| love visiting gardens wherever they are, to see what’s thriving and new possibilities to bring home! Balboa Park Botanical Garden, San Diego The lath house is wonderfully historic looking and is fronted by its broad pond, perennial bed, and even resident duck nests tucked underneath! Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, Arcadia Although the first flush of rose bloom is past, fragrance was inviting on a recent visit. My garden Artichoke bush exhibits its 4 stages of fruits – one huge center fruit, two slightly smaller side ones, a third one, and two tiny last ones. Different varieties will have differently-shaped fruits – sometimes elongated or pointed or thorned – but all will be ready to harvest when their bases are fully rounded and petals begin to pull away, indicating that the flesh at their bases is fully formed so you’ll have a bigger mouthful to enjoy with all that butter or mayonnaise! Cerinthe’s draping bells are a lovely combination of purple and blue. Chard can be perennial. This yellow-stalked plant is three years old. Cilantro blossoms attract beneficial insects, so always nice to keep sowing even through too-warm weather just so new plants keep blooming! Euphorbia seedling became fasciated - crested or contorted. I do love these weird formations! Fava bean blossoms and first fruitset – looking forward to the rest of the patch! Geranium rootings are successful during this mild weather. Best to use the portion that’s slightly woody, no longer just succulent green. Li Jujube tree puts out its tiny blossoms. Breadseed poppy’s last bloom and seedpods. Saving seeds requires an additional month or six weeks until the stems are crispy dry and mature enough to harvest. If it still wiggles, it needs to dry more! If in a community or school garden, put up an instructive sign so passersby don’t assume you’re just leaving trash in the garden! Salvia canariensis produces glorious mauve-colored bloomstalks, and the rest of the year delights with its fuzzy white stems and gray-green foliage. Dancy tangerines are looking good – seedy but oh so sweet and juicy! Verbena bonariensis are statuesque stems with a cluster of purple blossoms on top. This plant is about 5 feet tall; after our years-ago rain of some 40 inches, the plants grew beyond our roofline! Watermelon-colored blossoms and -shaped foliage make a nice perennial groundcover. Anyone know this plant's botanical and common names? |
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I provided my tomatoes with their “second story” cages of the indeterminate varieties before their foliage reached up and over the first story. What a concept – planning ahead! In addition, I drove upright stakes at the back corner of each cage before adding the second story, and then anchored horizontal stakes along the whole row of tomatoes. This stabilized the entire row in anticipation of late-summer Santa Ana winds. Years ago, I’d planted more than a dozen tomato varieties that I knew would grow way taller than the single cages, so I’d also added the second story cages, but not the upright stakes or the horizontal ones. Late in August, when the plants were massive and heavily set with fruit – and I’d just watered them – we had a huge windstorm that resulted in many of the plants being blown horizontal. All that weight and the loose moist soil just couldn’t withstand the wind. Consequently, each year since then, I’ve created this Jungle Jim of stability, and the magic has worked – no more blown-down tomato plants, despite however tall they’re grown! And some of those Sungolds have indeed grown up through the two cages, over the sides, and back down to the soil – all the while bearing their luscious golden orbs – by the time October and November chill arrived. Keep Sowing and Transplanting Our mid-70s and low-80s air temperatures continue to be perfect weather for prepping soil and sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings of summer edibles and bloomers. If you’ve already planted determinate tomatoes – that’ll grow, bear, and quit – then make a point of purchasing and planting another batch so you’ll continue having tomatoes after those first plants give up. Repeat sowing seeds of beans, cucumbers, and squash – best done where they’ll grow, now that air and soil temperatures are perfect. I don’t bother starting these big-seeded veggies in seed trays earlier, since at best the transplants may or may not thrive once in the garden compared with starting them in the garden where they’ll mature. Instead, I wait to plant my first seeds in the garden when I see volunteers from last year – then I know the soil’s the perfect conditions and so I sow mine. I learned this years ago when I’d had difficulty getting dill to germinate – when I saw some volunteers, I went ahead and sowed my seed with great success. When uneven germination occurs, I just sow more seeds where the original ones didn’t. By the time the first-sown ones reach the second tier of the cages, the second-sown ones have reached there as well due to quicker growth because of warmer weather and soil. Keep Thinning Fruit Trees Even though the optimum time to thin fruit trees is when fruits are dime-size, any time you can manage is fine. Every week or so I gently push away leaves to see how the fruits underneath are progressing, and I always find some more that I need to remove to prevent their rubbing when they achieve full size. I also remove fruits that are on the tops of the branches, more obvious to birds because they’re not fully covered by the foliage – I don’t want the birds to see any bit of fruit as they fly overhead that will encourage them to land and search for more to peck!
The lettuce has finally gotten too bitter for me to harvest for salads, so I’ve pulled out the plants and planted new seedlings. But, I’ve gotten a good month’s worth of lettuce harvests since that several-week long bout of heat that shifted the lettuce hormones from growing to bolting – elongating into “trees” on their way to setting seed – that turned the lettuce bitter. Here’s how I salvaged all that lettuce, in four steps. First, I tasted a single leaf from every plant to see whether I could still enjoy it. The potential for bitterness is individual to each variety and each plant, so you can’t generalize; you must taste each plant. Then, if the test-leaf is acceptable, you can go ahead and harvest that plant – but only the younger leaves, leaving the top 4 baby-sized leaves for further growth. Cleanly tear off the older leaves for the compost pile – you don’t want to leave any foliage bits to attract snails and slugs. The remaining plant will look like a stick with a topknot on it. Second, any plants that had become too bitter in my taste test, I pulled and added to the compost pile. Thirdly, I watered in the lettuce bed to encourage the plants to continue to grow quickly in the hopefully cooler soil and air temperatures for yet another week at least until the next batch of leaves had developed for harvest – or at least the next taste-test. Fourth, I took all of the harvested leaves into the kitchen and filled the sink with water, then gently turned the leaves into the water, gently submerging the leaves a couple of times and scooping off any of the bits of mulch. Let the lettuce soak for 15-30 minutes, submerging them a couple of times to make sure they’ve all been under the water for some of that time. Again gently, transfer a small handful of leaves from the water to a colander until they’re all out of the water. Drain the water, and remove any more mulch bits. Refill the sink. Put the leaves back into the water a second time, submerging and leaving for another 15 minutes or so. This double-soaking process accomplishes two things – exchanging some or most of the bitter elements for plain water, and crisping up the lettuce. Back into the colander to drain slightly, then into ziplock bags into the refrigerator, pressing out most of the air when you zip the lock, these bags will keep the lettuce fresh and crisp for up to a week. This technique will also work later in the season, when the weather really heats up for summer, and my just-planted lettuce will do its reproductive thing and bolt. Remember though, that if you truly loved some of that lettuce (that weren’t hybrid varieties), you can leave the bolting plant to develop fully so you can harvest the seed. It’ll take about another month to six weeks to complete this process because you must allow the plant to mature until it’s crispy-dry before harvesting the seed.
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