November In The Garden

I don't need a sign to tell me this is garlic, but I am grateful to tell everyone else.  What I would like is a sign telling me what kind of garlic it is!  If you're growing the same thing you get in the grocery store, Stop it!  Get some good garlic.  I’ll tell you  all about it!

On the coast, the winter plantings we started back in September and October can continue right up through March. The only months that are really hard on winter veggies as close to the Pacific as we are in Sunset magazine's Zones 22 and 24 is July through September. In some years, October can be hard for plants to handle too; there is often at least one week or so of very hot weather, caused by Santa Ana winds, that dries out our new winter plants and is extremely hard on freshly transplanted lettuce. If you are putting on extra hand cream, think about watering your plants.

But in most years, by this time of the year, we ought not have any extended heat spells and cool weather should be very much ensconced. Now we want to make certain I have a good stock of all the alliums laid in – garlic, onions, leeks and shallots all have a place in my heart – and stomach – so I plant a lot of them.

Shallots and garlic are mostly grown from bulbs. I often plant them in containers and I crowd all my container planted roses with garlic because of its reputation as a good companion plant. And according to folklore at least, garlic has a good reputation for discouraging insects. I’m not sure this is proven yet, but I think the garlic plant itself is good looking as a part of a planting and I love having that upright element in containers as well as in ornamental beds. . You can't really plant enough garlic and shallots. And leeks also serve those purposes, design wise and culinary wise, just as well.

This year, I am in my second year of planting onions and shallots from seed. Last year, shallots were a whopping success – except I felt completely out of my league when it came to cook them. I felt I needed to affect a French accent when tossing them into a soup – they seemed so foreign. The onions ran a distant second at growing which saddened me – I am much more familiar cooking with onions than shallots. But, I'm trying again and learning more about cooking with shallots – I find it strange that shallots, easier to grow, are so much more expensive than onions. Go figure!

I have purchased onion plants from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply for several years. They carry several different varieties, but the one I love is Italian Red Torpedo Onions. Unfortunately, for me, over the last two years, I have missed getting plants because they have sold out. In revenge, I have learned to grow my own from seed. The plants you can buy in nurseries are really only baby plants that someone had to start from seed, so someone had to do it. If someone can do it, I ought to be able as well. It's a little harder than I thought. The plants come up looking like grass and seem to take forever. Maybe that's why buying plants is so universally accepted. Because they do 'take close to forever,' they need to be started earlier than I usually begin to think about the fall garden, like late July.

Water in your garden hopefully becomes much less of a challenge by this point, although, as noted earlier, a Santa Ana might come flying through and send everyone scrambling to keep the soil moist. Mulch. The more the mulch, the less work. You can mulch containers too – in permanent (more or less) plantings like a rose, caper bush or bay leaf tree, add a layer of something to the top of the pot – cocoa shells make a lovely mulch and smell good. I have heard folks say that dogs will eat the shells which are poisonous to canines, but I've had cocoa mulch in garden beds around three different dogs and not one of them has taken bite out of it, so I don't know but what that's just a popular urban myth. Still, “your mileage may vary.”

Mulch is a term that I use a lot, but needs to be defined. Mulch is anything put on top of the soil that interdicts the sun's rays and raindrops (or 'sprinkler-drops') from hitting the soil. It can be rocks, sheets of plastic, or some organic material – even compost.

As a vegetable gardener from way back when, I disdain the non-organic mulches. They can be expensive and they don't do a thing for the soil. Most organic mulches are cheap and many can be found for free. Organic mulches, unlike rocks, plastic or other non-organic mulches, feed the microbes that live in the soil, which improves the soil and adds fertility, the Holy Grail of gardening.

As I plant more of my winter plants, I'll keep adding more compost as mulch around the base of my plants. One thing to take note of as the days get cooler and hopefully wetter, is an explosion of slugs and snails. This is the kind of weather they prefer and they multiply like crazy right now. Because they are migratory creatures, you can never be rid of them completely. If you did manage to clear your garden on Tuesday of all slugs and snails, by Wednesday evening, you have a whole new group on hand that wandered in from the neighbors (or hatched out while you weren't looking).

The only real solution is constant vigilance. I have a friend who walks through her garden with a pail of water with dish soap in it and every snail and slug goes for a fatal swim. Another friend tosses them towards the street. Another crushes them underfoot. (Gardening is not for the squeamish or faint of heart...) I do all three at different times depending on how I feel. You should have seen how I felt loosing four rows of baby lettuce in one night. I never found that culprit, but I have wrecked revenge on every slug and snail I've seen ever since.

