The Garden In April

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

Fox News Finds The Learning Garden!

Amina Humphrey and I discuss her garden of greens while Fox News films footage for their story "Recession Gardening" which aired on the March 15th Ten O'Clock News.


I was still at The Learning Garden after the UCLA Extension class on Sunday when a tall blond walked very carefully into the Garden in high heels. High heels and garden paths rarely meet one another because it takes a decent amount of concentration to navigate mulched garden paths without pitching off to one side or onto one's face. But, the intrepid Fox News reporter managed it and here is the result.

One of my students from the UCLA Extension class, Amina Humphrey, did a marvelous job of stating her gardening intentions; I wished I hadn't used the example of 'salad,' as it seemed to trivialize the plight of the unemployed and diminished the output we get from our gardens, but there you go... It was the end of a long day and I didn't think as fast as I usually do.

Still, ya can't throw it back and it's fine to be on the news as long as it wasn't a crime scene!

david

The Garden In March

March. Baseball teams are in Spring Training in Florida and Arizona. Tomatoes are growing in a protected location with 'bottom heat' so they can be set out in the garden close to the end of April.

We've all heard the old saying about March coming in like a lamb and going out like a lion, or is it coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb? Whatever the exact saying, it correctly alludes to March as being more schizophrenic than other months. That is certainly a true characterization of March as far as our gardens go. On one hand, we are still tending our winter vegetables, cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce, while on the other we need to be planning on what we will soon be planting for summer.

Those of us on the coast can continue to plant more winter vegetables if we haven't had our fill of all those cabbage family plants. I usually find I can grow winter vegetables right on into late May in most years. Some of the winter veggies will 'oversummer' for us; leeks, fennel, chard and kale will hold on in most summers although they can look downright ratty once our June Gloom has left us.

Royal Purple Pod beans can go in even in February, certainly by mid-March, I'll have a row growing. This is the only bean that will germinate in cold, wet soil. All other beans, in most years, will need to be planted no sooner than late March or early April.

You can buy tomatoes in March, but I wouldn't want to plant them out until later in the month. Tomatoes will survive cool soil, but they will thrive much better in warmer soil. If you want to grow tomatoes from seed, I usually sow mine in February. I start them in a sheltered location – I use a grow mat that warms the soil to about 70° so the tomatoes get off to a good start – I sow basil the same way at the same time. Other summer crops that I start in pots to be transplanted later, including peppers, eggplants and okra, need more heat and I don't even mess with those until after mid-March. They will be ready to sow out into the garden come the first of May (allow about 6 weeks to get them up and away).

This is one of the more busy months in the garden because I should be harvesting from the winter crops and I'm out there looking at those plants trying to figure out where I'll be able to plant the summer crops.

I'm awfully fond of lettuce. One of my Summer rituals is making a big production out of the first BLT of the year where I've grown the L and the T in my garden – if I'm lucky I'll have also baked the bread myself too. The hard part is getting the L and the T to cooperate. Tomatoes love heat, to really fruit they need temperatures above 84° while most lettuce is positively allergic to temperatures above 75°. There are some varieties of lettuce bred to be less heat sensitive – Jericho and Summertime are the two I'm most familiar with – look for them in seed catalogs and try planting lettuce plants North of taller plants to get them more shade.

In one fit of fanaticism, I once grew lettuce year round. I created a bed just for lettuce. I installed a copper snail barrier to keep those salad lovers out, and set up a series of little misters to spray the plants twice a day with a cooling mist. But the most significant feature was an old window screen (frame and all), resting over the plants on four 18” wooden stakes (easily purchased at Home Depot). The screen proved to be the most effective part of the whole operation. I was able to grow lettuce right into the middle of October, when a heat wave and an irrigation failure contrived together to completely fry all my lettuce. Fried lettuce has about the same appeal as month old bread. If you want lettuce all summer you might give this – or some of this – a spin in your garden.

