Crop Rotation

Wednesday, April 27th, 2016 by Jenny Watts
    • Begin spraying roses now for insect and disease problems. Neem oil is a good product for a less toxic solution.
    • The average date of the last frost in Willits is May 12. So protect young flowers and vegetables on clear, cold nights.
    • Petunias can be planted now. Their bright flowers will bloom all summer in hot, sunny locations and they will take a light frost.
    • When you plant your tomatoes, put a handful of bone meal in the bottom of the hole to help prevent blossom end rot on the fruit later on.
    • Enjoy the bright yellow colors of goldfinches outside your window by putting up thistle feeders for them.

Rotate Your Vegetable Crops

Deciding what to plant and sketching a layout for this year’s vegetable garden are among the joys of gardening. When planning your vegetable garden, remember the importance of crop rotation.

To keep your vegetable garden happy and healthy year after year, it is important to rotate your crops. You do this by shifting the locations of crops within the garden each season so the same crop does not grow in the same place year after year. This practice cuts down on pest and disease problems and balances the soil nutrients.

Another reason to rotate crops is that different crops have different nutrient requirements, and they affect the soil balance differently. Growing the same crop in the same spot can deplete the soil of those nutrients.

Some plants, like corn and tomatoes, are heavy feeders that quickly deplete the nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil. Root vegetables and herbs are light feeders, and peas and beans add nitrogen to the soil but need lots of phosphorus.

To rotate crops, divide your vegetables into root crops (carrots, beets, onions), legumes that feed the soil (peas and beans), leaf crops (including broccoli, cabbage, lettuce and other greens), and fruiting crops (tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, squash, cucumbers and corn). Plant each group of vegetables in a separate bed or two and then establish a rotation order. Where you plant peas and beans one year, plant leaf crops the next year and fruiting crops the year after that. Follow these heavy feeders by light-feeding root crops the next season. Then start the rotation over again.

Since legumes add nitrogen to the soil, they are followed by nitrogen-loving leaf crops, which reduces the need for fertilizer. Root crops break up the soil, so they are followed by legumes that like the loose soil texture.

Try not to plant crops from the same family in the same bed two years in a row. This will discourage the build-up of diseases and pests that prefer one group of vegetables. When plants change from year to year, the disease organisms don’t have a chance to build up large populations. Leave at least two and preferably three or more years between the times that you plant members of the same family in an area of your garden.

Potatoes are a little tricky to work into the rotation. They can be planted with the root crops, but be sure they’re planted in a section of the bed that has not recently held tomatoes, peppers, or eggplant, which are in the same family. Instead, plant them where the squash and cucumbers were the year before.

The concept is simple, and keeping a notebook of your crops from year to year is a great way to keep your crop rotation in line!

Gardening Resolutions for 2016

Sunday, January 10th, 2016 by Jenny Watts
    • Start seeds of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and other cool season crops indoors for planting outside in March.

    • Fill your winter garden with color from primroses and pansies.
    • Roses should be pruned in February near the end of the dormant season. You can clean them up now, however, by removing all the old leaves on and around the plants.
    • Control peach leaf curl by spraying during the next dry spell with copper spray to help prevent this disfiguring disease from attacking your trees this spring.
    • Blueberries are a delicious fruit that can be planted now from young plants. Give them a rich, acid bed prepared with lots of peat moss.

Gardening Resolutions for 2016

Rainy winter days make gardeners anxious for the warmer weather that will allow us once again to get our hands in the dirt and watch new life grow. As you look out at the garden, maybe with garden diary in hand, it always feels good to set some goals, to make some resolutions for the season ahead.

This is a good year to build a compost bin to turn kitchen scraps, leaves or yard waste into rich humus. Or vow to change to a more organic style of gardening for truly nutritious produce. Maybe this is your year to double-dig the garden. If so, pick up a copy of John Jeavons’ How to Grow More Vegetables and learn how to do it right.

Grow more food! Rotate your crops from where you planted them last year and practice succession planting with things like peas, lettuce, beets, greens mix, basil and cilantro. Choose at least one new vegetable to plant. Variety adds different nutrients to our diet and is good for the soil. Make a trip to the nursery to shop for seeds so you’ll be ready when the time is right.

Plant more flowers for color, cutting, and fragrance – and also to attract beneficial insects and butterflies. Plant them in flower beds, pots and even the vegetable garden. They are food for the soul.

This is a good year to replace that tired lawn with drought-tolerant shrubs, perennials or even vegetables. Get some help to create a new water-wise plant design for at least part of your yard, and perhaps an irrigation system to go with it. Choose natives and Mediterranean plants that will need little water once established.

