum or peach will produce luscious tasty fruit for many years. It's actually harder on you (and the tree) to prune incorrectly, so find out how and do it as right as you can in the first place.

This is still the dormant season to purchase deciduous fruit trees, apples, apricots, grapes and ornamentals such as roses and wisteria, to name a couple of my favorites. If you are putting perennial herbs in the ground (sage, rosemary and thyme – parsley is a biennial, with apologies to Paul Simon), this is the best time to put them in the ground – even though you may plant them here year round. Buy your trees or vines from someone who knows where you live in order to insure you are getting plants that will produce for you. A local neighborhood nursery will only carry plants that will do well in your climate whereas a big box store will carry things that are more likely to grow over a much wider area. You'll also find the selection at most big box stores to be woefully short and the staff indifferent at best to your needs.

Mail order suppliers are excellent venues for purchasing trees. One of my best finds was from a mail order nursery. I called and talked to one of the staff asking a few questions. There is no replacement for a person with knowledge. Based on where I was gardening, he suggested I grow Dorsett Golden apples. I took his suggestion and I have been blessed with year after year of a delicious, sweet and crisp apple that has wowed visitors to my garden ever since.

When I prune the deciduous stone fruit trees (including peaches, apricots, plums and apples,) if I have had problems with insects in the trees, I finish the job by spraying the trees with dormant oil. Of all the pesticides, this pesticide, with it’s low toxicity to mammals and its 100% effectiveness on pests is one of the best that is listed for organic gardens. If insect infestations are of concern to you, this is the best time to spray because the tree is dormant, not actually growing. A dormant oil spray can be a valuable addition to controlling many pests in these kinds of trees. However, take precautions if you feel you must spray. Follow the directions of the package very closely – using pesticides in ways not described on the label is against the law and usually defies common sense.

While pesticide labels will allow you to spray in the morning or in the evening, please only spray in the evening. Do NOT spry ANY pesticide in the morning ever. Spraying in the morning can allow the pesticide to kill off honey bees which we do not want – while spraying in the evening will insure the bees have returned to their hive for the night. Organic pesticides are only effective when they are wet and are dry by the morning. Honey bees, which have been having a hard time of it lately, should be one of any gardeners' biggest concerns. Please only spray any insecticide in the evening.

However, if you don't have pests to begin with, please consider not spraying at all. We are counting on our trees for food, so we will want to be proactive in their care, but we also need to be intelligent in our use of killing agents in our environment. Much of the problems we face in our world today are the result of mankind's irreverent use of “-icides” of all types. Somehow, modern man has become convinced that warring with nature is a fight he can win. I believe we are foolish when we spray just because. If you have pests, deal with them as the year goes along – and deal with them in ways that avoids all sprays, all “-icides.” I think we can be a lot more intelligent in our dealings with the critters that compete for our food supply and spraying is just admitting we are too stupid to deal with something in a more positive fashion. This does not mean I NEVER spray. But when I do spray, I do think I've just not figured out a less destructive way to solve the problem. Better people than I have called me stupid so, yes, sometimes I do think I might have done better.

On the other hand, all of your citrus fruit trees are evergreen, so they can technically be pruned at any time of the year, but they are best pruned when there is nothing better to do and the day is not too warm, so the person doing the work doesn’t overheat. You cannot spray citrus with dormant oil sprays because they are never dormant. (Something that is 'evergreen' doesn't go dormant – basically 'evergreen' means, no dormancy.) A recent innovation has been the formulation of lighter oil sprays that are called 'summer oils.' They do the same thing as dormant oils with a much less heavy hand and so can be sprayed when the days are warmer and on trees with living leaves. They work well, perhaps not quite as well as dormant sprays, but they are pretty effective. Their drop in effectiveness might be that they are used on trees with leaves and therefore the spray doesn't reach all the insects rather than any lack of killing power on the part of the spray; I don't know if research has been done to show it one way or the other.

As above, though, if you don't HAVE to spray, please don't. A healthy garden is shared among many critters – insects, birds, fungi, bacteria, mammals and humans. By introducing poison to your garden, you run the risk of killing off more than just your target species. Try to find an intelligent way to solve your problems. Read up on the pest. Find it's enemies and make friends with them. Your garden will be healthier and so will you.

This may be a cold month and, if we are blessed, rainy. But we still have to keep our eyes out for Santa Ana winds – sometimes hot and sometimes cool, but always dry and desiccating to garden plants, and plants in pots suffer all the more. If your skin is crawling and you need more skin cream, or lip goop, you can bet your plants need more moisture too! It’s best to get out there with a hose and help your irrigation system keep up – you’ll enjoy your garden more – the “best fertilizer is the farmer’s shadow.” Still.

Are you ready to think about summer yet? You mean you never stopped thinking about summer? Now is the time the new seed catalogs come rolling in by the truckload and they all have wonderful photos and several hundred new mouth-watering, irresistible new varieties that I must try… all in a 10’ square bed. If you aren’t getting these free catalogs, a quick jaunt through any gardening magazine will net you half a dozen 800 numbers or you can get web addresses from which to order. Once you've ordered from one, next January will be a real treat. I get sometimes three or four a day.

What will it be this year? Eight different sweet peas, half a dozen different lettuce plants? Look at all those tomatoes for sale and how about the dozen different violas from Thompson and Morgan? And if I knock down the neighbor’s garage, I think I could grow some squash and pumpkins….

The Garden in December, Part I

2009-12-05T18:28:00.000-08:00

Baby beets coming along just like they're supposed to do in the Winter – the garden can snip leaves of some of the plants for salads while leaving the remaining plants to grow big roots – they'll need more space between them, but the discards will make lovely additions to salads.

Who has time to garden? The days are so short, it’s hard to get out to the garden. As December comes rumbling through your life, make sure you have batteries in your flashlight because, Lord knows, I (and I doubt I'm alone) have done more gardening by flashlight than I want my mental health provider to know! At least, the cooler temperatures (we hope), keep plants from growing too fast.

The main thing is to keep up successive sowings, especially of salad greens, beets and carrots. You might include radishes and other root crops too. You might find yourself picking peas, fava beans, garbanzos, harvesting small heads of cabbage, broccoli, leaves of kale and chard. The more you pick, the more you will get so don't be shy. Pick and give it to friends and neighbors (who will become friends) and find ways to keep the harvest.

I try to sow 3 foot rows frequently rather than longer rows less frequently, unless I am planning on putting a crop up. Pickled beets and pickled beans are easy and a favorite way to keep some of the harvest through the year. I vow I'm going to learn how to pickle carrots like the ones you find in Mexican restaurants, but so far I have no good recipes. Of course, if I grow carrots in the winter and peppers in the summer, how will the two ever get together in a pickled carrot jar? Carrots can keep, but I don't have a place to keep them until the peppers are ready – like most Los Angeles homes and apartments, I do not, as yet, have a root cellar or even a pantry that would do the word justice. So there's a challenge.

For gardeners who have been at it for awhile the catalogs have begun to arrive and with it the challenge to not buy several hundred pounds of lettuce seed or tomato seeds.

I grew up in NE Kansas and all through my childhood, spent winter months with the Burpee catalog. I would read all the descriptions of the vegetables and compare them over and over again. Grandpa, who saved his seed, had no use for 90% of all they sold, so I rarely got to see any of my multitude of lists even purchased let alone grown. Burpee went out of business for a while and had a bumpy few years, now is back, but really is only a shadow of its former self offering a rather paltry selection of seed that usually isn't much for the home gardener. However, many other catalogs (from seed companies or seed savers) have taken up the slack – I've written elsewhere on my favorite catalogs. But how was the year just past?

Of course, in LA, we've got the current winter garden just planted, but for LAST winter, here's some of our results:

Artichoke: I know I'm teasing the rest of the world, but I pay rent in Los Angeles so I figure I'm due my share of teasing. We had a great harvest last year of artichokes – mostly Green Globe Improved. They all produced big beautiful chokes with abandon. We had respectable harvest from Violetto which I love, but it wasn't nearly as productive.

Beets: Burpee's Golden and Chioggia - both are dynamite and steady producers year in and year out and both are usually from Pinetree although I have been known to get seed from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply too.

Broccoli: Nutribud is an OP of respectable performance; earliness is right up there with the hybrids and the size is comparable. As the name suggests, it is reported to have a higher percentage of glutamine. I add in a few plants of Premium Crop or (less often) Bellstar because I hate to rest on one crop, but I really expect most of my broccoli to be Nutribud.

Brussels sprouts: Bubbles was the hybrid we grew – someone had given me a couple of plants. They got whitefly bad and I couldn't see cleaning each little sprout thoroughly enough; although a friend did and sent me back a lovely dish of them (thanks Mary!). Between cabbage and broccoli, I think I get enough of this family to skip Brussels sprouts.

Cabbage: A good year for cabbage for us. We were donated a pointy headed hybrid, whose name has been lost to prosterity, produced huge 10 pound heads and was successful wherever we planted it, but was not any better than Danish Ball Head which is an OP heirloom. Both were huge solid heads and we ate and ate and finally learned how to ferment cabbage to be able to eat it the rest of the year (I still have some and this year's cabbage is in the ground !)

Carrots: I grow Mokum and Yaya, both hybrids. Yaya is the winner, but I can't always find the seed at a good price – I think I have gotten it from Abundant Life Seeds. And while the seed was expensive (by my standards), but it was a sure winner in less than ideal soil. Mokum, from Pinetree, is always a dependable, decent carrot. If you decide to plant some of the different color carrots, you'll be able to grow open pollinated seeds. However, if you have some deep soil (loose down about 18 inches or more) you can try some of the non-hybrids which includes several of the non-orange varieties that have been repopularized recently. In the 1800's, carrots were a number of different colors – it has only been fairly recent that carrots were 'supposed' to be only orange.

Cauliflower: Mark Twain is supposed to have said that 'cauliflower was cabbage that had gone to college' and I can't afford the tuition, so I stick to cabbage. Cabbage is easier to preserve and broccoli will give successive cuttings from one plant. Cauliflower is more work and less results.

Celeriac: First year with this and I like it. I don't grow celery because it's a hard plant to grow and home grown celery has always tasted bitter to me. Celeriac, on the other hand, was easy to grow and produced well. You can't smear a hunk with cream cheese or peanut butter and have the same delightful appetizer, but it does a marvelous ballet in soups. Large Prague was our selection and I've not had experience with anything else.

Chard: (I'm dispensing with the 'Swiss' part, feel free to join me!) We had seed from Seed Savers Exchange of Five Color Silverbeet and seed of Pinetree's Orange Fantasia. Both were incredibly productive – although I've never known chard to be unproductive, so I'm not sure that's saying a lot. Someone gave us a few plants of Sea Foam and that one has spectacular production. Still, I like the red chard more and I think the orange is one helluva show stopper!

Fava beans: Windsor is my favorite and we get pounds of beans from each plant. In fact, I've given up on peas preferring to grow favas, garbanzos and lentils because I don't feel like I get enough to eat from peas.

Garlic: I love Spanish Roja and Music - hardnecks are supposed to not like warm climates, but I have great luck with them. Last year, the crows got to them. They don't eat the garlic, but they pull them out of the ground. After three or four go rounds with this (they pull, I replant), the cloves were hopelessly intermixed so which one was the better producer is anyone's guess. I'm starting with fresh seed garlic this year: Music, Spanish Roja, and Red Toch!

Kale: Redbor works for me. I had some plants of Dwarf Blue, but felt like that was a very stupid idea – same footprint for half the plant. What WAS I thinking?

Leeks: King Richard is my usual dependable producer but last year was a really so-so harvest. I think I ignored it too much.

Lettuce: I'm one of those who can't get through the lettuce section of a seed catalog without ordering four or five more packets! I could supply a large army with lettuce if I were given the land to do it. Marvel of the Four Seasons, Brown Winter, Red Winter, Deer Tongue, Buttercrunch, and on and on and on.

Onions: I buy plants from a local organic farm supply, but they sold out so I had NO onions. Disaster. But usually I grow their Italian Red Torpedo – a delicious onion that is absolutely stellar on the grill. Onions, unlike almost every other veggie we grow is 'day sensitive.' Most onions offered in the States will not bulb in LA because they are 'long day' plants and we need to grow 'short day' varieties. So most folks will not be able to compare to our experience.

Potatoes: We gathered leftovers from bachelor friends (they sprout in the pantry and we just plant them) - I don't know the varieties but we had a good harvest.

Shallots: Wow! I had never grown shallots before, but I have found they are easier to grow than onions and more productive! I planted seed from Pinetree and I was so impressed, I'm back for more! Olympus and Bonilla were both good performers.

All in all, this was one of the very best harvests we have ever had. We put up food, donated several tons to the Westside Food Bank and still ate like kings! It was all that compost, I tell you. The rain wasn't any great shakes (about 10” - less than our normal 12”) and there were several devastating hot spells in November, December and again in January. In fact, the winter garden last year got killed outright by a hard couple of weeks of Santa Ana winds that sent the thermometer soaring into triple digits several times and ruined numerous plantings. Oh, and I can't forget the mouse in the greenhouse that ate all the starts in January. Thank God for a long growing season!

david

Holiday Shopping? Here's Book List for You!

2009-12-02T18:21:00.000-08:00

Chard makes a lovely holiday gift, but I tend to give books much more frequently. Something in these chards (maybe the color?) says "HOLIDAY!"

As you make up your holiday gift list, take a look at some of these books, they will make good gifts, raise awareness and you'll be acclaimed a wise person for selecting such an astute gift! Or by them for yourself and be careful patting yourself on the back. Following are some selections that I have found fascinating and readable. Next year I hope I'll have one of mine on the list!