March is a month full of a lot of activity – daylight savings time now starts at the end of the second week and boy do gardeners need that extra hour of sunlight! Look at what you have in the ground and begin to imagine full size tomato, pepper, eggplant and basil plants growing there. Try to contain yourself and get a reasonable view of what you can plant. Check out the suggested planting spaces on the plants you want; measure to see how many you can reasonably accommodate. No, don't multiply by four! (We all do it anyway, don't we?)

david

Southern California Gardening: What To Do And When To Do It

These tomatoes and red peppers were part of my harvest last summer: This summer they could be from YOUR garden! This is the first class in a monthly series, the first Saturday of each month covering all you need to know to grow tremendous tomatoes and piquant peppers this year!

March 7th, 9:00 AM to Noon Getting Your Summer Garden off to a Great Start! Want mouth watering tomatoes and fresh-picked sweet corn this summer? Learn how to start a successful garden now, so that you can enjoy a bounty of fresh tasty vegetables and fruits this summer. Participants will get a basil or tomato plant to start their garden off. This is the first of a new workshop series, Southern California Gardening: What to Do And When To Do It, held on the first Saturday of each month. $25 per workshop, or $100 for five workshops if you prepay. Advance registration requested, email the Gardenmaster.

The Learning Garden is located on the Venice High School campus, 13000 Venice Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90066; we are on the corner of Venice Blvd. and Walgrove Avenue - enter the Garden through the Walgrove gate.

Change Is Inevitable...

Pickled beets just as the lids are popping as they cool (a sure indication that they have sealed properly) are a popular condiment at my table. These Golden Beets were prepared by high school students (golden beets don't bleed and stain like their red counterparts) who were much chagrined to learn they needed to wait six (S-I-X!!!) weeks before tasting the fruits of their labors.

I come to my environmentalism against the grain, by which I mean, I live in West-crises?- What-crises?-wood, California, a upscale portion of Los Angeles. My little bungalow home not only has no insulation, but a fellow can actually feel the breeze flow through on blustery days. Waking up here is like coming to in a refrigerator; it is frequently warmer outside than in. I bound out of bed, dressing quickly, pulling on my wonderful shawl collar wool sweater, a wool beret and tie a wool scarf around my neck. After pulling on my down booties, I thank God that I can sip wonderfully hot coffee and write on a laptop where the electronics within warm my fingers on the keyboard.

I rent my little bungalow. I have done a number of things to mitigate the lacks of this home and this is where I find myself after I've done what I can do. I live in a sweet little part of Los Angeles and I pay a ridiculously low rent which makes me loathe to ask for changes from my landlady. I do not run the electric heater that is a part of this house, I use a portable electric heater when I must. I have a propane heater that warms me as I dry from my shower and dress. From the McMansions going up all around me and the Hummer homes that dot my neighborhood, I feel my carbon footprint is a pretty good departure from my neighbors'.

Looking to others for comparison, however, is not valuable or instructive. My own footprint has progressively lessened over the past few years. I find that mark more useful to consider as my measure progress. Sadly, many lag considerably behind others in getting the message. I cannot fathom how the family down the street can consider the impact as they commence to remodel a perfectly usable bungalow into our latest McMansion, while the conscious among us have turned off sprinklers, cut heat, and changed our lifestyles towards reducing our impact on the earth.

Still. A quick look at the future convinces me that certain parts of our economy will change as the tanker sinks on cheap, easy oil.

In my home, and all of those around me, there is no pantry. Someone with carpentry skills and some entrepreneurial acumen could figure out strategies by which existing homes, no matter how small or large, can be retrofitted with something that can be a pantry to store food that is either grown at home, or purchased in season at a local farmers market. Something that can approach a root cellar to hold root crops as they were once held in homes all over America would be much more valuable in the coming years than a big screen TV. And would be produced locally by local craftspeople and not built of plastic (destined for the inevitable landfill) and imported from thousands of miles away.

Canning jar manufacturers have disappeared over these past few decades. Now it is sad to report that the two remaining icon brands of home canning are, in fact, owned by the same company. The only brands available for most Americans putting food by are Ball and Kerr, neither owned by Ball or Kerr, but by Alltrista Corporation. Even the original brand of canning jars, once the ubiquitous Mason jar, has completely become the pleasure of collectors and no longer makes appearance in the canners arsenal. (More information on the history of canning jars can be found at this link.)