Yes, there are predatory snails that feed on the common garden snail, but they are also migratory and seem like an iffy proposition to me. I don't like adding potential pests (that cost money too!). Besides, if they ever did completely eliminate your common garden snail, leaving themselves with nothing to eat (not very likely), then they would turn on your garden as well. Seems like that is a lose/lose/lose proposition. I'll pass.

There are also several products in the marketplace that work and are organic. Es-car-go® and Sluggo® are two products that are organic and safe around pets and other wildlife because the active ingredient is an iron phosphate, a soil component that is lethal to mollusks like snails and slugs.

Still, the least expensive way to deal with them was to kill them directly as mentioned above. I imagine if this makes you queasy now, after some valuable crops or hard work becomes a midnight snack several times, you will find yourself a hardened snail and slug murderer like I am.

This is also THE very time to begin to think about fruit trees. I urge you to think about fruit trees for a while before making the dive because they are a big investment, not so much in money, but in time and patience. Once one has planted a fruit tree, some will take several years to come into full production – if you find the fruit unsatisfactory, or you have a variety that doesn't fruit well for you, all that time is wasted.

Gather as much data as you can in order to choose the tree that is right for you. Here are some sources you will find helpful – I suggest you go online and order the printed catalog because you'll want to cross check facts and types with each different nursery before you commit.

Trees of Antiquity, www.treesofantiquity.com, is the place where we purchased most of the trees at The Learning Garden over the years. I found them extremely helpful and very knowledgeable. It was they who suggested Dorsett Golden as our apple and it is truly one of the finds of a lifetime for a Zone 24 garden.

Raintree Nursery is where we place ongoing orders for propagation supplies that happen in late January and early February. Their selection is lovely and their catalog is chock full of fruit tree information that makes it worth a read. A lot of their varieties are not suited for Southern California as they are servicing a clientele from the colder northern climes. Trees of Antiquity (above) and Dave Wilson nursery are good web sites from which to learn about fruit trees. Dave Wilson does not sell to the public directly, but you can find retailers that carry their products for you to purchase.

Dave Wilson Nursery was the nursery that popularized the idea of planting three or more fruit trees in one hole that went around a couple of years back. I was skeptical to begin with and that skepticism has deepened over the years. I have seen many failures and little success with the idea. The idea was you would dig one hole in the ground and plant up to four trees in that one hole. As the trees grew, they would naturally bond together and you'd get four different varieties from the same space as you normally would have gotten one. Great idea, but on the whole it didn't work. Usually the three weaker trees died and you were left with one. No harm, no foul perhaps, but a good deal of heart ache at losing 3/4's the trees you planted.

My old standby, Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, is a great supplier of trees and fruit bushes, but their selection isn't nearly as complete and their catalog isn't a detailed as these others. Still, if you are already ordering something from Peaceful Valley and they have the variety you want, I have never gone wrong with them. Shipping costs are the hard part. Let's organize a caravan and drive up and pick up one huge order! Yay! I'll drive!

The University of California has gotten in on the backyard orchard with a website, The California Backyard Orchard is a wonderful web site for a lot of answers about growing fruit trees in our climate. It also promotes the UC ANR publication, The Home Orchard, a highly recommended book if someone is going to go into this as deep. This is my 'go-to' book for orchard information. Other books will not have the correct data to understand what we need in our Mediterranean climate. Varieties that need a higher number of 'chill hours' do not produce fruit here – we cannot grow cherries reliably and only a select variety of apples and pears. Other fruit trees are more amenable to our warmer world, but even then, not checking can be a huge mistake. Imagine growing an apple for several years, loving it, caring for it, only to learn it will only produce fruit spottily, if at all, and offer very meager eating. I did it (Fuji apple) and I do not recommend going down that road; get something proven to perform in our climate and have loads of fresh fruit in a couple of years to enjoy.

Some Fruit Varieties That Do Well Here:

Apples -

Dorsett Golden – as mentioned above, is a heavy cropper in our climate. It takes about 3 years to really settle in (although it will bear fruit, they are tiny for the first three or so years with full sized fruit beginning to show up in year three). We have Dorsett Golden on half size fruit stock and it's a fair sized critter.

Gala – we have this on a dwarf rootstock – she's about five feet tall at this point and not likely to get much larger. Lovely apples with crisp texture and that is what I prize in an apple.

