Book of The Moment: Animal Vegetable Miracle

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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