Alltrista could do itself proud by expanding its offerings to the home consumer and building on the possibility that homemakers of the very near future will want to decrease their dependence on canned products shipped in at dubious expense from overseas containing products that has little oversight in it's production and quality control.

Most landgrant colleges have not only master gardener programs, but master home canners programs as well. As the economics of the last eight plus years have trimmed the budgets of these venerable institutions, many of these very essential programs have been cut. I was the recipient of this downsizing in a dichotomous moment. I learned of the sale of jars and equipment of the Los Angeles County Master Home Canners program in 2005 and was one of only a few that showed up to purchase these remains of the defunct program. For a song (a melancholy song at that), I ended up with a much used and sad looking Excalibur dryer that had seen much better days (but still performs like the thoroughbred champion it is) and numerous canning jars of many different shapes and brands. Several of these gorgeous jars end up in my homemade pesto and jams that I take a manifest pride in producing.

And these products, by a strange twist of fate have again become part of the educational system. I have taught several different people how to preserve food using the glass jars and others use my dryer to create dried fruits and herbs for storage.

So. I am busy attending to my own carbon footprint as best I can. I anticipate, eagerly, a time and a place where I have the resources to further reduce my carbon footprint and live a life that impacts this world less. That time will come and I do what I can in the meantime to move towards that goal. I grow a lot of fresh, organic produce; not nearly as much as I would like, but I strive towards more every year. I continue to learn more ways of cooking at home and keeping the food in ever-decreasing usage terms (dried foods, like beans, continue to be a foodstuff for a very long without electricity or propane). Food produced and stored locally are ways to divest myself from the consumption of oil. Driving the speed limit (God bless my right foot with lightness and my rear view mirror with forgetfulness for the hordes of Californians held up in my plodding wake) is one way that I am trying to immediately lower my dependence on oil no matter what model of car I drive. It would do me well to park the car more often as well – walking and biking are not only ecologically sound, but have health ramifications that my doctor would rejoice at as well.

I have often held to the conviction “What blesses one, blesses all.” There is no doubt that changes afoot will negatively impact some business and skill sets, just as wholesale adoption of the automobile in the early 1900's had a huge impact on the employment prospects of, say, wheelwrights and others. That does not mean that wheelwrights had to go on the dole. It does mean that there had to be changes made. A fellow in wheelwright school in 1914 might well have looked into the crystal ball of his day and thought, “gosh, maybe I should reconsider my plan to feed my family.” That change of plans does not necessarily mean the devastation of a life.

We have all adapted our lives to accommodate the personal computer – for better or for worse. We will all soon get to adapt again. One of the very (very) few things I actually remember from my 9th grade biology class (I failed biology twice in high school and as a senior had to take it a third time to facilitate my graduation – I could not do the required dissection of frogs and worms and finally was put into an honors class where I could replace animal dissection with a study of plants), that life may be defined as the ability to change.

How alive we all actually are will determine, in ever increasing measure, how successfully we can navigate the immediate future crises. I shall knit myself an even warmer scarf. Too bad I can't grow the sheep for the wool!

david

“Cultivated by A Community”

A community project, finished persimmon jam cools before being stocked. A friend with a fruit filled persimmon tree, desiring a willing accomplice, found me with my canning equipment and stove. We put up about 27 half pints of memorable eating. Persimmon jam has a taste that makes me think of mangoes with overtones of a kind of smokiness. It's a complicated, but mouth watering flavor.



Many Americans have no place to garden, they live in apartments and condominiums or the earth around their homes is just too shady. But wanting to grow vegetables and fruit for food or just wanting the pleasure of plunging their fingers in the cool moistness of the earth, a community garden might be their answer.