Fuji – one of my all time favorites, but the one we have in the garden is a 500 chill hour plant and in three years I harvested one small apple. It WAS good, but it wasn't worth all that time. Sadly, ours will have to be replaced. (There are newer Fuji trees that have less chilling requirement and I may buy one of those.)

Plant varieties with a wide range of fruiting times which will extend the harvest.

Apricot -

Goldkist – hands down, the best apricot I have ever eaten! A self-pollinated variety, this one tree stands out as the best fruit in our garden. While Royal Blenheim is the touted variety for our climate, I just love Goldkist and have no desire to look beyond it.

Pear -

Seckle is usually the only one suggested for our area of the European pears. We have one, but it ended up in a neglected area and I've got nothing to report. Although, I don't think a ripe pear can be beat for shear hedonistic eating!

Figs -

Violettte de Bordeaux – AKA 'Negronne' is our tree that has been a champion for five years. It bore fruit the first year and it has not stopped since. A deep black skinned fruit, the flesh is a gorgeous red and has a smoky richness that is heavenly.

White Genoa – is an Italian variety that took forever to fruit. Once it finally put on a crop by which it could be judged, I began to appreciate its lighter and sweeter amber flesh. A really lovely fig. But not a heavy producer. Still, yum!

The Learning Garden has acquired over five other varieties that I am eager to get into the ground and report back on – as a Kansas born and bred boy, I had never had a fresh fig until sometime after I was in my forties. I'm got a lot of lost time to make up for.

Nectarine -

Double Delight – not to be confused with the rose of the same name, this is a yellow fleshed freestone nectarine, heavily bearing and needs a LOT of thinning – we almost lost several branches because it fruits so heavily. I know Peaceful Valley calls it 'sensational' but I think that's a little over the top. It's good and with vanilla ice cream it's really good. But not 'sensational.' It is self-fertile.

Peaches -

Red Baron – this is one of our two peaches – this is a yellow freestone and a very good producer of large fruits. The other one is a clingstone and I like its flavor better, but I can't find the record on it and don't know which variety it is. The importance of keeping good records is not to be overlooked.

Plums -

Santa Rosa – this is one of the thousands of plants that Luther Burbank created (he lived in Santa Rosa and gave us the Burbank potato, the Shasta Daisy among thousands of others), and I find this to be the best and most prolific producer of any tree in our gardens today. It makes a fabulous sorbet, delicious jam and fresh eating cannot be beat. There are several other plums that will do well in our region, but I haven't got past this one.

If you still have empty space to fill in your garden beds, refer back to October – you can still plant all things mentioned there from October through January. Try to keep a few extra plants of that which you like best on hand in containers to be popped into your garden to fill little holes that appear as plants are harvested or those that fail. I like to keep a six pack of a variety of lettuces to pop into the garden as the cool months roll by. They are reliable and fast! And they hold well in a six pack.

Keep up with the rotation planting, you can persist right into March if you live on the coast – those of you inland will need to begin to scale back on it before the end of February.

It gets dark so early these days it's hard to find a lot of time to be in the garden. But do get out there as much as you can – California gardens look so inviting in these short days with the golden sunlight playing off the plants! It's one of my favorite times to be in the garden despite fall's sense of melancholy.

As a child, I watched the garden preparations for Winter snow and keenly felt the end of working outside. After the frosts of fall, I would be only gardening in my mind with the seed catalogs that flooded the mail. Most of them wouldn't arrive until after the first of the year, and school, at which I did not excel, was the only thing to occupy my time until those catalogs came to spark my imagination and delight me for hours of reading and rereading. Obviously I was destined to be a seedsman from a very early age.

I made huge lists of the seeds we would need in the spring, embracing every new item and every scrumptious photo of the latest hybrid offered by W. Atlee Burpee, Shumway and all the other old time seed houses. Sadly many of them have folded or have turned into hawkers of the hybrid seeds exclusively – seeds that are not bred for and do not perform well in the gardens of homeowners. Hybrids are bred to be planted by farmers, grown with the use of lots of inputs, like fertilizers and pesticides and will be uniform in the field so they can be harvested at a single pass. These are not qualities you will value in the garden, especially when they are offered to you in place of good taste and natural disease resistance. You'll want to do what my Grandfather did: ignore the lists of your headstrong grandson and pull out the seeds you saved from last years harvest and plant those. Grandpa was a seed saver and I wish I had learned more about this from him – it's a tradition and art I am needing to learn from books.