A Nation of Farmers by Sharon Astyk et al © 2009 New Society Publishers

Sharon Astyk is one of the premier writers of this decade. She is a sharp, critical thinker, who writes form a personal style and experience. She has her facts and she isn't afraid to use them. In fact, I think the desire to be thoroughly based in reality has lead to a few more facts than I like, the specter of the future this book shows can be the difference between a bleak desperate holocaust scenario, or it can be one of abundance and peace. How we will do that rests in a large way on how we grow the food we eat. A new prospective that is enlightening and thought provoking – if not 'action-provoking.' I read Sharon's blog almost daily because she has a lot of important things to say.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, et al © 2007, Harper Collins
One of the more accessible books on eating locally. While some folks can afford new hybrid cars, and some folks can put up solar collectors and commute by computer, the majority of us will have to take other steps to lower our carbon footprint. The Kingsolver family model how eating is a global statement – what is on the end of your fork has more to do with global warming than the car you drive. Or how fast.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by J. Hertzberg et al © 2007 Thomas Dunne Books

You like fresh bread? Who doesn't? This book gives you a way to come home from work and have freshly baked bread from your own oven with dinner. It is very good bread. I have made loaves of this bread for my class and for many potlucks. It is wolfed down with gusto. This is good bread. This is easy. Do you need another reason?

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan © 2009 Penguin Books
There is nothing written by Micheal Pollan that I have found wanting, but this book is the most powerful force to change lives that he has written. Pulling on the same research that brought us The Omnivores' Dilemma, he brings the lessons to our dinner table. Excoriating the nutritionists and the fads of modern American eating, Pollan is a voice of reason in the insanity of our supermarket abundance of empty (or worse!) calories.

This is the most recent Sharon Astyk to hit the stands. An important book of directions to real independence – independence is not won with a gun or massive buying power, but in being self-sufficient in your food. How do you do that? This is the manual and it makes so much sense. The security we often seek in vain can be found in these pages – we don't need a world undone to need independence – the loss of a job or an injury can force us to face difficult choices. As Katrina showed us in New Orleans, counting on the government might not be our wisest choice.

I know this may seem a little out of place on this list, but I got to admit, Logan's book was one delightful read. Page after page has some new tidbit to teach me and another tale of wonder about these magnificent trees that populate every continent in the Northern Hemisphere. You cannot open this book without learning some little tidbit that will surprise and amaze. This is a well-written and fast paced book of many surprises. I really recommend it.

Nabhan's research into Native American foods (beans and corn, to name a few) gives him the special insight to understand their value to the world and how we can feed more Americans and the world if we only take some time to enjoy a good meal – if we will save food plants, we must grow them and eat them. Can't think of a tastier preservation project myself, can you? As usual Nabhan's writing is first rate.

If someone you know is into alternative medicine and they have not yet read this book, they are only dimly aware of what they are doing. This book profoundly explores the depth of our disconnection with plants, specifically the healing herbs, and brings a sense of ecology and connectivity to a medical practice that few modern healers are more than slightly aware of. Opens eyes, hearts and calls a thinking person to action.

The Omnivores' Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan © 2007 Penguin Books
How do we get what we eat and does it matter? This is Michale Pollan's quest as he opens the book. Looking at how modern America gets its food from farm to table is a fascinating tale that often discourages one from some of the things we often eat for granted. This is the same research that brought us In Defense of Food although the focus is different. Here Pollan looks at how our modern food has compromised the very essence of food in a never ending race to the lowest bottom line and the lowest selling price. How come sodas are so cheap?

Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine by Gary Paul Nabhan (c) 2008 Shearwater Publishing

Nikolay Vavilov was a Russian scientist who did more seed collecting than any other scientist in the history of mankind. Convinced that diversity was the key to ending starvation by famine, he sought out indigenous plants from expeditions all over the world. Unlike the modern model of filling the world's bellies with food of the First World, he sought out Third World plants and looked to them as being the most important living things on earth. Vavilov died, ironically, in a Soviet prison of starvation, but his legacy overshadows groups like Seed Savers Exchange and other work to preserve the diversity of the world's food.

Do you have books you'd suggest for gifts for others (or for yourself?). I read a lot and I'm always looking for new titles that need to be better known.

Happy Holidays!

david

The Garden In November

2009-11-07T00:47:00.000-08:00

I don't need a sign to tell me this is garlic, but I am grateful to tell everyone else it is. Can a fellow grow too much garlic?

I don't think so....

On the coast, our winter plantings can continue right up through March. The only months that are really hard on winter veggies as close to the Pacific as we are in Zone 24 is July through September. In some years, October can be hard to handle too, but this year's one week or so of very hot weather is much more common. It was hard on our lettuce and young plants in the garden, we had to add some extra water by hand. And we did loose a few.

But now, by this time of the year, we ought not have any extended heat spells, the cool weather should be very much ensconced. Now we want to make certain I have a good stock of alliums laid in – my garlic, onions, leeks and shallots all have a place in my heart – and stomach – so I plant a lot of them.

Shallots and garlic can be grown from bulbs, so I will plant them in pots and I crowd all my roses with garlic. Garlic is a good companion plant because, according to folklore at least, it is good at discouraging insects. I’m not sure this is proven yet, but I think the garlic plant itself is worth a look so I love having that upright element in pots as well as in ornamental beds. And you can't really plant enough garlic and shallots. Come to think of it, leeks would serve that purpose just as well.

This year, I am in my second year of planting onions and shallots from seed. Last year, shallots were a whopping success – except I felt completely out of my league when it came to cook them. I felt I had to copy a French accent while cooking with them. The onions ran a distant second, which saddened me – I am much more familiar cooking with onions than shallots. But, I'm trying again.

I have loved to purchase onion plants from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply for several years. They carry several different varieties, but the one I love is Italian Red Torpedo Onions. But for the last two years, I have missed getting plants because they do sell out. So, in revenge, I have sought to start them from seed. The plants you can buy in nurseries are really only baby plants that someone had to start from seed, so someone had to do it. I figure if someone can do it, I just as well ought to be able to do it. It's harder than I thought. The little plants come up looking like grass and seem to take forever. Maybe that's why buying plants is so hot.

Water, hopefully becomes much less of a challenge by this point, although a Santa Ana might come flying through and send everyone scrambling to keep the soil moist around my plants. Mulch. The more the mulch, the less the work. You can mulch pots too – in permanent (more or less) plantings like a rose, caper bush or bay leaf tree.

Mulch is a term that I use a lot, but needs to be defined. Mulch is anything put on top of the soil that interdicts the sun's rays and raindrops (or 'sprinkler-drops') from hitting the soil. It can be rocks, sheets of plastic, or some organic material – even compost.

As a vegetable gardener from way back when, I disdain the non-organic mulches. They can be expensive and they don't do a thing for the soil. Most organic mulches are cheap and many can be found for free. Organic mulches, unlike rocks, plastic or other non-organic mulches, feed the microbes that live in the soil, which improves the soil and adds fertility without a lot of extra expense.

As I plant more of my winter plants, I'll keep adding more compost as mulch around the base of my plants. One thing to take note of as the days get cooler and hopefully wetter, is an explosion of slugs and snails. This is the kind of weather they prefer and they multiply like crazy in it. Because they are migratory creatures, you can never be rid of them completely. If you did manage to clear your garden on Tuesday of all slugs and snails, by Wednesday evening, you have a whole new group on hand that wandered in from the neighbors (or hatched out while you weren't looking).

The only real solution is constant vigilance. I have a friend who walks through her garden with a pail of water with dish soap in it and every snail and slug goes for a swim. Another friend tosses them towards the street. Another crushes them underfoot. (Gardening is not for the squeamish or faint of heart!) I do all three at different times depending on how I feel. You should have seen how I felt to loose four rows of baby lettuce in one night. I never found that culprit, but I have wrecked revenge on every slug and snail I've ever seen since.

Yes, there are predatory snails that feed on the common garden snail, but they are also migratory and seem like a pretty iffy proposition to me. Besides, if they ever did take out your common garden snail and left themselves with nothing to eat (not very likely) then they would turn on your garden as well. Seems like that is a lose lose lose situation. I'll pass.

There are also several products in the marketplace that work and are organic. Es-car-go® and Sluggo® are two products that are organic and safe around pets and other wildlife because the active ingredient is an iron phosphate, a soil component that is lethal to mollusks like snails and slugs.

Still, the least expensive way to deal with them was to kill them directly as mentioned above. I imagine if this makes you queasy now, after some valuable crops or hard work becomes a midnight snack several times, you will find yourself a hardened snail murderer like I am.

This is also THE very time to begin to think about fruit trees. I urge you to think about fruit trees for a while before making the dive because they are a big investment, not so much in money, but in time and patience. Once one has planted a fruit tree, some will take several years to come into full production – if you find the fruit unsatisfactory, or you have a variety that doesn't fruit well for you, all that time is wasted.

Gather as much data as you can in order to choose the tree that is right for you. Here are some sources you will find helpful – I suggest you go online and order the printed catalog because you'll want to cross check facts and types with each different nursery before you commit.

Trees of Antiquity, is the place where we purchased most of our trees here in The Learning Garden. I found them extremely helpful and very knowledgeable. It was they who suggested Dorsett Golden as our apple here and it is truly one of the finds of a lifetime for our area.

Raintree Nursery, invariably is where I place my ongoing orders for my propagation class (that starts in January) because I need rootstocks for the class, but their selection is lovely too and their catalog is worth a read.

My old standby, Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, is a great supplier of trees and fruit bushes, but their selection isn't nearly as complete and their catalog isn't a detailed as these others. Still, if you are already ordering something from Peaceful and they have the variety you want, you can't go wrong with them.

Dave Wilson Nursery has one of the most extensive websites around on fruit trees. It is really worth a good solid look, chock full of data.

The University of California has gotten in on the act with a website, The California Backyard Orchard, that is a wonderful web site for a lot of answers about growing fruit trees in our climate. It also promotes the UC ANR publication, The Home Orchard which I recommend if someone is going to go into this head over heals – like I want to!

After looking through these catalogs, one might have narrowed their purchase down to a few trees. Once you get trees, these following sources are lovely to have in your library:

The Backyard Orchardist: A Complete Guide to Growing Fruit Trees in the Home Garden, Otto, Stella, © 1995 Ottographics This is the oldest book in this list and probably the smallest too, so it isn't as chock full of data as the other two, but then it would be the least expensive as well. Otto covers a lot more, obscure, fruits and so this is a book for the adventurous and those who don't want to spend a lot of money. It is a gem of a book and she does not intimidate the reader.

The Home Orchard, Ingels, C. et al, © 2007, University of California, Agriculture & Natural Resources One of the very best books for learning about the home orchard. Well written, easy to understand, good photos, this one has it all. No shortcuts, I like this book. It is available through the address above (and on sale as of this writing – which means a new edition might be on its way out – because of the sale, it is cheaper from ANR directly than it is from Amazon).

The Organic Apple Grower, Phillips, Michael, © 2005, Chelsea Green Publishing Although written for the New England area of the country, he introduces tools of the trade with a flair and his way of doing things IS organic. Might be one to check out from the library, but you will find plenty of good information and lots of lovely reading about organic apple production. (And his description of finding a flat-head apple borer makes my fulminations over slugs seem very, very tame.)

Some Fruit Varieties That Do Well Here:

Apples -

Dorsett Golden – as mentioned above, is our heavy cropper. It takes about 3 years to really settle in (although it will bear fruit, they are tiny for the first three or so years with full sized fruit beginning to show up in year three). We have Dorsett Golden on half size fruit stock and it's a fair sized critter.

Gala – we have this on a dwarf rootstock – she's about five feet tall at this point and not likely to get much larger. Lovely apples with crisp texture and that is what I prize in an apple.

Fuji – one of my all time favorites, but the one we have in the garden is a 500 chill hour plant and in three years I harvested one small apple. It WAS good, but it wasn't worth all that time. Sadly, ours will have to be replaced. (There are newer Fuji trees that have less chilling requirement and I may buy one of those.

If I had known better, I would have planted more varieties with a wider range of fruiting times to extend the harvest – as it is now, we get a ton of apples in late June/early July and then we are done for the year. Although, a quick look at the literature I have at hand shows that I have few apples to choose from that will fruit here at all.

Apricot -

Gold Kist – hands down, the best apricot I have ever eaten! A self-pollinated variety, this one tree stands out as the best fruit in our garden. While Royal Blenheim is the touted variety for our climate, I just love Gold Kist and have no desire to look beyond it.

Pear -

Seckle is usually the only one suggested for our area of the European pears. We have one, but it ended up in a neglected area and I've got nothing to report. Although, I don't think a ripe pear can be beat by much for shear hedonistic eating!

Figs -

Violettte de Bordeaux – is our tree that has been a champion for five years. It bore fruit the first year and it has not stopped since. A deep black skinned fruit, the flesh is a gorgeous red and has a smoky richness that is heavenly.

White Genoa – is an Italian variety that took forever to fruit. Once it finally put on a crop by which it could be judged, I began to appreciate its lighter and sweeter amber flesh. A really lovely fig.

Nectarine -

Double Delight – not to be confused with the rose of the same name, this is a yellow fleshed freestone nectarine, heavily bearing and needs a LOT of thinning – we almost lost several branches because it just over set fruit. I know Peaceful Valley calls it 'sensational' but I think that's a little over the top. It's good and with vanilla ice cream it's really good. But not 'sensational.' It is self-fertile.

Peaches -

Red Baron – this is one of our two peaches – this is a yellow freestone and a very good producer of large fruits. The other one is a clingstone and I like its flavor better, but I can't find the record on it and don't know which one it is. The importance of keeping good records, where you can find them is not to be overlooked. (I do have this all written down and saved in a computer file from 2003, but I can only find files back to 2005 right this second.)

