January 8th, 2008

Happy New Year!

Would you believe that the Osteospermum ‘Asti White’ that we tested last summer started blooming in my San Diego area garden on New Year’s day?  Everyone else reported blooms through late summer and fall, but mine just didn’t get there.  Granted, most osteos are short-day bloomers, which means that they bloom in the spring/winter/fall rather than in the long days of summer. ‘Asti White,’ though, is supposedly day neutral, so they should bloom regardless of day length.  In fact, the literature says they bloom 21 to 28 days from seed.  I started mine in June!

That’s the thing about gardening in California.  Plants just behave differently! Its something that takes new gardeners and gardeners new to the area some time to understand.  Fall is our best planting season, plants go dormant in late summer to escape the heat, and summer veggies such as tomatoes and peppers take weeks longer to ripen. 

Most of Southern California and the majority of coastal gardeners have year-round growing climates.  That’s the up side.  The down side is, we never get a break.  There’s never a time to rest and contemplate, let alone plan and re-think the garden. 

As I write this, it’s raining outside – a rare occurrence and the only time Californians stay out of the garden.  Bill Nunes is a fellow seed tester who farms and gardens about 400 miles north of me in California’s Central Valley, where it is also raining. “I'm actually enjoying some time off,” Bill wrote me in an email, “but I do need to get the greenhouse up and running while the ground is wet so I can get back at it when the ground dries a bit.”  See what I mean?  It’s raining and Bill doesn’t feel he can even take time for a snooze!

A few days ago, I asked the other seed testers what their gardening resolutions were for the New Year.  My four big resolutions are 1) write blog entries more often, so we can keep you all up on what is happening in the seed tester gardens; 2) to stop feeling bad about not planting a winter vegetable garden.  I vow to accept the fact that fall and winter are when I focus on the ornamentals, since that is our best planting time; 3) to finish the new patio and meadow I started two summers ago to replace a big lawn.  And 4) to finish covering my more cold-sensitive plants with floating row cover - just in case this month’s temperatures dip down into the high teens like they did last January.  I was born and raised in Southern California and I’d never seen winter temperatures that low.  It set the garden back several years and I hate to see it happen again.

What were everyone else’s plans?  Here is a sampling:

Carla Jeanne Gilmore (Cabool, MO. Zone 6/7):
To have the pruning and weeding and mulching done before we start planting garden the 2nd week of March. We are starting our transplants of cole crops, celery, and peppers about January 12.

Don Boekelheide (Charlotte, NC, Zone 7b):
•    Devote more time to my homescape, as opposed to spending most of my time and creative energy on my community/food gardens.

•    Try ‘Mahon’ sweet potatoes.

•    Do more crazy garden art (bottle trees, etc) everywhere I can get away with it.

•    Be mindful and open as I garden, strive less and breathe more. Garden the way Thich Nhat Hahn walks.

•    Take more pics of “real life/true grit” stuff as well as “pretty” stuff.

•    Really listen to the homeless folks at the Center [where Don runs a community garden] and try to help make gardening accessible for them.
•   
•    Do more with garden seating and benches, even right in the midst of the food.

•    Keep trying to entice my kids to join me in gardening.

•    Laugh a lot in the garden. Rejoice in the bounty, and learn from the setbacks, bugs, weeds and mistakes with more wry humor and less angst. Try to be as open to other people's ways of gardening as I strive to be to their religious beliefs and traditions. Garden with joy.
•    Oh, and pray for rain.

Pamela Ruch (Emmaus, PA.  Zone 6)
I bought one of those BIG calendars, with BIG spaces, which I will hang on my porch wall. The plan is: every time I come in from the garden I will pass it and write a few words about what I did. Having tried computer journaling, in-the-garden notes, passing on the record-keeping to interns -- all with incomplete success -- I'm hoping this system will work for me.
Another plan is the mulching bed: I'm going to devote one bed (6x20) to alfalfa for cutting to use as mulch--just to see how it works.
As for varieties, I want to grow more heirloom onions. They're so much better in salads than store-bought onions -- even the sweet Vidalias and Walla Wallas.”

I’ll share more of the group’s resolutions in my next installment.