Create a relaxing oasis somewhere on your property. Find a place for a bench, surround it with your favorite plants and add a small fountain to enjoy the sound of running water. A recirculating fountain uses very little water and is a place where birds can enjoy a drink of water.

Plant a fruit tree this year. If you haven’t started an orchard, there’s no better time than the present. If you have a tree that isn’t thriving, pull it out and plant a new vigorous one. There are few things so rewarding as harvesting a tree full of fresh, ripe fruit. And there are few taste pleasures as satisfying.

Keep a garden diary. Each of us seems to live in a different micro-climate where temperatures, precipitation, sunlight and winds can drastically vary within a few miles. It’s hard to remember what happened from year to year, and after a few years, you may be able to anticipate the first frost or when the rose weevils arrive.

If you’re not a gardener, become one. You don’t even have to have a yard. Many flowers, herbs and small vegetables can be grown in pots. And the exercise and stress reduction make gardening a healthful pastime.

Share your love of plants and gardening whenever possible. Grow, celebrate, discover and enjoy your garden this year!

Growing Great Onions

Friday, January 23rd, 2015 by Jenny Watts
    • Prune fruit trees, grapes, berries, and ornamental trees this month. Take in a pruning class and sharpen your shears before you start.
    • Spray fruit trees with a dormant oil spray. Spray from the bottom up, including the undersides of limbs and the ground around the tree, to prevent early spring insect infestations.
    • Tree collards are delicious winter vegetables. Set out plants now.
    • Start seeds of perennial flowers like columbine, coreopsis and echinacea.
    • FREE Fruit Tree Pruning Class this Sunday, January 25, from 10 AM to 2 PM at Sanhedrin Nursery, 1094 Locust St., Willits.

Growing Great Onions

Onions seem like they would be one of the easiest vegetables to grow, but raising good onions can be more complicated that it first appears. As vegetables they are interesting plants to grow because they are very dependent upon day length and temperature to form bulbs.

Onions are typically seeded in fall through early spring, harvested in early summer and used fresh or stored for winter. But as many experienced gardeners know, the crop is not always successful, and many times the bulbs produce flower heads, which is known as “bolting”.

To grow onions successfully, you must know a little about them. Onions are biennials, which means that they grow one year and makes flowers and seeds the second year. The first year the onion plant begins its growth by putting out its green top leaves in cool weather. It stores energy in those leaves until the weather gets warmer and the days get longer. Then it begins storing energy in the bulb underground. When the bulb is mature, the leaves turn yellow and die and the onion is ready to harvest.

Given a certain set of environmental conditions, onions can be tricked into believing they have gone through two growing cycles during their first year. Instead of finishing with a well-cured bulb, ready to harvest, a seed stalk can develop prematurely, causing onions to be unmarketable.

Fall seeded crops are susceptible to bolting the following spring if warm fall temperatures, allowing excessive growth, are followed by low winter temperatures and slowed growth. The most successful onions may come from transplants set out in early spring.

Occasionally other factors, such as damage by cultivation or excessive stress, may cause bolting. That’s why only a few plants may bolt in an entire plot. Should this occur, the onion will still be perfectly edible; however, as the seed-stem gets bigger, the ring inside the onion will become pithy and inedible. If left to maturity, this ring will rot quickly and cause the entire onion to rot as well. It’s best to eat the onion as soon as you see the seed-stem. Don’t bend or break the top; the leaf is hollow, and breaking it will allow water to go right into the center of the onion and cause it to rot.

Onion sets (the small dry bulbs) have a bad habit of bolting and producing a flower stem. It is actually better to plant first-year seedling onions. These come two ways: as nursery-grown seedlings in small pots, and in bunches of larger seedlings that have been grown in fields and dug-up. The latter are available now in a limited number of varieties, and the former will be available soon with other spring vegetable starts.

Onions are characterized by day length: “long-day” onion varieties will quit forming tops and begin to form bulbs when the day length reaches 14 to 16 hours while “short-day” onions will start making bulbs much earlier in the year when there are only 10 to 12 hours of daylight. As a general rule, “long-day” onions do better in north of 36 degrees latitude while “short-day” onions do better south of that line. Willits and Ukiah are at about 39 degrees.

Our long summer days make the intermediate to long-day onions good for our climate and latitude. These include Red Zeppelin, Walla Walla, and Copra, Ruby, Candy, the Southport Globe onions, and Yellow and White Sweet Spanish.

For keeping qualities, the strong-flavored, yellow ones, like Copra, Yellow Spanish and Yellow Globe are the best. The milder onions don’t develop the really firm outer skin needed for long storage.

Onions aren’t bothered by frost, so early spring is the best time to get them planted. Then they have plenty of time to store up energy in the leaves before bulb-making time. The more green growth, the bigger the bulbs will be. So get started with onions, now.