Plums -

Santa Rosa – this is one of the thousands of plants that Luther Burbank created (he lived in Santa Rosa and gave us the Burbank potato, the Shasta Daisy among thousands of others), and I find this to be the best and most prolific producer of any tree in our gardens today. It makes a fabulous sorbet, delicious jam and fresh eating cannot be beat. There are several other plums that will do well in our region, but I haven't got past this one.

This is just the highlights of the common fruits. I will take on some more later in the month.

david

The Garden in October, Part II

2009-10-28T12:28:00.001-07:00

Lettuce from seed looks beautiful in the late winter sun! A romaine lettuce like this is easy to grow and will look good no matter where you plant it!

Direct sowing of seeds gets far too much mystical billing. It’s easy. The hard part, in our busy world, is staying disciplined enough to keep them watered. Remember, the seed wants desperately to grow, that is its only “job.” If you provide enough water for the seed to break its seed coat, you will see a little pair of leaves soon above the soil. These are called cotyledons and, if there are two of them, you have what is commonly referred to as a 'dicot.' There is only one other kind of flowering plant we would be concerned with in a vegetable garden and that has only a single seed leaf and is called a 'monocot.' Monocots are all the grasses, which includes grains like corn, wheat, rice and barley.

Take note of all the little cotyledons of the plants you grow and soon you will be able to tell them from the weeds. This is somewhat important. If you can rid yourself of weeds before they get really big, you have a much easier job of it; if you rid yourself of all the wrong plants because you mistook the lettuce for dandelions, you'll be a very disappointed and frustrated gardener!

Composting is one of the more essential parts of gardening. Gardening is a life cycle and composting is that part of the cycle that returns nutrients and fertility to the soil. In our culture, we don't like the smell or the thought of decomposition, yet a knowing gardener loves the smell of rich compost; that smell, incidentally is from actinomycetes, a fungus that is in the same group of organisms as penicillin.

Somehow, fall always reminds me of composting probably because I grew up in those colder climes where fall signals the oncoming winter and so marked the end of the growing season. And that leads to thoughts of composting. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

You can get absolutely nuts trying to build a scientific compost pile, but let me offer that I don't do all that. Decomposition happens. Just leave some veggies in your fridge too long and tell me they did not decompose. And you didn't have even think about carbon to nitrogen rations (c:n). You do want to understand the process – especially if you don't have the space to leave something sit for 9 months, which is what I used to do – and get usable compost in less time that it takes to grow a decent cabbage.

Remember you have 'browns' and 'greens,' names that are somewhat misleading. 'Browns' refers to carbon material which is usually brown. This is dried leaves or woody pieces. 'Greens' are those materials full of nitrogen – usually represented by grass clippings, but all of your table scraps are nitrogen sources too and they, though a different color, are classed as 'greens.' While we can specify the ideal carbon to nitrogen ratio, achieving it is always a meandering attempt to meet an approximate target. And you never have composting materials in the right amounts to achieve an ideal c:n ratio. So, add as much of the green and the brown as you have. Mix well and water – keep moist. Make a pile that is at least three feet by three feet by three feet. Keep moist. Turn the parts that are inside, outside and the parts that are outside, inside. Keep moist. Not soggy, but moist. In about 9 weeks of warm weather, you'll be able to use fresh compost. Sift out the big honking pieces and return them to the pile (they will help get the pile off to a better start) and build it again.

Honestly? I usually dig a trench about one foot across and two feet deep and as long as it needs to be to handle what I have to compost. I pick a part of the garden I won't use for a few months and I add the compostable materials, covering with soil as I go. I add to the trench every day I need more room for materials. Eventually I'll simply plant right into that soil. No big deal and it works without a lot of reading.

You can find the composting technique that thrills you. The important part is that none of that rich material gets thrown into a land fill! That is unconscionable! All of the plant wastes from the kitchen and table are wonderful food for the garden and they are free!

However, for apartment dwellers, condo owners and others with no easy access to land, vermicomposting is the answer you are looking for! And you didn't even know you had the question! It's easy, the result can be used on plants in pots and your garbage need never grace the entrance of a landfill ever again!

You will need

10 gallon bin or 1 20 gallon bin

1 lb or so of worms

Cardboard or newsprint

Kitchen waste

OSH sells two storage bins that work very well for vermicomposting. The smaller bin is a 10 gallon container by Rubbermaid called Roughneck Storage Bin #2214-08. It’s dimensions are 9” x 21” x 15” , comes with a lid and is available in various colors. This size works well for a family of two.

A worm bin can be made of wood, but plastic seems to work better longer because it won't rot. Your bin must be tightly covered – worms cannot live in light and you don't want them to escape! Punch or drill holes around the top third of the vertical walls to allow air to circulate – punching them with a nail is best because any larger of a hole will be an escape hatch for the explorers in your worm population. You should do the same thing with the lid. Oxygen in the bin will allow the breakdown of materials to proceed aerobically, which means it won't stink and your worms won't suffocate.

Wet a sheet of cardboard or a section of newsprint – soak thoroughly and wring out to where it is as moist of a well wrung sponge. Worms will use this as bedding, and eventually you'll need to replace it

as time goes by.

Red wigglers will reprocess kitchen waste such as: vegetables, fruits, eggshells, teabags, paper coffee filters, shredded paper towels, and coffee grounds. They particularly like pumpkin, watermelon and cantaloupe. Avoid citrus fruits because they are too acidic for them. If you pamper your worms by cutting food scraps into small pieces, the worms can finish them off that much faster, I am not, however in the business of making life wonderful for a bunch of worms – I throw it in whole and they take care of it sooner or later. Burying the food scraps into the bedding will help you avoid fruit flies and not adding meat or fish to the bin will help prevent cats and dogs from investigating the bin.

Feed the worms your scraps as you have them available -ideally, no less than twice a wee – however, I have gone on vacation for a week and fed my worms nothing in that time and did not come back to a hell hole of a worm bin. Don't stay up nights worrying about them. These worms prefer a pH of something close to 7 and the temperature needs to be between 50 and 84 F. Don't let the bin dry out.

Harvesting the vermicompost can be done several ways, but the way that is easiest and therefore my choice is called 'side-harvesting.' Feed the worms on only one side of the bin for a few weeks which will cause the worms to migrate to that side. You can then begin to harvest the worm compost from that unoccupied side of the bin where you will eventually, once you've finished harvesting (over a few weeks), begin to add fresh bedding on that side causing them to migrate to the new bedding and allowing you to harvest from the second side.

You can make a it lot more complicated than this, but really, you have better things to worry about, yes?

david

The Garden in October, Part I

2009-10-05T15:12:00.001-07:00

Seedlings in terra cotta pots getting ready to be transplanted into slightly larger containers. On the left, broccoli and cabbages have two seed leaves while the two pots on the right must be onions or leeks because they only have one seed leaf each.

In all the books from back east and England, you'll find fall as a season of 'going to rest,' 'putting the garden to bed' and other allusions to 'sleep' and restoration. It is not true for us! We are in our other Spring and this Spring is really closer to the Spring that other parts of the world experience. This is our shot at carrots, peas, and other cool season plants. We either have all our space filled with plants, or we've just got a part planted with big plans (dreams) for the rest. So the Winter garden is in full swing. Later this month, if I have grown any green manure cover crops I will cut them down, leaving the plant material in place and cover with a thick layer of mulch. I would like to allow this to “mellow” (meaning I want this material to begin breaking down into nutrients the plants can use) for about 2 weeks before placing the next crop in.

I tried to plant one chard plant because I only need one to provide me with enough chard for all my needs, but there are so many colors to choose from, I feel a need to grow at least three: yellow, red and I love the orange. But these plants provide continuous chard obviating the need for succession planting, but almost everything else benefits by being sowed at intervals throughout the season, a process called 'succession sowing' or 'succession planting.'

A person plants a garden to get to eat the very freshest of food – you don't pick your veggies and put them in the fridge to age before you eat them – well, at least, that isn't the intent. So, to the degree we can, only plant enough of what you can eat in a reasonable amount of time. For me, being a single person, I have found that an eighteen inch row for most things is the perfect size to grow enough to supply fresh carrots, beets, parsnips, cutting lettuces, for any given time. A typical planting schedule for me might look like this:

Week 1 – carrots (maybe Yaya)
Week 2 – beets (Golden)
Week 3 – parsnips (Hollow Crown)
Week 4 – carrots (Mokum)
Week 5 – beets (Chioggia)
Week 6 – turnips (DeMilano)
Week 7 - lettuce (Black Seeded Simpson)
Week 8 – carrots (Yaya)
Week 9 – beets (Red Ball)
Week 10 – spinach (Space)
Week 11 – turnips (Purple Globe)
Week 12 – beets (Golden)

Quickly you see that, though I do eat parsnips and turnips, I don't eat nearly as many of them as I do carrots or beets. Your situation might be different in that you could care less at all about ANY parsnips, but spinach is near and dear to your heart so you would have spinach in the rotation much more than I do – you can, of course, plant three different things per week – carrots, beets and spinach in week one; turnips, lettuce and parsnips in week two; carrots, beets and parsnips in week three. Or spinach planted in one row every week all cool season long. Tailor the program to your needs! You might also find that you need longer rows – I wouldn't imagine that an 18” row would suffice for a family of four! Play around with the scheduling and the row legnth and the mix of plants you grow until you find what your family needs. At which point, their needs will change, but you'll have a lot more data with which to figure out the new schedule.

In our smaller gardens there is no room for the proverbial 50' row of carrots, so succession planting of a given vegetable is one of the staple strategies for stocking your larder. Another good point about putting in many smaller plantings of crops is the ability to harvest these vegetables at a smaller size, which is just the ticket for a garden in pots. Don’t get suckered into the “bigger is better” routine. A huge cauliflower might serve as a great subject in a “look what I grew” contest photo, but the cauliflower you pick at half the size will be the one your tastebuds will reverently remember.

A mark of the very good gardener is one who has his/her succession sowing down to such a science that allows them to place fresh vegetables on the table without lag time or a concentration of over-abundance and the attendant wild fluctuations leaving you with nothing from the garden for intervening weeks. Learning how to do this well has been the work of a lifetime for many and, as for me, I’m still finding it a moving target. But at least I know what I’m shooting for!

More later in the month.

david

The Garden In September, Part II

2009-10-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

These ARE the 'dog days' of summer. Baseball season is winding down and the playoffs loom just ahead. Fall seeds need to be ordered soon and planted. It's time to deal with the end of the summer produce and look into the cooler months ahead. This is my faithful friend, Casey, also known as 'the Gardenmascot,' a proud Scottish Terrier who is in his waning days as well. Sorry this post got put up so late - it's been a jam-packed month.

I've had a great crop of peppers this year – which, I find a tad disturbing, because this year was lousy for eggplants this year due to a lack of consistent heat, and if it didn't get hot enough for one, I'd think it'd not be hot enough for the other. But I have a lot of peppers. We pickled about 5 pints of the Sweet Banana peppers so far this year, but the jalapeños, I'm letting stay on the vine until they turn red so I can dry them until they are crispy to grind them into powder for a teentsy little zip in some recipes over the coming months.

One thing to remember when working with hot peppers: either wear rubber gloves or make very sure to wash your hands thoroughly before you touch your face – especially your eyes – the juice in hot peppers are just about one of the most painful solutions you can get into your eyes. Or other sensitive flesh parts of your body.

Measurements of heat in peppers are in Scoville Heat Units (SHU's), which is predicated on the amount of capsaicin in the pepper. Here is a chart comparing the different peppers and their varying amounts of capsaicin. If you know the SHU of a pepper, you can avoid blasting the top of your head off. But, remember, right after the note on keeping capsaicin out of your eyes, if you dry peppers, the heat increases by a factor of ten! That's an increase worth remembering!

Pepper Type Heat rating (in Scoville heat units)
Pure Capsaicin 16,000,000
Naga Jolokia 800,000 ~ 1,041,000
Dorset Naga 800,000 ~ 900,000
Red Savina Habanero 350,000 ~ 575,000
Habanero 200,000-300,000
Red Amazon 75,000
Pequin 75,000
Chiltecepin 70,000-75,000
Tabasco 30,00-50,000
Cayenne 35,000
Arbol 25,000
Japone 25,000
Smoked Jalepeno (Chipotle) 10,000
Serrano 7,000-25,000
Puya 5,000
Guajillo 5,000
Jalepeno 3,500-4,500
Poblano 2,500-3,000
Pasilla 2,500
TAM Mild Jalepeno-1 1,000-1,500
Anaheim 1,000-1,400
New Mexican 1,000
Ancho 1,000
Bell & Pimento 0

I'm afraid my Kansan heritage precludes eating most of these. Anything above Jalapeno would not be found in my kitchen! And yet, I've dried Jalapenos. That's just a little scary - the only use I have for the final dried Jalapeno powder will be to add a pinch to my famous Hot Chocolate That Kills, served at the Learning Garden for Dios de los Muertas and again at Valentines Day. Other than that, I'll keep it tightly capped and show the container to some things I'm cooking just to make them THINK about being warmer. :-)

About half-way into the month, it usually becomes cool enough to sow arugula, beets, carrots, lettuce, peas and turnips. My leek and fennel seedlings ought to be ready to transplant out, as should broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, chard, endive, kohlrabi.

As September wanes, probably the most productive time in the Southern California potager begins. If you are eating from your garden, now begins the time you can really feast for awhile, the last of summer – peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, okra, sweet corn, basil – is still out there to eat and the first root crops or lettuce will be big enough to munch a bite or two. I enjoy eating BLT sandwiches and for a brief moment in spring and another brief moment at this time. I make my own bread, so the tomato and lettuce come from my garden and the only parts I buy are the bacon and the mayo. It's almost a mystical experience for me, especially when the bread is still warm from the oven. Finish it off with a dessert of figs heated on the grill or in a broiler, drizzle honey on them and a dollop of some fairly stout Greek yogurt on them. Oh is that to die for! Not some store-bought fig shipped in from far away, but a fig that got ripe on a tree in the back yard or from a local farmer's tree that you found for sale in a farmers' market.