Start These In Containers	Start These In The Ground	Move to the Ground from Containers
More of the cabbage family! Lettuce	Beets Carrots	Cabbage family members from early September
	Fava beans	Fava beans
	Garlic	Leeks
	Lettuce	Onions
	Other green leafy vegetables
	Peas
	Turnips

Refer to the text for exact dates.

David King's Most Beautifully Delicious Rhubarb Pie!

2 double pie crusts

2½ pounds fresh rhubarb, cut into ½ inch pieces, or 2 20 ounce packages of frozen rhubarb, thawed and drained

1 cup sugar, or to taste

½ cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon ground cardamom

1 teaspoon nutmeg

Juice and grated zest of 1 bright-skinned orange

Preheat the oven to 350 ° F

Cut the rhubarb into pieces to fill your pie crust. Combine all ingredients except rhubarb in bowl. Spoon this mixture over the rhubarb as evenly as you can over the rhubarb – the act of baking will take care of the distribution of the sauce.

Bake for approximately 50 minutes, until the filling has bubbled and thickened. Let cool on a rack before serving.

Makes two pies.

This is a bachelor male's adaptation of a Martha Stewart recipe which takes about 3 hours longer to make.

david

October In The Garden

Seedlings in terra cotta pots getting ready to be transplanted into slightly larger containers.  On the left, broccoli and cabbages have two seed leaves while the two pots on the right must be onions or leeks because they only have one seed leaf each.   

In all the books from back east and England, you'll find fall as a season of 'going to rest,' 'putting the garden to bed' and other allusions to 'sleep' and restoration. It is not true for in the Mediterranean Climate! We are in our other Spring and this Spring is really closer to the Spring that other parts of the world experience. This is our shot at carrots, peas, and other cool season plants. We either have all our space filled with plants, or we've just got a part planted with big plans (dreams) for the rest. So the Winter garden is in full swing. Later this month, if I have grown any green manure cover crops I will cut them down, leaving the plant material in place and cover with a thick layer of mulch. I would like to allow this to “mellow” (meaning I want this material to begin breaking down into nutrients the plants can use) for about 2 weeks or more before placing the next crop in.

I tried to plant one chard plant because I only need one to provide me with enough chard for all my needs, but there are so many colors to choose from, I feel a need to grow at least three: yellow, red and the orange really knocks socks off. These plants provide continuous chard over a long season, sometimes even 'over-summering,' obviating the need for succession planting. Almost everything else though, benefits by being sowed at intervals throughout the season, a process called 'succession sowing' or 'succession planting.'

A person plants a garden to get to eat the very freshest of food – you don't pick your veggies and put them in the fridge to 'age' before you eat them – well, at least, that isn't the intent. So, to the degree possible, only plant enough of what can be eaten in a reasonable amount of time. As a single person, I have found that an eighteen inch row for most things is the perfect size to grow enough to supply fresh carrots, beets, parsnips, cutting lettuces, for any given time. A typical planting schedule for me might look like this (the words in parenthesis name the varieties I like):

Week 1 – carrots (St. Valery)	Week 7 - lettuce (Black Seeded Simpson)
Week 2 – beets (Golden)	Week 8 – carrots (Scarlet Nantes)
Week 3 – parsnips (Hollow Crown)	Week 9 – beets (Red Ball)
Week 4 – carrots (Dragon)	Week 10 – spinach (America)
Week 5 – beets (Chioggia)	Week 11 – turnips (Purple Globe)
Week 6 – turnips (DeMilano)	Week 12 – beets (Albino)

Quickly you see that, though I do eat parsnips and turnips, I don't eat nearly as many of them as I do carrots or beets. Your situation might be different in that you could care less at all about ANY parsnips, but spinach is near and dear to your heart so you would have spinach in the rotation much more than I do.

Another way to do the same thing, for a larger family, is to plant three different things per week – carrots, beets and spinach in week one; turnips, lettuce and parsnips in week two; carrots, beets and parsnips in week three. Or spinach planted in one row every week all cool season long. Tailor the program to your needs! You might also find that you need longer rows – I wouldn't imagine that an 18” row would suffice for a family of four! Play around with the scheduling and the row length and the mix of plants you grow until you find what your family needs. At which point, of course,their needs will change, but you'll have a lot more data with which to figure out the new schedule.

