Barefoot Gardening

My garden needed some seasonal refreshing. I took advantage of the tail end of the indian summer yesterday to handle a number of garden chores. Task 1 was to harvest compost and mix it into all of my containers. Task 2 was to add in some annuals amongst the perennials. Task 3 was to add in my Halloween decor, which ended up skewing a bit Día de los Muertos, and I’m ok with that.

On the left, I had some mums coming back from last year, so I added in some more, with some black potato vine. On the right, The red rooster carex has been going strong for a long time, so I surrounded it with some peach heuchera, ‘blackie’ potato vine, and ornamental kale. The potato vine prefers shade, and the mums love full sun, and these containers get a mix of both, so I’m crossing my fingers.

For fun, I also nestled some calendulas in between the red salvia in the windowbox and added a few mini pumpkins. As always, click to embiggen the photos.

And don’t tell me the flamingos aren’t fantastically humorous. My favorite succulent author posted them and I was in love.

This is currently my favorite container. I knocked it over one day while moving garden supplies, and the ceramic pot completely shattered. I re-potted it in a plastic one left over from a citrus tree, and the flowers are so prolific, you can’t even see the plastic. Recently, I added some lantana ‘fire’ behind the ‘sunset’ calabrachoa and California poppies. I love the color combination, and maybe I’ll even get some butterflies to play with my hummingbirds and katydid! (Butterflies love lantana)

I didn’t quite have the motivation to make the mole sauce this weekend, but I got around to picking more veggies. I’m so proud Only one red sweet pepper so far, but more tomatoes, and enough holy mole peppers to make a batch of mole sauce. Not too bad for containers!  [Note: Sorry for the previous iPhone photos with the blown out reds. I actually charged the batteries in my dSLR for this one.]

Sunset has a number of cute container gardening ideas on their website this month. The first one caught my eye as a little similar to a container I put together. The first one uses both electric pink festival grass (cordyline) and pink huechera, (though personally, I wouldn’t have doubled up on so much pink), and a plant that looks a little like a sunburst aeonium, but I’m not sure. Any readers able to identify it? It’s cute and could make a nice companion to my pink festival grass and thyme leaf fuchsia (which has adorable, tiny, dainty flowers – and it hasn’t stopped blooming!).

Photo from Sunset

My version of a pink container

Well, it’s at least time to be thinking about what I want to plant for fall again. Northern California gardening is still strange to me. Back home in PA, you have one growing season – a

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikenan1/

ridiculously hot summer. You grow everything at once, and freeze or can a lot of it. Out here, save for the two or three frosts we get in December or January, it’s a long warm season and cool season. The problem with this is that planting for cool season overlaps with growing for warm season. Which means hauling containers out of their storage and finding a place to put them on the patio.

For fall, I usually grow chard, cauliflower, broccoli, and sweet peas. I don’t get too excited about veggies, but I discovered a leafless sweet pea, which means all the plants energy goes into veggie production – small space, high yield. And don’t tell me purple cauliflower doesn’t pique your interest!

What do you grow for fall?

I previously mentioned that I put my Earthbox on a stand, so I didn’t have to keep bending over, after I ruptured a lumbar. Well, I also picked up an Earthbox Staking System, as my peppers are getting a bit wobbly. Nowhere on the staking kit does it say that it’s incompatible with the Garden Stand. However, after being baffled on assembly, I searched online and only the stand says that it’s incompatible with the staking kit. (Not vice versa)

Earthbox basically makes one product, with two different accessories. Why would they decide that the accessories would be mutually exclusive? A simple redesign could solve this problem, but it’s set up so that they both need to attach to the same part of the Earthbox lip.

The kit is a good, though overpriced, idea for newbie gardeners, but at this point, it’s become a typical box with a water reservoir and some fertilizer in it.  (And to state the obvious, I’ve alternately used bamboo stakes and ties.)

