Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Spring vegetables can be planted now from nursery starts. Begin your garden with broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, chard and onions. It pays to grow your own!

• Potatoes can be planted this month. Plant red, white, yellow, blue and russet for a variety of uses and flavors.

• Raspberry, blackberry, loganberry, and boysenberry vines should be planted now for delicious, home-grown berries.

• Prune wisteria trees and vines by cutting out unwanted long runners and removing old seed pods. Don’t damage flower buds that are clustered at the end of short branches.

• Fruit trees are still available as bare-root trees, but only for a short while longer. Start your orchard now!

The Spring Vegetable Garden

A few lovely, warm spring days finally give us the chance to get outside and enjoy the sunshine. And what better way to enjoy it than to set out some spring vegetable plants in your garden or raised beds. The warm days and chilly nights that we get this time of year are perfect for many delicious vegetables.

You can now set out seedlings of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, onions, chard, sugar snap peas and lettuce. From seed you can start beets, carrots, Swiss chard, lettuce, peas and spinach.

Cabbage and broccoli are members of the cole family. “Cole” is the Old English word for cabbage and is the name given to a group of vegetables that share a common ancestry and a family preference for cool weather. Other garden relatives include cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, kohlrabi, collards, turnips, radishes, bok choy and baby bok choy.

Seeing these plants side by side, you might find it hard to see what cabbages have in common with kohlrabi or broccoli. But the diverse appearance of cole family members comes from a single remarkable family trait — the ability to thicken various plant parts. Thus the kohlrabi has thickened stems; broccoli has thickened immature flowering branches; turnips and radishes have thickened roots; and with cabbage, the thickening forms the heads.

Lettuce also needs cool weather to be at its best. There are many different kinds of lettuce: looseleaf has tender, delicate, and mildly flavoured leaves; butterheads, also called Boston or buttercrunch, form loose heads; romaine, also called cos, grows in a long head of sturdy leaves and crispheads, also called iceberg, forms tight, dense heads. Leaves come in various shades of red and green. You can set out plants and plant seeds at the same time to have successive crops this spring.

Root crops grow well in the spring also. Carrots are easy to start in the cool, spring weather. Carrot seeds are tiny and germinate best in damp soil when the soil temperature is between 50 and 60 degrees. Beets, onions, radishes and turnips all grow very rapidly in the spring.

Peas are perhaps the most popular spring vegetable. There’s nothing quite so sweet and delicious as fresh garden peas. Dwarf varieties grow 18 to 24 inches tall and stand best with some support. The tall varieties grow 6 to 8 feet high and need poles or string, or wire trellises to climb. You can grow shelling peas or edible-pod varieties, also known as sugar peas, or the flat edible-pod varieties known as snow peas, popular in Asian cooking.

Take advantage of this nice spring weather and start your vegetable garden producing now.

• Japanese maples may be pruned now in order to shape them.

• Mottled leaves are often a sign of spider mites. Check for them with a hand lens or bring a leaf to your nursery in a plastic bag for identification and treatment options.

• Feed rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias with 0-10-10 fertilizer to encourage flowers for next spring.

• Keep flowers and vegetables in peak condition by giving them a midsummer feeding with a fertilizer that is high in phosphorus.

• Roses have more flowers all summer long than any other shrub. Plant them in a sunny location and feed monthly for continuous blooms.

Best Vegetables for Fall Growing

When the days grow shorter and the night air has that crisp chill of fall, it’s nice to be able to walk out to the garden and harvest a bunch of fresh broccoli, or a head of cabbage or lettuce. But to make this happen in Willits, you need to start planting the fall garden now, in the middle of summer.

We have a short growing season here, and when fall arrives, it is too late to start planting since cold weather generally comes on rapidly in November. Broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower take 60 to 90 days to mature from transplant size, so it’s important to set plants out soon. They will grow vigorously in the warm summer weather. Then, when they begin to head up, the weather will be cooling down so that they can develop properly.

Though many of the same crops are planted for the fall as for the spring garden, fall vegetables will hold for harvest much longer without bolting to seed. Many crops, like Oriental greens, radicchio, leeks, spinach, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, collards and kale will actually get sweeter when touched by light frosts.

Transplant seedlings into well-prepared moist soil in the evening, so they have the cool night temperatures to settle in and minimize shock. In hot weather it is best to shelter newly transplanted seedlings for a few days with shade cloth or row covers.

You can start seeds of leaf lettuce, bok choy, spinach, Swiss chard and roquette or arugula now. These are fast-maturing crops that will be ready before frost. Although most seeds will germinate quickly in the warm summer soil, some, such as lettuce and spinach, will not germinate well if the soil temperature is above 85°F. Shading the soil with a board or a light mulch will keep the soil cooler, enhancing germination. Remove the temporary shade when you see sprouts emerging.

There are many kinds of lettuce to choose from on seed racks that will give you color and variety in your salads. Swiss chard comes in green, red or “rainbow”, a mixture of colored stalks.

Root crops, such as beets, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas and turnips, can be left in the ground through the fall. Green onions and radishes can also be planted for harvest in the fall.

It is important to rotate your crops from year to year. Do not plant the same crops in the same place that they were planted in the previous year because the soil will be weakened through continual loss of the same nutrients and the plants will also attract the same insects and diseases to that part of the garden.

A major benefit of a fall garden is that it gives you fresh vegetables long after most of your summer crops have been harvested and killed by the frost. So start your fall garden now to extend the productivity of your garden.