Fava beans, lentils and peas are in season now, too. All of these grow best in our cooler winters. Fava beans were the only bean in the Old World before the Americas were discovered; all the other beans are American in origin (as are tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes among others – one wonders how in the world the Italians and French survived long enough to arrive at a culinary tradition!). Fava bean plants, as well as lentils and peas, make a marvelous addition to any soil building program and favas, when combined with artichoke hearts, make a Mediterranean stew so delicious that my taste buds flutter just to remember.

To have sweet pea (Lathyrus odoratus) flowers for Christmas, they must be in the ground by the first weekend of September. Please note that 'sweet peas' refer to a flower, while peas (Pisum sativum) are a food plant. The sweet pea flower (which I think has the most divine aroma!), is strictly an ornamental as the seeds are poisonous. Not smart to confuse the two – gives a whole new scenario to the “no TV for you until you eat your peas!” line.

If you don't start your own seeds, find broccoli, cabbage, kale, chard and onion plants in a good nursery. Don't scrimp on your plants – if they have been cared for with indifference (like one might find at a big box store with minimum wage employees who may even hate working in a nursery) you might not get the quality plants that will produce the best (or the most) food. You are going to invest considerable time in growing these plants before they will be your dinner. Buying a cheap plant might be 'penny wise and pound foolish.' If you have to hoard some pennies, skip a couple cups of coffee rather than buy cheap plants.

I think it's better to start your plants from seed, instructions are easily available, if you can, find the seminal seed starting book, The New Seed Starters' Handbook by Nancy Bubel. That was the book that started me on the road to starting almost all my plants from seed and is still the best book on the subject. I see if sells for about $14.00 on Amazon; I got my second copy (the first went a-wandering) from a close out bin in Borders for $3.00.

Starting from seed, as you saw if you went to any of the web sites from last month, offers you the most diversity in what you have available to plant and you control over when you plant as well – which is a delightful way of keeping your garden looking its best. Mind you, this takes patience and time – but the rewards are equal to those investments. Isn't that the way of everything, though?

This is an exciting time to be gardening. Grab your imagination and look at where you planting. Think about the eventual size of what you are planting – it's OK to make mistakes – that's how we learn! When I'm teaching a class, the truth of it is, I have probably killed more plants than anyone else in the room and yet, they are the ones saying “I have a black thumb.” That's probably not true at all. The big difference is when I kill a plant, I usually know why it died and sometimes it isn't my fault. And when it IS my fault, it's usually because I wasn't paying attention. Death by inattention isn't a 'black thumb' issue unless you do things like forget to turn your car off; or forget to go to work in the morning. Death by inattention is reformable – it's a changing of your patterns.

Be good to yourself and it'll change.

david

The Garden In September, Part I

2009-09-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

Lettuce is one of our winter crops in Los Angeles – Merville des Quatres Saissons (Marvel of the Four Seasons) is more like Marvel of the Two Seasons here – our summers are way too hot to grow this lovely French belle, but in cooler months this is a true delight that is as tasty as it is beautiful – and it's really beautiful!!

As the Summer crops begin to decline, we now get ready to see the seasons change in a dramatic fashion. The plants that have given you tomatoes all summer, are mostly a heap of sad, brown vines. If there has not been any difficult diseases, I prefer to leave the vegetation where it lays. I chop it up using my trusty pruners or a machete – or a shovel, if it is handy and will do the job. The cut up plant debris is left where it lies and fresh mulch is piled up on top of it – to three or four inches deep. The paths are filled with wood chips if I don't have a clover or other green manure crop growing there. The old vegetation will break down and in the process will become composted in place.

These plants have drawn nutrients from the soil and, by leaving them in place, we allow some of that nutritional value to be returned to the soil. It's true, when we harvest a tomato, we are really harvesting the soil's fertility that has been converted via the sun's energy into the things we eat to live. Putting the tomato plant back into the soil, without the tomatoes you harvested, represents a net loss for the soil. That's where the additional mulch and wood chips come in – we try to replace the stuff we ate with stuff that will allow the soil to recreate its bevy of nutrients to nourish our next round of food plants. It is not sufficient, in the long run, to just add fertilizers – we need to add things that will provide sustenance for the critters in the soil – a thriving soil ecology will provide better nutrition to your plants without spending needless dollars on fertilizer, most of which will only provide pollution of our ground water.

In a garden where perennial weeds are not a huge problem, I encourage everyone to plant a perennial crop that will assist in nourishing the soil. I like any one of several clovers or alfalfa or whatever else that will take mild foot traffic and will do something to add to the fertility of the soil. If this crop is mowed in a sustainable manner – like with a hand sickle, for a small area, to a scythe for larger areas – the mowings can be put right back into the beds next to where it was cut. Some kind of soil regeneration must be happening all the time or the soil will eventually not support food crops. Unfortunately, growing in a community garden, control of the perennial weeds is only as good as the worst gardener and so a perennial cover crop on the pathways isn't always a practice we can use.

One portion of the garden needs to be left fallow in every season, 'fallow' means it is not growing a crop to harvest – usually what we call a green manure crop. For gardeners in Sunset Zone 24, that means a part of the garden can be left without growing crops to harvest every single month of the year. In areas where there is not a huge problem with perennial weeds, the paths can supplement this soil enrichment by growing something like clover year round that improves soil viability. In any growing season, it is better to have the soil covered with some crop – even a crop of weeds is better than leaving the soil barren, except they'll produce more weeds if they go to seed.

More September later in the month!

david

The Garden In August; Part IV: A Short List of Seed Houses

2009-08-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

I've started a new blog called "The Learning Garden - Almost - Daily," and this photo of some lettuce seed trials appears in the very first post there. These are so-called 'summer lettuces' that we're trying to ascertain how well they will do in the Southern California summer heat.

Following, I list a few of the seed houses I order from consistently. I tend to order most of my seeds from Pine Tree Garden Seeds simply because I rarely need the quantities of seed per packet that I get from the other companies. I pay less, I can experiment with different varieties and I have less seed left over at the end of the season. What's not to like? Their listings include almost all the main varieties I want to grow.

BOUNTIFUL GARDENS; 18001 Shafer Ranch Road; Willits, CA 95490; 707.459.6410 www.bountifulgardens.org This is a good source for open-pollinated seeds and often have varieties not found elsewhere. They also sell packets of grain seed – grow a little wheat, some oats or rye? Don't dismiss this out of hand – I had a wheat field in my front yard once. It is a good thing to support organizations that do credible garden research.

FEDCO SEEDS; PO Box 520, Waterville, ME 04903; 207.873.7333; www.fedcoseeds.com A very funky catalog, that makes me think of the Trader Joe's Frequent Flier, provides good quality open-pollinated seeds. While their focus is on 'cold-hardy, short season' seeds, we can use a lot of them here. As of August 31, they will no longer take orders for 2009. They begin to prepare for 2010's growing season. Their prices are really low - puts places like Seeds of Change to utter shame. And they are all open-pollinated.

PEACEFUL VALLEY FARM SUPPLY; PO Box 2209; Grass Valley, CA 95945; 916.272.4769 www.groworganic.com A fair priced purveyor of more than just seeds. This is the company to order cover crop seeds and tools as well as veggie and flower seeds. Their catalog is so chock full of data on pest control, fertilizing, cover crop seeds and irrigation; I have used it as a text in my organic gardening classes.

NATIVE SEED/SEARCH; 526 N. 4th Ave. Tucson, AZ 85705; 520.622.5561; www.nativeseeds.org; Like Seed Savers Exchange, this is a non-profit organization that exists to save seeds that have been grown for generations and represent a genetic diverse collection that mankind cannot allow to fall into obscurity. Their efforts are centered on the Native American seeds of the desert climates of Arizona and upper Mexico, which, despite the challenge of desert conditions still represent a disproportionate portion of our modern food crops.

PINETREE GARDEN SEEDS; PO Box 300, Rt. 100; New Gloucester, ME 04260; 207.926.3400 www.superseeds.com This is THE catalog where I order most of my seeds – they are the least expensive. How? The packets are smaller, fewer seeds. And that makes good sense for us with smaller sized gardens. If I want more, I can order more packets – but usually I order several varieties with which to experiment.

SEED SAVERS EXCHANGE; Rt. 3 Box 239; Decorah, Iowa 52101; 563.382.5990 Membership fees $25. Free brochure. www.seedsavers.org This is the other main source of seeds for me. I have been a member for over five years because I believe in the work they do saving the rich heritage of heirloom seed varieties that might well be a thin green line between us and the Monsanto's of this world that are striving to control our food supply. I urge you to order from the Exchange and to become a member; we NEED these seeds.

There are many other seed catalogs out there, some of them quite fun. I used to love to look through all of them and indulge dreams of acres of land on which to grow vegetables until I learned that subsidiaries of Monsanto were buying up some of the old Mom and Pop seed houses and keeping the cute old names. Seminis, Monsanto's seed supplier also lists some of my old favorites as sellers of their genetically modified seeds. Firms like Burpee, Parks, Cooks Garden, Nichols Garden Seeds are listed on the Seminis site as dealers for Seminis. I have changed my recommendations to these few that clearly state they do NOT sell genetically modified seed.

david

The Garden in August Part III: Some Suggested Varieties for the Fall/Winter Garden

2009-08-10T07:04:00.000-07:00

Seeds of this onion will soon be harvested so we can sow them for onions next year's crop. We don't save seeds of everything and those we need to have for fall planting must be ordered now. Here are varieties I have used with success, but it shouldn't limit you! Plant as many varieties as you have space to allow! In some years one will do good and the next year not so good, so hedge your bets and try to plan for a longer harvest by planting varieties that mature at different times. This is a good strategy for almost all vegetables - especially our fall crops! Some suggested seed houses will be published later this week!

Artichokes (a perennial)
Green Globe – one of the more productive varieties, Green Globe is usually one of the varieties available in the farmers' markets and groceries.
Violetto – is not so often seen in the market. Not quite as productive but still quite acceptable. Like the name implies, it has a good splash of purple in it. Each leaf tip possesses its very own, very sharp spine. But I think they are worth it!

Beets
Burpee’s Golden – there was a time when 'Burpee' was synonymous with seeds for the home gardener. While this is no longer true, way back there in that faraway time, Burpee bred a lot of wonderful crops that we still find useful today. This beet has lower germination rates than other beets, but boy oh boy! They are worth it! From the mere fact that they don't bleed red beet juice all over your fingers (and clothes!), Golden beets are very sweet. Sauté in orange juice.
`Chiogga – another heirloom. Very productive and sweet, not as sweet as the Golden, but running a close second. One of these beets, cut in half before being cooked, reveals alternating rings of a light red and white. They keep those alternating rings when roasted.

Broccoli
Premium Crop (62 days) and Early Dividend (43 days) are two of the better hybrid broccoli varieties. If you are gardening in pots, Early Dividend is a great selection.
Nutribud (58 days) and Waltham (85 days) are the heirloom varieties available today. Of these two, Nutribud is the one for container gardening. The days listed behind each variety is the 'days to harvest' from the catalogs. This refers to an approximate day by which you may expect to harvest the broccoli heads from the day you set them into the ground (transplanted out). It is an estimate only – weather conditions and other factors speed it up or slow it down, but in these four varieties above you have the idea that Early Dividend will come in first and Waltham last, all other things being equal.

Brussels Sprouts
Bubbles – 88 days. Brussels Sprouts are a largish plant but have the added advantage of providing a rather continuous harvest over many weeks. They also can be a pain if they get aphids or whitefly because they are very difficult to police.

Cabbage
Danish Ballhead – A late season cabbage – not so good for containers, but a reliable producer for those who wish to preserve some of their cabbage. Note that all these cabbages are not savoyed cabbages. Those crinkled leaves of the savoyed variety hold dirt and also make very opportune homes for slugs – and one gets a lot of slugs in long season cabbage anyway.
Point One – An early cabbage that is a delight. The 'early' cabbages are usually smaller headed and more useful in succession planting and for containers as well.
Surprise – Another early cabbage – like the name implies, this is not a round cabbage, but forms a pointy little head of cabbage.
Ruby Perfection – For those who want a red cabbage. Small heads and early. I've found red cabbage much more difficult to grow.

Carrots
Little Finger – A small carrot that is good for containers – an early harvest and you haven't had a carrot fresh from the garden, you don't know what you're missing! Sweet!
Mokum – This has been my number one carrot over the past five years. Productive and delicious.
Thumbelina – Little round carrots that are considered THE container carrot, but I like Little Fingers better thinking they are more sweet. Still, many folks will plant these and be perfectly happy.
Yaya – This may well be my new number one carrot. Bright orange six inch blunt roots, with a great flavor and will hold in the ground for a long time – which means I don't have to sow carrots in succession.

There are many different colors of carrots to think about growing as well – Pinetree Garden Seeds sells a carrot mix that includes a number of different varieties and colors!

Cauliflower
Early Snowball – is an open-pollinated and is the earliest and tastiest of all the cauliflowers available. Other varieties are out there that are tasty but I think this one takes less work and compares well with the others. There are, though, several varieties that are quite colorful, Green Harmony is, of course, green; Graffiti is purple and Cheddar is yellow. Not sure how I feel about them, but then I'm not a huge cauliflower eater.

Celery/Celeriac
Large Prague Celeriac – I'm not even going to list celery. In our climate, I don't think it's possible to get a sweet celery that isn't as tough as a sisal rope! Celeriac, on the other hand, has that delicious celery taste, is easy to grow and works as well as or better than celery in soups and other dishes. You can't fill it with peanut butter or cream cheese like you can celery, but how healthy is that anyway? And if that's the only advantage, stick with celeriac!