A community garden (defined as “a piece of land cultivated by members of a community, esp. in an urban area”) is usually a vacant lot or other unused land that some public body sets aside for people to grow some of their own vegetables (some gardeners do grow flowers, but the focus of most community gardens is primarily food). In some communities, Los Angeles among them, community gardens are sponsored by the city itself. Most of our community gardens are on LA Parks and Recreation land and are nominally under their control – although in practice, community gardens in LA have charters and are self-governed. In other communities (and some other in Los Angeles), community gardens are created by churches, schools, or other groups of people. The garden is laid out, plot sizes are agreed upon and a process to enlist gardeners promulgated. Plots in most gardens I have seen are between ten by ten to twenty by twenty feet. Some are smaller and some are larger (especially in communities where land is not as dear as it is in Los Angeles), but most gardens have plots about that size.

Those things are probably all decided long before the gardener comes on scene (for how to set up a community garden, see the American Community Gardening Association web site). What a gardener finds once assigned a plot is likely to be a new world completely populated by gardeners from many different cultures. This is, of course, less true in homogeneous communities, but in communities with any kind of diversity, the diverse populations of community gardens can be astounding. In my time at a nearby community garden, Ocean View Farms, I had neighbors from Mexico, Iran, France, other states, and England. All age groups were represented and all levels of gardening experience were present in all age groups. Among all these different people I learned gardening techniques and recipes for the use of the bounty of the garden from cultures the world over.

Almost thirty years later, I attribute my time at Ocean View Farms as pivotal in my gardening education. I learned more about gardening and what to do with the harvest that radically changed me – my experience before this had all been in the insular world of my childhood way back in Kansas. In the community garden, I learned to grow mint, artichokes, asparagus, paste tomatoes, yellow and purple beans, peppers and garlic – all food plants I had never seen in the soil because they were not in my family's pantry. I learned as well how to garden in a twelve month growing season.

The Los Angeles Times carried a story on community gardens on January 10th – as a board member of the American Community Gardening Association, I was able to offer some perspective on community gardens in Los Angeles. The Times article traces the progress of community gardens from the Victory Gardens of WW II – which, themselves were an outgrowth of the Liberty Gardens of WWI. History shows that whenever we are confronted with unprecedented disaster, we go back to the garden. Sometimes that disaster can be an internal emotional disaster. But returning to the garden has enabled more than one distraught person to feel as though they had taken their lives into their own hands. Truly it is meaningful to feel that you can feed yourself no matter what befalls the world or yourself. Many times, under duress and ready to give up, going to the garden has lifted my spirit enough to carry on.

If you have no place to grow your food, look into a local community garden. If you become a community gardener, consider joining the American Community Gardening Association and amalgamate your voice with theirs. With them and your community garden, you will learn to garden better, teach someone else to garden better and cultivate your own peace at the same time.

And you will have fresh tomatoes. Or 27 half-pints of persimmon jam that tastes like smokey mangoes. Life doesn't get any better.

david

February's Garden

Summer's harvest from last year include these gorgeous peppers (what did I plant last year?) and San Marzano tomatoes. Both were prolific and delicious. When summer is over, I don't want to touch another tomato, but by February, I'm getting geared up for a fresh BLT!

The short days of winter are getting perceptibly longer. We are half way to the Spring Equinox, which is half way to the Summer Solstice. These dates became important in an agrarian culture and as one gets more involved in gardening, it is easy to see the reasons that these dates were important to people dependent on knowing what to do and when to do to necessary to stay alive.

Valentines' Day is my traditional weekend for starting my tomato crop for the coming year. One method I have done in the past was to use fluorescent tubes about 6 inches above the pots for the beginnings of tomatoes – I have also started them outside with a heating mat to keep the soil warm; with enough sun that works well enough. Peppers and eggplant are started about 2 weeks later. As seedlings, they cannot be allowed to dry out and they must be protected from predation, it doesn't take even a small critter many bites to entirely remove a plant less than an inch tall.