With this month’s cold snap, I was getting concerned about early blight. But then we jumped to 100-degree days, and I swear, my tomatoes produced a ton of fruit overnight. The green zebras are such gorgeous tomatoes, but as a bush variety, they’ve nearly outgrown their huge cage over the container. I hope the plant stops growing and focuses on more fruit. The principe borghese has stayed smaller, as it should –  I plan to dehydrate them for sun-dried tomatoes.

Green Zebras

Principe Borghese

Recently, while looking up the most effective way to add eggshells to my tomatoes for calcium, I came across some other great gardening tips on You Grow Girl. They recommended putting matchsticks in the soil under pepper plants because peppers love sulfur. Which got me thinking… guess what the main ingredient in my Hydrangea bluing formula is? Sulfur! And I already use it on my fuchsias and blueberries. (A word of caution – some bluing formulas may be aluminum sulfate and not sulfur, which are not the same thing, and aluminum sulfate can easily burn plants.)

It turns out that epsom salts are also very effective, as they contain both magnesium and sulfur – especially as a spray solution (1tbsp per gal of water). It is supposed to increase chlorophyll production and also help plants process the phosphorus and nitrogen better. Many reports say to use this solution when the peppers first start to blossom. When I planted mine, I also put down a layer of dolomite to provide calcium (and magnesium), because peppers, like tomatoes and eggplants, are very susceptible to blossom end rot.

Extra nutrients are more essential in container gardening than traditional gardening because of the limited amount of soil/planting medium. One of the things that I think has made me most successful in gardening is learning how to cater to each plants family’s specific need, which again, is more important with containers. This sounds like a daunting task, but really it’s just been an ongoing learning experience, as well as one giant experiment.

I think I may actually have more edibles this year than flowers. On my way in the door from work, I snagged a strawberry – boy, was it sweeter than my store-bought ones. And not just because it’s from my own garden! I’ve got 4 blackberry brambles growing as well, some blueberries coming in, 4 pepper plants, and 2 tomato plants! Sadly, I started with 6 pepper plants. One was the last of its variety at the MG sale, and it wasn’t long for this world. The other was dug up and absconded with by some animal, I’m sure. What’s left are 3 sweet varieties and a mole pepper. I will certainly enjoy the fruits of my labor this summer!

Also, a random photo because there was a 4-headed calendula in my windowbox.

It’s the end of January and my winter veggies are finally looking *really* good. Not quite time to harvest them all, but now I’m excited with the anticipation. Please pardon the formatting issues below, WordPress is not being my friend today.

My sugar snap peas are finally producing like crazy. This variety was supposed to be bushy, but still needed supports. They also took a lot longer than the listed 62 days, as I planted them in September. The insects are already after them, so I’m about to harvest what’s already grown.

The earthbox has been great for my broccoli and cauliflower. I grew both regular broccoli and a cheddar cauliflower from seed. I found some Romanesco broccoli seedlings at my local nursery and decided I had to have just one. It satisfies my gardening habit *and* my geeky love of fractals. Currently, it’s about the same yellow color as the cheddar cauliflower, which will turn more orange because has a ton of beta carotene in it! Yay for Vitamin A.

Not quite a winter plant, but since NorCal has mild winter, my everbearing strawberries are producing a nice crop already. I can’t say enough good things about the “growin’ bags” i use, as it keeps them off the ground and away from pests, and is also a great space by going vertical. I was hip before vertical gardening was trendy You can buy the bags seperately as 4 hole or 10 hole, or with strawberries from Park Seed.

And since even a mild winter still brings the blahs, I added a few “annuals” to brighten up my windowbox. (Technically perennials but typical treated as annuals.) The celosia were done for, but I thought the salvia still had a little life left in them. So I added orange calendulas and red and yellow English primrose, both of which are prime bloom season right now. What you see in the middle is silver falls dichondra, supposedly an annual, but is still going strong from last year. This is one of my favorite cascading plants and it looks great in such a variety of containers.  I wouldn’t call this my best windowbox, but I was making due with what’s in season for a pop of color. I often feel stumped with what to do with my garden when it’s between winter and spring.