Chard
Five Color Silverbeet – All the chards taste about the same to me, so I like to plant this chard to get all the different colors – some of them are quite wild. (Australians call chard “silverbeet” which is a nod to the fact that chard and beets are the same exact species of plant.) Dependable and beautiful, you can't beat this one in the garden or the kitchen.

Cilantro
Delfino – A new variety that puts the old 'Slo-Bolt' to shame. Holds better than older varieties in heat (cilantro does not like to grow in heat) and the plants are a little larger for a better and longer harvest.

Fava Beans
Windsor – Though not the only fava out there, this one is probably the premier fava bean for a home garden. Not for those of us with very little garden space, a typical fava plant can get to be four and half feet tall or more. One plant, happily tended, will provide enough fava beans for two folks unless they really intend to chow down on favas! (Fresh grated parmesan cheese on fresh raw fava bean seeds marks you as a dedicated fava eater and you will need more than one plant!)

Florence Fennel (bulbing)
Fino – Usually used raw or cooked in Italian cuisine for its sweet, anise-like flavor, don't let it go to seed or you'll have this all over your garden as well.

Garlic (this is a long season crop, plant in Fall harvest next Summer)
Chesnok Red – The three varieties listed here are all heirloom varieties. This variety doesn't store so well, but the taste it holds even after cooking is worth the trade off!
Music – A slightly spicy, incredibly flavorful garlic, this is one of the most popular types around.
Spanish Roja – I grew this hard neck garlic for years – one of the finest flavored garlics I know. Not just hotter, the subtle tones that weave through the taste allows this garlic to compare to the common garlic in the supermarket equal in flavor as a fine Cabernet compared to a 'box of wine.'

Kale
Dinosaur – Also called Tuscan Black Palm or Lacinato. A unique kale with very large, rounded, well filled, meaty leaves. Plants are large, hardy, and vigorous, and the flavor, if you like it is 'bold' and if you don't like it, it's 'overwhelming.'
Nero di Toscano – A three feet tall plant with dark, meaty, puckered leaves, the color of a blue spruce. The striking ornamental leaves have a fine flavor harvested young and cooked simply in olive oil.

Leeks
Carina – Leeks have been divided into 'over-winter' and 'summer' leeks. Over winter are usually larger and take something like 110 to 130 days. In cold climates, these leeks stay in the frozen ground to be harvested out from under a blanket of snow. We usually don't have to dig them out from under the snow, but the slower growing leeks are larger.
King Richard – A 'summer' leek, this one grows nicely in our winter and quickly makes a decently edible leek in something like three months. To get a longer white part of the root, bring up the soil around the base of the plant – even though the catalogs say we don't need to do this, if you do, you will be rewarded with more usable root.

Lettuce
more varieties than you can shake a stick at – or grow a mix! There are many different colors and types, get as many as you have room for! Ha! I usually can't keep myself to less than 10 varieties at a time!

Onions (also a long season growing; find “short-day” varieties)
Italian Red Torpedo – Peaceful Valley Farm Supply has these as 'sets;' young plants to set out. This is my very favorite onion. Onions are difficult to grow by seed unless you plan on taking two years to get a good onion.

Parsley
Italian Flat Leaf – A brighter, more intense flavor.

Peas
Super Sugar Snap – I admit that I've mostly given up on peas. They take lot of space and don't exactly overwhelm a person with production, they get mildew and croak early and I'd rather grow another row of fava beans which are much more productive.

Potatoes
Yukon Gold – A ton of varieties are available, Peaceful Valley Farm Supply will have seed potatoes available in mid-October.

Radishes
French Breakfast – The standard radish for dependable crops. All radishes are easy to grow and are very quick to harvest – usually around 20-25 days.
Easter Egg – A fun radish that is great for children (and the young at heart!) with white, red, purple and intermediate colors between those.
Purple Plum – A lovely purple skin with white flesh – milder than most of the rest.

Shallots
Bonilla – Onions are a hassle (and don't really cost that much in the market), shallots are easy to grow and replace the expensive shallots one would need to buy at the store. This hybrid shallot is quick and easy from seed. I got a remarkably good crop with little effort in my first year to grow them -even though I got them in rather late! Dried, they make a good long term storage item.
Olympus – Another easy to grow shallot from seed. This one is white and also stores well.

Spinach
Melody – A semi-savoyed spinach. Most of the spinach we remember from way back were all savoyed spinaches, but savoyed (wrinkled), holds dirt better than smooth so I'm all for leaving the savoyed spinaches behind.
Space – A smooth spinach that is easily cleaned and has that taste of fresh spinach I didn't like until adulthood. Now I love it.

Turnips
DeMilano - A lovely flattened turnip – the best for container garden and very productive.
Purple Top White Globe – Will get to be the size of a small foreign country if you let them, but they are better when small.

You can also plant perennial herbs and perennial flowers. Try some fun annuals like calendula, larkspur, poppies (bread, California or Iceland types), sweet peas, and venidium.

david

The Garden in August; Part II

2009-08-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

It's not enough to grow the stuff, you also got to decide what to do with it! Six pounds of Sweet Banana Peppers and what to do? I think I can make some decent pepperoncinis with them - just need to find a recipe.

At this time, a gardener also needs to keep the green and yellow beans picked (they can be pickled as well) or they’ll stop producing. Keep using the basil, continually pinch their tips – flowers and the first pair of leaves and throw into whatever you're cooking or a salad - the flowers are as edible as the leaves. Next month, you can harvest whole plants and make pesto and this constant pinching will cause the plant to grow into a vigorous small shrub! Share the abundance of all your produce with friends, relatives or a food bank. Nature isn’t stingy so carry on that tradition and share too. We all need a fresh homegrown tomato now and then to remind us how blessed we really are.

Anything planted into the garden in August is an act of desperation. Mind you, you CAN plant, but it isn't going to be a cakewalk for you or the plants. You'll both need extra water and you both will chance a sunstroke that could kill them much more readily than you. You, at least, should have the sense to move into the shade if you notice symptoms of hyperthermia. Plants, on the other hand, have to stay put. If you do plant on a hot day, it is not a bad idea to find someway to shade your little darlings. A stick propping up a black nursery flat, with the flat covering from the south of the plants is a tried and true way for many gardeners to provide shade for their newly planted starts.

What to plant in the coming months is a great game gardeners play, wiling away long, insufferably hot hours in the shade. It is best to write down some of the ideas you're having for next summer's garden now. while this year's experience is fresh, otherwise the harvest of knowledge could be wasted. Of all the ways to learn gardening, the most sure and least expensive is to keep a garden journal. It is so easy now days and can be very inexpensive. If you have a computer, a digital camera and a word processing program you are set up. It can be a cheap camera (find a used one on eBay) and a free word processing program (I'm using Open Office Writer to do all my writing nowadays), and your thoughts will be preserved for the next year's garden. If that's not your bag, get a paper notebook, draw your plans, paste in pictures from catalogs and write your observations in a multitude of colors. Or use a combination! The point is to write down things so you'll remember them and to find a way to write them down that will give you enough pleasure to insure you'll do it. A chair or bench in your garden is the most perfect place to do this. Haul out a few catalogs, something cool to drink, sit down in the shade with your notebook (computer or paper) and think about the year gone by. It can be a meditation that is almost as good as eating from your garden. See below for a few catalogs to consult in preparing your next garden.

But don't throw all your attention in to next summer's garden. Spend some time now to consider what you will grow in our mild winters. I'm looking through some catalogs looking for cabbage, broccoli, onion, lettuce and other seeds. If I order them soon, I'll have them by the end of August and I'll be starting little pots of seedlings that will be going out into my garden by the beginning of October. Below, I've listed a few of the vegetables I want to grow along with some varieties that I like. I'll order seeds to start now, and, to save on postage, I'll order seeds that I'll be using a little later on.

However, no matter the state of the present, August is the time to contemplate the fall and winter garden; I’m in my seed catalogs already dreaming of my next great adventure in the garden. Soon, in sheltered locations, I’ll be starting seeds of broccoli, cabbage, kale, leeks and onions. I’ll plant several different heirloom varieties of sweet peas – maybe some blends of antique varieties, two seeds per pot. I’ll pour very hot water over the seeds the night before and leave them to soak until I actually stick them in their pots. It is amazing to see how much they have swollen from absorbing water because of that treatment. Don’t worry, pouring even close to boiling water on them won’t kill these seeds because the seed coat is too hard and the hot water will help the seed inside to break free.

david

Book of The Moment: Animal Vegetable Miracle

2009-07-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

I would imagine that many of you are familiar with Sharon Astyk's writings (Casaubon’s Book; Sharon Astyk’s Ruminations on an Ambiguous Future). I am an avid reader and Sharon has recently commenced a daily blog entry on the books she suggests for our edification. The title of the posts are, "365 Books #___." Sharon is a prolific writer and a farmer in upstate New York. I cannot believe she finds the time to write all that she writes AND farm(!), but, in plentiful evidence in her writings, she reads a whole lot too.

I only have an acre to keep up with and a couple of writing projects, so I am a little envious of her time management skills (and should go looking for anything she has written on the subject), but I will emulate her after a small fashion. I will post one book review every so often and over any amount of time, build a library of the books I suggest. These will be mostly garden books, but every so often, I will add in books that have changed my life in ways that have contributed to me becoming the gardener I am today.

So here we go with the first book, a 'why' book more than a 'do' book.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Barbara Kingsolver, Steven Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

Publisher: Harper
ISBN-10: 0060852569
ISBN-13: 978-0060852566
Cost: $14.95 Paperback

“At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them.” Barbara Kingsolver

A lot of books a person finds in the bookstore are eager to tell you what to do, sometimes with a rather shrill tone. Kingsolver, with her husband and two daughters (one was too young too sign a publishing contract), tell us what they did, acting on their conviction that they had to change their participation in the way they ate and participated in the American food chain.

Most of us are probably more than a little queasy about the modern American food distribution system. No other culture has had the luxury of food choices that we enjoy and the productivity of our agriculture staggers the imagination, still at no other time in mankind’s history has a civilization faced such an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Something is terribly broken with the way we eat.

The Kingsolver/Hopp clan do not intend to preach to us about what we could do, but quietly set off on their own private revolution and simply confide in us what happened. They chose to become “localvores” (also written as “locavores” by some), eating only food produced within a 100 mile radius of their home in Southwestern Virginia. Each family member was allowed to chose one item from a further realm (Steven Hopp, obviously a man of vision, chose coffee), but beyond that, the commitment they signed on for was to eat locally for one whole year.

Most Americans would think of eating seasonally as a little too “quaint” – something akin to foregoing indoor plumbing – if they thought of it at all. But when one chooses to eat locally, one is also choosing to eat seasonally in some degree as well. This alone would be a shock to most of us, used to, as we are, strawberries any month of the year, or peaches, asparagus, or any of our common fruits and vegetables. In fact, it’s probably a point of pride for our culture that we can eat these things at any time of the year.

But what has the cost been? Our farmers are as bankrupt as the taste of the food from the local market. No preaching, but plenty of common sense guides the family through the year as they learn how to provide a lot of their own food and how to get the rest from local sources. Not only is the family empowered, but those they work with locally are also empowered. Not only do they not starve, but they eat well. In fact, their year long experiment has changed by year’s end from experiment to lifestyle.

Along the journey, the “Miracle” in the title seems to morph as the book progresses. In the beginning, filled with the fear of throwing her family’s diet to the winds, the “miracle” seems to be they might really be able to eat through the year. By mid-book, the “miracle” becomes this tastes so good, even though it is a lot of work. By the conclusion, the miracle is the transformation that will inspire many others to try this as a way of life and the hope that Kingsolver and clan clearly offer the rest of us.

The Kingsolver family maintain a blog site that has more to tell about their year of food 'freedom.'

david

The Garden in August; Part I

2009-07-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

A couple of handfuls of Cannellini beans show the beautifully dried beans ready to be bagged for storage away from critters that would like to eat them as much as I would! And this is just one of the many things we are harvesting from the garden this month!

(This month I am experimenting with the idea of posting the monthly hand out in several segments. This is Part I - there will be several addendum's, hopefully weekly or so, to this one over the course of August.)

I used to think of August as nap time, and in the heat of Southern California's summer, it sure is inviting! Grab a cool drink, a hammock and the Dodgers on the radio and I can feel the muffled sounds of snoring...

But not anymore. Not since I realized that growing the food was less than half the battle. I mean, there's a lot to do on that account too, more will be revealed very soon, but getting the harvest in and making good use of it is another important part of gardening.

It's hot work, but this week alone, I've harvested 10 pounds of those famous Italian Cannellini beans (a dried bean sometimes referred to as 'white kidney beans' but that refers to the physical appearance and not to their eating or cooking qualities), about as many pounds of peppers – mostly the sweet banana types that I hope to pickle soon. As well as the tons of cucumbers I am hauling in. Did you follow my advice and plant any Armenian cucumbers? If you did, you are swimming in cucumbers by now and have come to realize the reason that pickles have such prominence in our culture!

How do you preserve the harvest makes a huge difference in how well you can eat from your garden. When the season is in full swing, like it is right now, dealing with the abundance is the major focus of the home gardener.

There are several ways to deal with fresh produce that will allow you to eat from your garden long after the heat of August is gone. You can dry the produce. This is the easiest way. Beans, like my Cannellinis (above), are simply left on the plant until the pods are crispy and ready to drop the white bean seeds on the ground. I come along, gather them up and lay them in a dry, partly sunny location to dry for a couple of days. In Southern California that should do them nicely. Putting them away with too much moisture could result in moldy beans when you want to use them in cooking.