Basil. We must plant more basil. Is there such a thing as enough basil? Basil is planted right along with tomatoes – isn't that just poetic? I like the 'Genovese Profusitissimo' variety of basil – large productive, heavenly perfumed leaves that are the basis for my pesto recipe that has become the basis for my annual Pesto Day Celebration, my annual harvest festival. I make about 9 dozen half pints of The Gardenmaster's Special Pesto and it is well loved in the community. The recipe, which follows, is nothing special, the spectacular results are exclusively due to the ingredients: Genovese Profusitissimo basil and heirloom garlic combined with cheese, pignolis, olive oil, a little pepper and salt. Viola!

Make sure to cover the pesto tightly or store in an airtight container immediately after making it. The top layer will discolor faster than the rest you can keep a thin layer of oil on top to stop oxygen from getting to the pesto and causing discoloration, but this will add more oil to the pesto each time you use it. Some of us think this is not a problem.
2 cloves of garlic
1½ Tablespoons lightly toasted pine nuts
2 cups loosely packed fresh basil leaves
¾ cup plus ½ teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Combine all the ingredients, except the ½ teaspoon olive oil, in a food processor and process until a puree forms, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Transfer to an airtight container and pour the remaining ½ teaspoon of olive oil over the pesto, covering completely. Cover and refrigerate until needed (the pesto keeps for a long time, tightly covered, but loses it’s bright green color after the first day).

And then I think “baseball”. (“Wait until next year”, is the universal call among gardeners and baseball players everywhere.) Dodger spring training in Arizona starts next month. Win or lose, I’ll be out in my garden soon, radio in hand. Something about that baseball optimism dovetails nicely with my gardening optimism. You don’t have to “think baseball”, but I do and it lifts my spirit.

With any amount of luck, this is our rainiest month. That means we won’t need to be watering too much. I have more or less permanently built up beds with paths between them, so walking through a wet garden isn’t that big of a deal. If your garden isn’t laid out like that, take care not to walk through your garden when it’s thoroughly soaked. Your footprints will compact the soil and cause needless grief later when the soil has dried out. Especially in clay soil.

February is positively the last month to dormant-prune fruit trees. One cannot plan that they won’t have broken dormancy any later than this. See flowers? That’s “broken dormancy” in a nutshell, the sap is running inside the tree and pruning after that drains more of the tree's vitality – mind you pruning late won’t kill your tree, some folks do this kind of pruning regularly – it’s my preference to do my pruning with the least harm to the tree and for me, that means before the sap begins to run and that means December or January in a Zone 24 climate. I have learned over the last few years that my nectarine and peach trees break dormancy first.

Don’t forget to deal with slugs and snails. In these wet, cooler months, these little mollusks multiply with alarming proficiency and present huge problems. You can't get rid of them forever, they are migratory, so even if you could rid yourself of every single one in your garden on Tuesday, you'd have a whole new supply by Friday coming in from next door. And more on Saturday. It's baffling.

Some gardeners keep a five gallon bucket on hand with soapy water in it and drop the critters in for a quick death. Others put a board down with one end slightly raised. Slugs and snails will congregate there and can be simply crushed. Good for the soil. A fairly new product, 'Escar-go' is on the market and is non-toxic to mammals (you, your children and dogs and cats etc), and is actually beneficial to the soil. Slugs and snails eat it and die. Probably not as humane as crushing them, but more acceptable in polite society.

No matter what you do, you will probably always have problems with snails and slugs in our climate unless you are fortunate to have a possum on hand. These homely marsupials consume slugs (mostly) and will resort to snails if hungry enough. I am fortunate in The Learning Garden to be blessed with a possum or two that have negated any need to bait or board for snails and slugs.

Broccoli is being harvested, along with cauliflower, cabbage, peas, scallions, carrots, radishes, beets, new potatoes, chard, kale, and lettuces by the bushel. The garden looks stellar at this time of year, it is bursting with produce of deep green, blue green, punctuated with red and yellow (chard) flags.

Don't stop planting lettuce, that will continue right up through May. It is easy for us because we are so close to the Pacific Ocean – my cool season plantings can stretch through all months except late July through late September. Warm season crops aren't nearly so flexible because our night temperatures are never that high.

The real summer garden begins to take shape next month...

david