Juicier veggies can be dried too, but they take longer and are a little more involved. If you want to dry tomatoes, or peppers, pick up a good book on drying. Look for a list of my suggested books soon. Drying has the wonderful advantage of not being dependent on the power grid to continue to be edible, unlike freezing which is totally dependent on electricity.

Likewise canning definitely cannot be done without careful consideration. Pickling making jams, a subset of canning, is not quite as involved as other types of canning though it too needs to be done with some awareness. Pickling and jams are easier because the high acidity or sweetness (pickling uses vinegar, jams and jellies avoid botulism with lots of sugar) keeps the bad organisms from growing in your food without using a pressure cooker. Get a good book on canning and pickling and you will discover a whole new world.

Certain kinds of fermentation have begun to make a comeback in modern times. Making alcohol has been one way of preserving grape juices, and apple jack for apples. They require no refrigeration, because most of these methods predate electricity by a couple hundred years. Again, delving into that would take more space than I can muster right here.

But do give how you will keep some of your harvest on into the coming months should be a priority in this month of plentiful heat and produce to match!

Check back next week for more August doings.

david

The Garden in July

2009-07-09T22:49:00.000-07:00

Corn high in the garden promising good eating right around the corner. As a boy in Kansas, I knew my Grandfather's goal every year was to harvest sweet corn ears by July 4th. He might have even had money bet with a neighbor or two who would harvest corn first and I'm sure in most years he won! Corn takes a lot of room though, most of us will have to buy our corn at farmers' markets.

July means we are speaking of hot weather, so now is the time to get a cool drink and say hello to summer in our Southern California gardens; I insist that no garden should be created without seating for the gardener to glory in the work that has been done. This is not the month to do a lot of planting, if you can help it at all. Water is what your garden wants along with some weeding and harvesting. Don’t just pour water on your garden without exercising your noggin! Monitor the soil moisture and apply water as needed – but before plants begin to wilt. Try to water when less will be lost to evaporation – early in the day or late in the day… At night under the full moon listening to the owls... Stick a finger in the soil up to the first knuckle – better yet, turn over a small spot of soil with your trowel. It should be slightly moist down about an inch or so. The surface of the soil can be quite dry and that's fine. A gardener is more concerned with the moisture level in that part of the soil where roots live.

Check the mulch level this month – insure it is deep enough to keep roots cool and prevent evaporation of the precious water you are putting down. I don't use ANY fertilizer, which means my plants are never over-fertilized, except I am cautious about using really good compost that might have a lot of nitrogen in it on tomatoes or other members of that plant family (peppers, eggplant, potatoes and deadly nightshade, for example). They tend to use up all the nitrogen you give them by growing very large and healthy looking plants and not setting fruit. For our climate, this isn't a disaster, you just have fresh tomatoes in October and November. But if you don't want to wait, skip fertilizer or good compost. Save it for corn which is a notoriously heavy feeder.

I know I said this isn't a good planting month, you and I both were supposed to get all that done last month, but we probably didn't, so listen up: With care, it is still possible to sow beans and, for those of us with the room, corn. If you need it, it's also possible to sow another planting of summer squash. Some of the real heat loving veggies can be set out, like more peppers or tomato plants. If you desire that foul taste of eggplant, one might set out another plant at this time. But these guys will need extra water (try to plant them in the late afternoon – and try very hard to minimize root damage). The problem with planting now is that the leaves can easily transpire much more water than the small root system can take up. If these plants have been growing in the same amount of sunlight that they will get in the ground into which they have been transplanted, they stand a much better chance of survival. But wilted leaves the following afternoon suggest the root system is not keeping pace with the lost moisture and unless your little darlings put on enough roots quickly, or you can do some judicious, temporary shading, your crop might not make it to a thriving adulthood.

Other experienced gardeners have disagreed with me so this is purely my own call, seen with my own eyes, but I don't think corn works well once the Summer Solstice has passed (June 21 or so). As the days get shorter (Wait! Weren't they just getting longer? What happened?), corn “realizes” it has to set seed before the cool months of fall and winter and so it flowers and sets seed as fast as it can. I've seen corn seedlings at six inches high fully tasseled out and trying to produce ears of corn. The ears they did produce were so small you needed a 10x jeweler's loupe to see them! Not a lot of corn to eat. Gardening will disabuse a person from believing that California doesn't have seasons! The plants know seasons better than we do.

In our climate, especially in that part of the west coast that gets a lot of Pacific Coast influence, growing the cucurbits can be a challenge because the moisture in the air allows mildew to grow and kill these plants. The cucurbits are cucumbers, squashes, melons and pumpkins (which are really a squash) and they are particularly susceptible to getting mildew. It can be hard, in some years with heavy 'June Gloom' to get a good crop. There are some remedies for mildew but I haven't tried any yet. I get rid of the infected plant and simply grow another. It's usually only a hassle with winter squash.

Summer squash is called that because you eat it in summer. Summer squashes include zucchini, patty pans, crooknecks, and all the squashes the British call 'marrow' and 'courgettes.' They are characterized by soft skin and will rot if you keep them around too long without refrigeration.

Winter squash, which includes pumpkins, are so named because they would keep for many months and provide families with food over the winter months. It is their hard outer shell that allows them to be a part of a winter diet in a world without refrigeration and the ability to transport food over thousands of miles. Our ancestors relied on the keeping ability of winter squashes to hold starvation at bay. Keeping winter squashes edible for a long period of time in Southern California is a challenge because we don't have root cellars to store them cool and dry. Many of us can't really grow a lot of winter squash because of the space they take up.

The avalanche of ripe harvest should begin to worry you before July is halfway through. Tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, beans, corn, zucchini, stone fruits and others will begin to overwhelm a gardener. Keep the harvest coming by picking when ripe promptly and finding ways to keep the produce for later.

Zucchini and summer squashes are a special concern. A four inch squash on Tuesday will be 9 inches and will resemble a caveman's club by Friday. It won't be as tasty and tender. Any summer squash will do that, with the ones we call 'zucchini' being the quickest to grow to laughable sizes fastest. It's the reason for a million recipes for Zucchini Bread, Zucchini Casserole, Zucchini Lasagna – I have even eaten a Zucchini Crumble, which was pretty good as long I could avoid eating any of the zucchini in it (which means eating the brown sugar, butter and cinnamon around the zucchini slices). Don't let that happen – once they have gotten much beyond the four to six inch size, they aren't all that tasty and begin to get woody. Harvest them early and often – just like voting in Chicago!

Melons are a challenge. Cantelopes and honeydews should have wilted tendril at the stem end of the fruit and should smell ripe (mouth waters when smelling). Watermelons are much more difficult to tell; I have a very funny story about being fooled by a watermelon when I was twelve, but that's for another day. I only know to thump them, listening for a dead, almost hollow sound to determine ripeness.

Cucumbers are not so much a challenge – as soon a cucumber is big enough for you, snag it. There are many different varieties of cucumber and it would be impossible to list each and every one because they all come in different sizes and shapes. Suffice it to say that Japanese cucumbers and Armenian cukes are able to get quite large and be edible – not just edible, but delicious! Not so much with other varieties. I know everyone gets goo-goo eyed about 'Lemon' cucumbers, but I don't share the love on them. Some say you have to wait until they turn yellow before they are good to eat. I think they are never THAT good to eat no matter how long you wait. I'll go with the Japanese or Armenian cucumbers – highly productive and delicious!

The harvesting of corn is another that begs exploration. The first time I saw city folks trying to choose ripe corn in the market, I was completely blown away! I had never seen people pull back the shuck (the leaves covering the ear) to see if the corn had filled out the cob or to see how large the kernels were. Although, I suppose if you hadn't picked it yourself, these things would be suspect. I had learned to merely feel through the leaves to 'see' what was underneath. Corn sold in markets – even farmers' markets – is usually picked after it's past the optimum stage – and non-gardeners are likely to prefer it. It is a 'more = better' kind of thinking. But corn kernels that have gotten big and fat are not as juicy and not nearly as tender. Smaller kernels are better.

The tassel on a corn plant are the 'boy flowers' and the silks are the 'girl flowers.' The pollen falls from the tassel onto the silks and that causes the kernels – really the seed of the next crop of corn – to grow. Each kernel has its own silk – if you find a cob with a vacancy (no kernel where there should be one), that is one silk that did not get pollinated. When the silks begin to dry out, they have been pollinated. If you have experienced worms in your corn, as soon as you can see silks, put a couple of drops of mineral oil in the spot where they emerge from the shuck. The worms will find that an impassible barrier and you'll have worm free corn! To harvest, feel the ear – it does take some training, but after a time, your tactile explorations will enable you to feel the ripe (and full ear) and leave the underdeveloped still on the plant. Grab the ear firmly and pull slightly out and down in one compelling motion and liberate it from the plant. The up and down ends will need trimming to find the actual ear in all that you have in your hand. Here again, you can find it by careful touch.

In this season of heat, don't neglect yourself when you are in the garden. The sun we experience today is not the same sun our grandparents faced. With ozone depletion, it is much easier to have to face skin cancer, so take steps to avoid having to deal with that. I know the popular method to avoid overexposure is to slather on lots of sun screen, but I don't find that a realistic alternative for a person in the sun almost every day. In the first place, I'm concerned that all that goop eventually gets washed off our bodies and goes into the waste stream and I know there is no provision for what happens to it after that – it isn't one of the substances ameliorated by city sewage treatment and so flows out into nature where we don't have a clue what it does. It's just another human pollutant and no one has bothered to investigate if it's harmful or benign. Dealing with our environment, we should always assume the worst and take exceeding care to not damage the only world we have. I know this is a contrary view.

I continue to wear long pants and long sleeved shirts even on hot days. I have several that are quite light and let the breeze flow through. It is one way to avoid harmful rays and avoid having to purchase goop on a regular basis – the pores of my skin aren't clogged up with questionable solutions and I am as comfortable – or as uncomfortable – as the next person. I also strongly suggest a hat – not only for the interdiction of the sun, but a way of shielding my eyes and keeping cooler. And besides, a straw hat is the epitome of fashion!

And while we are on this tangent, consider your number one tool set in the garden: your hands. This is one set of tools you can't replace or upgrade so it's best to take good care of them at all times. For gardeners, the feel of earth in their fingers is one of the true joys – and feeling of connection – a gardener can experience. However, the hands can also get injured easily in a garden so take a few steps back and consider how to protect them. When doing repetitive tasks that abrade your skin, wear gloves. Have more than one pair: one for moist work that has a moisture barrier of some kind, one for light work (goatskin gloves are marvelous to the touch – they contain a lanolin that works wonders on your hand while you work) and a heavy leather pair for hard work. The goatskin and heavy leather gloves can now be replaced by some non-animal products that are almost as protective. You will find good selections of gloves from your local nursery and your local big box store – mail order gardening companies' catalogs show you the full range of whats available. There is no need to settle in your glove choice – never buy a glove you find uncomfortable. In the first place, you don't need to and in the second, it will discourage you from wearing that pair as often as you might need to.

One more thing: is your tetanus shot up to date? Talk to your doctor – this shot should be renewed every several years and you should strive to remain current. I'm not a doctor and I can never remember how often it is now recommended (they changed it several times and I'm not sure which figure is right anymore). It was seven at one time, now I think it might be ten. So, talk it over with your doctor. You don't have to garden on a former dump site (which is what The Learning Garden once was) to be surprised by a nail or broken piece of glass. And while soil is one of the safer substances in its natural state (penicillin was concocted from a soil mold), soil in the city might not be in its natural state!

In the evening, grab some lemonade and contemplate your garden. You are awesome – you are growing food you can eat. Aren't you glad you put a seat in your garden? When you are done with your reverie, go inside and write me an email about how happy you are. I also accept checks.

david

Vote for Your Favorite Farmers' Market!

2009-06-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

I voted for my local farmers' market, the Sunday West LA Farmers' Market on Sunday because they know that locally grown music is a part of the same wave as locally grown produce! My band, Lost 'n' Found, plays at the WLA market the first Sunday of almost every month. But even if we didn't play there, the management at this market work hard to make it a part of our neighborhood.

But don't let me influence you - just vote!

david

The Garden in June

2009-06-05T21:54:00.000-07:00

These nectarines are only one of the fruits that are beginning to ripen in a coastal California garden this month. There are also peaches, apples and apricots. Close behind we will see ripe figs, avocados, plums and other peaches and apples. Not too shabby a reward for the little bit of work done back in January! The one in the middle was eaten about three minutes after this photograph was taken.

If you are on the Coast, the weather will forgive you for most of your transgressions, if you are more inland, you are cutting your production seriously if you do not have the bulk of your summer plants in the ground. On the coast, if we have a typical summer, you have until the end of the month to get any of the cool season items out of the soil. You should wait until September before you take another crack at cool season. This is the warm season vegetable’s finest hour.

Do all that is listed for May if you haven’t done so yet, but do so with the thought that you’ll need to be more attentive to your plants’ water needs, and if you are inland, the later in the month it gets, the more stress your plants will be under to get their roots established in the ground before really hot weather hits. If you haven’t gotten your slower growing heat lovers in by now, it would serve you better to wait until next year. I’m thinking of some squashes and pumpkins – the big ones. The bigger the squash or pumpkin the longer it takes for them to get ripe; some of these take 100 days to harvest time, check that out, that’s over three whole months!, and will not ripen under anything but the hottest of conditions.

The mulch around your plants needs to be up to at least four inches – provided of course that it is a plant taller than 6 inches, as most of summer's crops are. Add any kind of organic matter at all. It matters little what it is, but add it and don't be stingy with it. The worms will come up from the ground in the night and pull bits of the mulch down into the soil, creating air pockets as they come and go and depositing their castings all through the soil. This is what they do and you make them an important and viable part of your soil ecology by allowing them to do what they are born to do – besides it saves your back and makes for a much more enjoyable garden all the way around. And that's what we all want to do – enjoy the garden!

Garlic planted last fall will begin to come due soon. Racambole garlic – the hardneck kind of garlic that I prefer – will begin to grow a hard center stalk that will eventually have a small group of bulbils on it. The hard neck grows up to almost even with the leaves and begins to make an elongated “Q” shape. Once this shoot begins to make its sweeping turn, begin to hold back water.

Other garlics are a lot less dramatic, their leaves will show signs of turning brown on the tips. Hold back on the water. As the leaves begin to turn fully brown, you can pull the garlic bulbs, shake the soil from them as best you can and leave the plants in dappled sunlight for a few days until really dry to the touch. You can then braid the softneck garlics and tie the hardnecks into a bundle. Hang them in a cool dry place, I know, like we have those in Southern California, but do the best you can.

Remember, if you have planted both kinds of garlic, though the hard necks will often have a more garlicky taste, they will not keep as well as the soft necks. The soft neck allows the bulb to be sealed more effectively from the air and so helps it last longer. Eat the hard neck garlics first, then, keeping the braids of soft neck garlic until later in the winter. Onions are much the same way – if you have good sized bulbs and the tops are not turning brown, you might need to knock them over at the very top of the onion. This will cause the onion to 'seal' off the bulb from the stalk and will help the onion last longer in your pantry.

This is my first year growing shallots and I imagine they'll take the same care as onions – except at this point I have no bulb to speak of which causes me to wonder if I didn't get them into the ground too late? One of the draws of gardening is that no matter how long you do it, you'll never learn all there is to learn about it. So this is my year to learn how to grow shallots. I understand they are easier to grow and provide a more reliable harvest than onions. And, while you can buy onions rather cheaply, certainly the same cannot be said about shallots! So, dollar for dollar, shallots are a more tempting allium to grow. Look for October's chapter to find out how to plant garlic and shallots.

Have you staked up your tomatoes yet? If you haven't, you may well find yourself resigned to having free-range tomatoes this year! Once plants reach a certain size, it is more destructive to try to corral them into a cage than to let nature have its way with them. You may escape with the best harvest ever, but, as much of a risk taker as I am, that's one bet I don't place. Even a lone bamboo pole at the back is better than nothing. Use some soft ribbon or old rags to tie them up – string or twine will damage the plant.

I have my tomatoes planted with two basil plants and one pepper plant for every tomato plant. I'm doing companion planting to discourage pests and to not drain the soil of the nutrients needed by one plant. I could have planted more tomato plants closer together, but all those plants would draw on the same nutrients through the soil. By planting different plants near by, I am using the same ground but perhaps not pulling nutrients of the same exact profile from the whole bed. There will be slightly different nutrients used by the basil and pepper. This helps me keep my soil more fertile – you know I eschew the use of all fertilizers. I think they end up being harmful to the soil in the long run. Even the organic ones. 'Organic' heroin is just as bad as chemical heroin.

Beans and corn can be grown as succession crops in summer. Corn probably is a bad choice because it takes so much room – in fact, if you have enough room to do a succession planting of corn, you probably don't live in Southern California. Corn, as we observed last month, has to be grown in fairly substantial blocks to allow for good pollination. So, 'beans can be grown as a succession crop in summer.' You can put in several different kinds of beans all through June – just make sure you don't fail to water the young lads on the hot days. They'll need more water than the rest of the garden, so pay them special attention.

Also try to keep a lettuce plant here and there on the shady side of taller plants – like corn and tomatoes. Some of the lettuces to try for summer are: Bronze Arrowhead, Gold Rush, Jericho, Mascara, Pablo, Rossa di Trento, Rossimo,Tango, Red Velvet, Reine de Glaces, Slobolt, Summertime, Sunset and Yugoslavian Red Butterhead. All of these promise to be “slow to bolt” or “hold well in heat,” but often that heat is 'heat' as in Maine and not 'heat' as in Los Angeles! Marvel of the Four Seasons (Merville de Quartre Saison) is only Marvel of the Three Seasons in Los Angeles!

If you have cabbage, broccoli or other cool season crops still in your garden, you'll probably have to kiss them goodbye soon unless this is a cooler June than usual. Even with “June Gloom,” the temperatures are usually too high for good tasting food from those cool weather plants to mature at this time. If you have a cabbage or a broccoli close to being fully grown, watch it very carefully lest it bolt suddenly on a warm day. Broccoli will begin to show the yellow of the flowers. Once you can make out a pronounced yellow in the head, you cannot procrastinate picking it. If some of the buds do open, all is not lost because you can still eat the ones that haven't. However, you are living on borrowed time as far as that head of broccoli is concerned. Get it sooner rather than later.

Once cabbage has formed a head, it is acceptable to pick it. If you want the most cabbage for your square foot of land possible, feel the head. If there is give to the leaves, you have a ways to go. A fully grown cabbage will be hard – there will not be space between the leaves and the give will be gone. At this point, you need to pay attention to it. Once you see the outer leaves on the head begin to curl back on the edge, the cabbage is about to split open and the flower stalk will emerge. Once the head has split, you've not got a good eating cabbage on your hands. There went all that slaw and kraut!

If you do miss them and they do go to flower, leave them in the garden. Beneficial insects will find them a happy addition to their diet. It will advertise to your friends who garden that you screwed up, but swallow your pride and allow the beneficial insects to have a good thing to eat. If this is not a hybrid crop, look into learning how to save your seeds for next year. Just as well get some good out of it!

Keep your garden moist – a tough trick as our world heats up. Your mulch will help. Try to water in the cooler times of day – early AM or late PM. If you have troubles with mildew and other fungus problems, try to stick to the early mornings; any moisture on the leaves will have a chance to be wicked away and will less likely cause problems. However, if you, like me, are crunched for time, late in the evening is better than not at all!

It is better to avoid over head watering if at all possible because the amount of water lost to evaporation and wind dispersal. If you can get one, a 'leaky pipe' hose that sweats the water out at very low pressure is the way to go and is fairly inexpensive to boot. Turn the water on very slightly and, once the hose is full of water it will bead out of minute holes all along the length of the hose. Allow it to run for a very long time and you'll get water soaking down into the roots of your plants which is where you want it. Use it much less frequently than you would an overhead sprinkler.

Overhead watering can also encourage problems with mildew on plant leaves. You get a whitish sheen on your leaves that eventually kills the plant. There really is no way to avoid getting it on your plants this close to the ocean. For some reason all our squashes and many other plants just seem to get mildew and it shortens their production something fierce. I've never found a solution to it, but if one grows squash, the 'work-around' is to grow your cucurbits fast, get a crop and if that wasn't enough start more plants to keep the harvest coming. Of course, the ones you can't really do that with are the winter squashes and pumpkins. Their growing season is just too long to start over again and you really only get one crop. Still, grow them (if you have room) with plenty of light and plenty of air circulation and if you're lucky, you'll get a crop. In most years, you'll be OK, although you'll never harvest those record-setting pumpkins you can read about from points further east – like Kansas, Kentucky and Connecticut, for example.

Marina de Chioggia squash produced a lovely crop for me last year even in a relatively shady bed! So go figure. That not withstanding, if you want a good crop of winter squash, I still advise you to put it in an area with abundant sunlight.

The Garden In May

2009-05-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

Tomato cages made of bamboo are one way to keep your tomatoes off the ground and less available to pill bugs (AKA roly-poly bugs). I've always wanted to grow my own tomato cages and bamboo is one way to do it. Saplings of weed trees (like Chinese elm or pepper tree, two of the candidates growing at The Learning Garden) can be used the same way, tied together with some garden twine. There are a host of tomato cages you can buy, but this way is so environmentally friendly, do it if you can.

The cool of Spring is likely to be a sweet memory before this month is out – a gardener will have to have the summer garden pretty much in place unless your weather is really influenced by the Pacific, like Santa Monica, Venice and other beach towns. Longer days with a marine layer are still nothing like the warmth of Summer and Fall, but the diffuse sunlight through the 'June Gloom' does make it warm enough to get your summer plants surging ahead. This growth time is important for a full harvest. If you can't get things in the ground this month you will not have the harvest you could have had. And besides, working in the garden in May is so much sweeter than doing all that back breaking work in June and July! Save yourself and your plants! Strike while May's picture is still on your wall calendar!

I am planting the following from seed: corn, cucumbers (you can set out cucumber plants, but I have learned they dislike being transplanted so much it is faster and more certain to sow them directly, just keep the snails at bay), squash of all kinds – summer, winter, zucchini, acorn – and beans – and setting out plants of basil, tomatoes, and peppers. I am setting out lettuce seedlings and still sowing short rows of carrots, beets, radishes and spinach in one small area, with an old screen standing by to shield them from too much sun. Sowing all of those without the screen would be a recipe for disaster.

It is easier to grow cool season crops in the Summer on the coast than it is to do the reverse and one of my major goals in life is to grow a complete salad, meaning tomatoes with my lettuce. I have an annual tradition of the First BLT of the season, wherein, I grow the T and the L and usually bake my own bread. You can try planting the cool season crops in a shadier part of the garden if you don't have access to a screen and sometimes you'll be lucky, sometimes not so much. I've done it both ways and like the certainty of the screen

You may grow any of these in pots as long as you get smaller versions – most nurseries and all the seed companies will help you find plants that will grow in pots – it is possible to buy tomatoes and cucumbers bred to live in a hanging basket, but in our climate, think of all the attention you'll have to give their watering needs! And while you can grow smaller varieties of sweet corn, it is a wind pollinated crop and it is important to grow a substantial number of plants to get a viable crop. Still, it sure makes a statement – even a small corn stalk is pretty impressive – one could do a Native American theme pot with a couple stalks of corn, a sunflower and pole beans climbing up them. But don’t plan on it for a dinner party; it would be a decorative piece only. Pots, of course, do limit the size of a plant's root system, so you get less food, but if you don't have a choice in the matter, it is one way to add truly fresh food to your diet – just keep a very close eye on their water needs.

In addition, try melons, eggplant and okra, if you have room for melons and actually like okra and eggplant. Okra needs the most heat of any vegetable under discussion here, put it the hottest corner of your garden. In addition, if your eating plans include borage, chervil, chives, lavender, lemon grass, lovage, marjoram, mint (be certain to get a good culinary one, there are many that are not) Greek oregano (Origanum heracleoticum NOT O. vulgare, big difference in taste although vulgare is a lot easier to find), parsley, rosemary, sage and tarragon, you could set these plants out into a border convenient to your kitchen. Or in pots. These perennial plants are fine being planted now – they are hardy in the heat and will take a lot more drought than the annuals – these are all Mediterranean plants, which is the type of climate we have in LA. They are not as hardy as the California Natives, our drought is typically nine months long, theirs is closer to six, but they run an edible second.

This is the 2nd big season for planting perennial crops. And while Fall is better, many people with East Coast or Midwest “roots” simply cannot prune from themselves this “Spring = planting time” mentality. It can be so pervasive that even nurseries themselves often evidence a better selection of some things at this time of year. Our part of the country seems so divorced from manual labor with the soil that such things are not the strangest occurrences that happen horticulturally here. Just to add confusion, a good number of the chain stores have their plant selections made somewhere back east by someone who has no clue what we should be growing here. You will find roots of artichokes, rhubarb, potatoes, onions, shallots, garlic and asparagus in many stores – I'd skip these if you can discipline yourself. It is much better to purchase these from mail order suppliers. You'll get better plants and they will arrive at a better planting time, late fall and early winter which is where I offer my ideas on planting them. One of my favorite suppliers, and fairly local too, is Peaceful Valley Farm Supply. Their website, GrowOrganic.com is not one of the easiest to use, but their paper catalog is fantastic. I have used it to teach organic gardening. Call them at 888.784.1722 and ask for the catalog. The main catalog comes out in January with seeds, tools and general supplies, but the little fall catalog is the one that has these plants for your purchasing joy. Try some heirloom garlic and the Italian Red Torpedo onions for some real wonderful eating! But wait to buy them in Fall.

You may put out deciduous fruit trees and fruiting vines, but they are best planted in Fall like the plants in the last paragraph. In Fall, you will have the chance to plant bare root trees which is easier on the tree and will help you get an established tree sooner (and therefore more fruit sooner!). The only thing you can find in the stores at this time of year are trees potted up in 10 gallon or larger pots, but these are more expensive than the Fall bare-root plants, and they will not establish nearly as quickly as bare-root plants. It really is much better to patiently wait until next Fall to plant any deciduous trees.

Now however is a good time for citrus to go in as well as kiwi and sapote because they are more tropical and will love the coming heat while they get established. These plants do not go dormant so they are always sold in pots. Dig a hole no larger than the pot the tree came in, and do not bother adding all kinds of compost, mulch or other organic matter to the soil you fill in around the rootball. Current research shows that all that effort is pretty much a waste of time. Get the soil all around the roots and press it down with your foot in order to make sure it's firm. Put a garden hose on 'drool' and leave it be for as long as it takes to wet that are thoroughly. Keep citrus trees moist – especially in their first year – and soon you'll have more lemons, limes or tangerines than you know what to do with! Nature is always abundant if we work with Her and not against.

In setting out your tomatoes and other vegetables, you'll want to choose the part of the garden that gets the most sun. I know we have all been told that all vegetables must have all day sun, but that isn't necessarily so. Even in dappled sun, or in areas that don't get sun all day long, I have grown tomatoes and peppers. Sometimes the crop yield is somewhat compromised and the fruits mature measurably later, but I've still had good eating from plots others said would not produce at all. One does invite more preying insects because the lack of sun stresses the plants a little more, but with a little vigilance and industry, those shortcomings can be mitigated.

Tomatoes will set roots all along their stem, so setting them into the ground deeper than they were in the pot is a standard practice. However, other transplanted vegetables should be set in the ground no deeper than they were in the container. Allow one foot between peppers and eggplants, 2½' between most tomatoes – unless you know the plants are the short season early tomatoes – like Siletz, Stupice, Early Girl, Prairie Fire or Glacier, to name a few. These tomatoes are almost all determinate tomatoes that give you one crop in about 60 days from setting out and will set fruit in cooler/wetter conditions. They can be 18” apart and usually don't need staking – the other tomatoes do need something to keep them off the ground.

If you find aphids on your plants, wash them off with a stream of water – at worst, hit them with a little soap solution. Unless one is gardening in deep shade or the plants are stressed some other way, aphids should only pose a minor problem and all one needs to do is to help the beneficial insects keep them in check. It is helpful to keep a border or some pots of herbs or flowering ornamentals near the vegetable beds – beneficial insects may use their nectar for a food source when aphids aren’t present.

I really try to avoid all pesticides and fertilizers. Even the organic ones. I believe in the old organic maxim to “feed the soil and not the plant” and the addition of all fertilizers and pesticides hurts the flora and fauna of the soil. If the soil has a healthy ecology, teeming with bacteria and fungi, then this healthy soil will provide the building blocks for my plants to use in photosynthesis. Pesticides are designed to kill – and organic ones in some ways are worse than the chemical kind. Organic pesticides are wide-spectrum killers – they kill almost any critter they touch. It is true they don't persist very long in the environment – and that is one reason to use them instead of the chemical pesticides. For any pesticide to be efficient, you have to spray enough to cause it to drip onto the soil and those drops are fatal to soil biota. Don't do it if you can help it.

If you cultivate the ecology of the soil, you won't need fertilizers in your garden. It might take a few years, but with a little patience, you will raise the fertility of your soil. Plants aren't thriving though are probably not victim of a lack of nutrition (except nitrogen, which plants need in good supply at all times); it's probably a water problem (too much or too little).

Plants in containers are in a different world however. Those plants are placed in a most abnormal position. You must fertilize them – especially nitrogen. I use fish emulsion – it stinks, I know, I know – but it's still my favorite fertilizer. It is mild. Plants readily take it up and results are visible quite quickly. Even sickly plants can handle fish emulsion, whereas many of the other more powerful fertilizers are too hot for plants that are stressed and can keel right over when hit with the stronger solutions. I tend to use all fertilizers almost diluted twice as much as suggested on the container. I would rather have a weaker solution used more often than a full strength solution as recommended by the people that make their living off fertilizer sales.

I mentioned nitrogen as being the one nutrient your plants really need all the time. Signs of nitrogen shortages are yellowing older leaves on your plant. Because plants can move nitrogen inside their bodies, they will transfer their limited supplies of nitrogen from the older leaves, which don't work as well as the younger leaves, to their newer leaves in order to maximize the effect of the nitrogen. If your plant has green new leaves and yellowing older leaves, it's probably a lack of nitrogen. This happens a lot in citrus in winter when nitrogen moves slowly in the soil and yet the plants still need a lot of it. Fish emulsion is the answer for this problem definitely.

To get nitrogen into your garden is a different sort of thing. Over the summer, I'll be sowing plants in the garden to bring in some nitrogen without fertilizer, but the main way to get nitrogen in your garden is through lots of organic matter. That brings the critters to digest it and they will provide your plants with all the minerals they need.

The Garden In April

2009-04-03T16:57:00.000-07:00

The summer garden's plants are in their little starter pots right now (vaguely reminiscent of training wheels on a bicycle) really begging to be transplanted into the earth. Tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, the stalwarts of our summer garden are almost ready to hit the big time. In some years, it's too cool until after your taxes are done, but in many others, you may heed their pleas and put them out sooner.

It seems like the crops most of us think of as value crops are the summer garden crops. Back in March, if I got to it, I sowed a couple of short rows of purple snap beans. I know folks that swear they are 'purple green beans, ' but that seems a little contradictory to me. They aren't green, they're purple – until you cook them. Purple beans turn green when they are done to a toothsome crunch and so the beans tell you when to stop steaming them!

They are good, but in my book, they aren't the real deal of the bean world. In April, gardeners put out their main crop of snap beans. Most folks plant green beans, including, Blue Lake, Kentucky Wonder, Romano and others, either as a pole bean or a bush bean, depending on need, so check the package to make sure you know what you are buying. I like to plant yellow beans, also called 'wax' beans. I hated yellow beans as a kid, mainly because they were different and I never saw them for sale in the grocery store; I didn't want anything on our table that wasn't on someone else's table. As an adult, I've come to love the yellow beans pickled. The yellow ones are like 'sunshine in a jar' that I can put on sandwiches and in salads all year long. Yum! I look for Pencil Pod or Gold Crop are delicious and good croppers. A little different, look for Dragon Langerie, a Dutch variety that has purple strips down the large flat yellow bean. They can be quite large and still tasty.

In the first half of the month, start planting beans directly in the garden, I don't bother with transplanting from beans in starter packs. You can put out any bean from this point on, but I usually wait yet another month for the beans I want to dry, like the famous Italian Cannelini, or the American Cranberry Bean or Black Turtle, to insure they will ripen when the garden is basking in the dry heat of late summer/early fall. There are a lot of drying beans, but a gardener of a small plot can be forgiven if they pass on the dried beans – it can take a bit of space to get a decent crop. For drying beans look into Native Seed/SEARCH in Arizona or Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa.

Beans can be climbing or bush, or 'runner beans' which are somewhere in the middle. Runner beans will bear over a longer period of time, which is good if you want to have beans over several weeks or more. If you plan on freezing or pickling your beans, bush beans will bear their crop pretty much all at once. Runner beans are a compromise, being a bush bean that throws out 'runners' that look like they would climb if they could just get a little caffeine or something. They do not climb, and they produce a crop very similar to the all at once nature of bush beans. Look for Scarlet Runner which will give you plenty of red flowers and some really good eating. You can tell I like beans, huh?

About the same time you are putting your green and yellow beans into the garden, set out a couple cucumbers. I like Armenian and Japanese cucumbers which have the same mild flavor and awesome crunch, even though they couldn't look any more different! The Armenian cucumbers are a light green almost bordering on yellow, with smooth skin covering a straight fat cucumber while the Japanese are a very dark green, with massive prickles on a furrowed and absolutely convoluted twisty narrow cucumber. Both are delicious. The Japanese cucumber will bear over a longer period but there is much more eating on each Armenian cuke, so it probably ends up with both being about the same. Give both of them plenty of room! If your garden is small, allow these gangling fellows to climb up rather than out.

The beans and cucumbers aren't alone in being planted out about now. Tomatoes. However you say it, cucumbers and tomatoes are the number one plants gardeners think of when they think “Summer Garden.” There are more varieties of tomatoes than there are potholes in the greater Los Angeles area. Just check out a catalog called Totally Tomatoes, or Tomato Growers Supply! Thirty or more pages of tomatoes. They come early, mid-season or late. Tomatoes are cherry, saladette, plum and beefsteak as well as black, cream, green, red, striped, yellow and many shades in between. Tomatoes come as hybrids and open-pollinated, and (had enough choices?) determinate and indeterminate. It's a complete overwhelm of choice. Determinate tomatoes are similar in growth to bush beans, giving you short plants that bear all at once (more or less), while indeterminate are like pole beans that bear over a long stretch and get quite large to boot.

Here are a few common ones to consider:

Cherry Tomatoes

Sweet 100 – a great productive and sweet little red tomato that is as dependable as a beach day in July.
Orange Sunshine – lots and lots of very sweet little tomatoes! Cute
Golden Nugget – a ton of cream colored little guys that are sweet with low acid – always a bonus in my book.
Yellow Pear – lot of folks like these, but I think they are mushy. Very productive though.

Saladette

Jaune Flammee – a lovely bi-colored tomato (give it something to climb on!) that is red outside and gold inside – good tasting and beautiful!
Green Zebra – yup, it's ripe when it's green. I think they are little to acidic, but lot's of my friend like 'em.
Moonglow - Solid orange meat, few seeds and wonderful flavor. One of our favorites since we first grew it in 1996.
Black from Tula – not really 'black,' but a very deep red. Delicious, though not a heavy producer – the skin is so thin I think it's best to take your plate and fork to the garden and eat it right at the plant!
Stupice – a small early plant that is worth growing because they also taste good and come in quick!

Plum (or paste tomatoes)

Black Plum – almost a mahogany tomato – tasty and meaty, an indeterminate tomato than produces
Cream Sausage - A unique colored variety with creamy white to light yellow sausage-shaped fruit, very productive bushy plants do not require staking; a really different tomato sauce!
Opalka – Red 3" by 5" paste tomatoes with a lovely fresh flavor. They have very few seeds so make great sauces. Long unruly vines.

Beefsteak

Brandywine – the taste that everyone is looking for in a big tomato, winner of many different taste tests. We can't really grow them very well in West Los Angeles because they need 85F through the night as well as the day. Pasadena and other points inland can grow them, though.
German Johnson – a large pink tomato that is really juicy and yummy.
Mortgage Lifter – there's a great story about the name of this tomato I'll tell you at a cocktail party one of these days. For now, I'll say it tastes great and is very filling, a lovely juicy tomato that rates.
Persimmon – this is the largest tomato I've ever grown in West Los Angeles. One sliced tomato could fill two dinner plates with meaty orange/yellow slices. However, the six foot plus plants only gave me one tomato each! Way too much space even though they were the sweetest and tastiest tomato I've had the pleasure of growing.

You'll notice I didn't include any of the Best Boy or Early Girl or other common hybrids. It is true they are productive and will give you a good crop of bright red fruits, but I think they are too acidic and have tough skin, so I don't grow them at all. There are so many delicious tomatoes in this world, to stick to those few seems silly to me. Check out Tomatomania (you can find it by searching the web) to find a lot of very unusual tomatoes to tempt your taste buds. Plant lots of basil at the same time you plant your tomatoes. Basil and marigolds make good companion plants for tomatoes.

When transplanting tomatoes from it's container to the ground, set them deeper in the soil than they were in the container. This is a great exception to the rule (almost all other plants should be set in the ground at the same level they were in the container) because a tomato stem will sprout roots all along the stem that is in contact with the soil. If the soil is really cold however, you'll have to resort to a more advanced technique. Tomatoes, being a tropical plant, do not like cold soil and the deeper you go, the colder it gets (and stays colder longer), so don't dig deep to plant tomatoes. Instead, if you have long plants, dig a shallow trench and lay the plant in on its side, gently bending the top to an upright position. The plant isn't deep in cool soil and yet it gets to make a lot more roots from the buried stem. (If you planted the tomato straight on down, the soil would not be warmed for a lot longer and the sulking tomato plant would refuse to grow until the warmth was felt that much deeper in the soil.)

And I haven't even mentioned later in the month! After the taxes are in, set out growing plants of peppers, eggplants, okra, melons, zucchini, summer squashes and tomatillos. Sow seeds of corn directly where they will grow. Pumpkins are a winter squash and all those hard skinned squashes should go out in May or so. They are really heat lovers.

Peppers and eggplants are easily grown once it has warmed up. They usually get about 3½' tall and need about two feet between plants. As with most vegetables, you need to give them all th sun you can. You can also try growing some lettuce in the shade of larger plants. Lettuce dislikes heat, but I like tomatoes and lettuce at the same time and it's easier trying to get lettuce in summer than tomatoes in winter.

I love peppers but I hate eggplant. Both however, are beautiful additions to every garden. Peppers come in a wild variety of colors – all start green and eventually change to whatever color they want to be – every green pepper you've ever eaten would have turned to some other color if we'd only practice more patience. I like Anaheim, Corno di Torno (Italian for 'Horn of the Bull') for warmer peppers and Cubanelle, Sweet Banana and Marconi for a sweet pepper. Eggplants can be Asian or Italian – I like the Italian Listada de Gandia or Rosa Bianca, primarily because they are very good looking in the garden. I have no intention of eating them. There are deep purple ones (almost black) and white ones as well as Turkish Orange and green eggplants.

Okra can be planted late in April/early May. Clemson's Spineless, Burgundy, Annie Oakley, and Star of David all are prolific producers. Put on a pot of gumbo in late summer! I'll eat 'em if I don't see 'em.

Not enough has been said about basil, but Genovese basil is the best in my book. Not just good production, but wonderful aroma and the taste is incomparable. Pick leaves all summer to keep it producing – once there are two pair of leaves on a stem, that stem will commence to flower. Once a flower has set seed, the plant begins the process of dying. If you keep it well picked, the plant gets bushier and bushier and you get a lot more basil from each plant. Throw the pickings in soup, salads or directly in your mouth!

Sweet corn is another delight of the summer garden. It is a little tricky to grow in our small gardens though. Corn, like all the cereal grains, is wind pollinated. The tassels atop the plant are the 'boy' flowers and the silks on the ear are the 'girl' flowers. The tassels produce loads of pollen that must reach the silks to fertilize them and create the corn seeds. This is hard to do if you don't have a lot of corn plants with pollen to be blown onto the silks. It is best to plant corn as a block of plants rather than one long row. There needs to be a critical mass of male flowers to produce pollen that falls on the silks. You can go out and shake the flowering corn stalks to cause the pollen to fall down and assist in corn sex if you're the adventurous type. If you've ever eaten and ear of corn and found a spot where there was a space instead of a kernel, that shows that one silk was not pollinated because every kernel has its very own silk. To get a fully populated ear of corn, every individual silk must be fertilized.

Boy are we busy this month! Don't worry. If you fail to get everything done, you can keep at it for the first two weeks of May. There is no need to rush in Southern California. Our climate forgives us for being too early or too late most of the time, so you can go wrong, but you have to work at it pretty hard.

david