In our smaller gardens there is no room for the proverbial 50' row of carrots which means succession planting of a given vegetable is one of the staple strategies for your daily grub. Another good point about putting in many smaller plantings of crops is the ability to harvest these vegetables at a smaller size, which is just the ticket for a garden in containers. Don’t get suckered into the “bigger is better” routine. A huge cauliflower might serve as a great subject in a “look what I grew” photo contest, but the cauliflower you pick at half the size will be the one your tastebuds will reverently remember.

A mark of the very good gardener is one who has his/her succession sowing down to such a science that allows them to place fresh vegetables on the table without lag time or a concentration of over-abundance that fluctuate to nothing to eat for a few weeks in between. Learning how to do this well has been the work of a lifetime for many and is still a moving target. But at least I know what I’m shooting for... and now you do too.

Direct sowing of seeds gets far too much mystical billing. It’s easy. The hard part, in our busy world, is staying disciplined enough to keep them moist. Remember, the seed wants desperately to grow, that is its “job.” If you provide enough water for the seed to break the seed coat, you will soon see a little pair of leaves above the soil. These are called cotyledons and, if there are two of them, you have what is commonly referred to as a 'dicot' (“di” meaning two), horticultural shortcut word for dicotyledon. There is only one other kind of flowering plant we would be concerned with in a vegetable garden and that has only a single seed leaf and is called a 'monocot' (one-leaf). Monocots, meaning 'monocotyledon,' are all the grasses, which includes grains like corn, wheat, rice and barley. And a lot of your weeds!

Take note of all the little cotyledons of the plants you grow and soon you will be able to tell them from the weeds. This is somewhat important. If you can rid yourself of weeds before they get really big, you have a much easier job of it; if you rid yourself of all the wrong plants because you mistook the lettuce for dandelions, you'll be a very disappointed and frustrated gardener! I have done this, I am not too proud to say. Learn them quickly to forestall the sadness of hoeing up your own plants.

Composting is one of the more essential parts of gardening. Gardening is a life cycle and composting is that part of the cycle that returns nutrients and fertility to the soil. In our culture, we don't like the smell or the thought of decomposition, yet a knowing gardener loves the smell of rich compost; that ever so slightly 'sweet' smell, incidentally, is from actinomycetes, a fungus that is in the same group of organisms as penicillin.

Somehow, fall always reminds me of composting probably because I grew up in those colder climes where fall signals the oncoming winter and so marked the end of the growing season. And that leads to thoughts of composting. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

You can get absolutely nuts trying to build a scientific compost pile, but let me offer that I don't do all that. Decomposition happens. Simply leave some veggies in your fridge too long and tell me they did not begin to decompose. And you didn't have even think about carbon to nitrogen rations (c:n). You do want to understand the process – especially if you don't have the space to leave something sit for 9 months, which is what I tend to do – to get usable compost in less time than it takes to grow a decent cabbage.

Remember you have 'browns' and 'greens,' names that are somewhat misleading. 'Browns' refers to carbon material which is mostly, or usually, brown. This is dried leaves or woody pieces. 'Greens' are those materials full of nitrogen – usually represented by grass clippings, but all of your table scraps are nitrogen sources too and they too are classed as 'greens' regardless of their color. While we can specify the ideal carbon to nitrogen ratio, achieving it is always a meandering attempt to meet a moving and approximate target. Believe me, you'll never have composting materials in the right amounts to achieve an ideal c:n ratio, which is considered to be 25-30 parts per brown to 1 part of green. So, add all the green you have and scrounge around to dig up enough brown to make it work. You can add newsprint or cardboard to the pile to bring up the carbon level ('brown') if you have those around, Mix well and water – keep moist. Make a pile that is at least three feet high by three feet long by three feet wide; this is the minimum size to create a working compost pile. Keep moist. Turn the parts that are inside outside and the parts that are outside inside. Keep moist. Not soggy, but moist. In about 9 weeks of warm weather, you'll be able to use fresh compost. Sift out the big honking pieces and return them to the pile (they will help get the next pile off to a better start) and build it again.

Honestly? I usually dig a trench about one foot across and two feet deep and as long as it needs to be to handle what I have to compost. I pick a part of the garden I won't use for a few months and add the compostable materials, covering with soil as I go. I add to the trench each day I have more to compost. Eventually I'll simply plant right into that soil, starting in the oldest part of the compost ditch. No big deal and it works without a lot of reading. Or thinking. I did this when I had a small garden and kept working compost into the soil in this pattern. On the Plus side, it's not a rodent attractor and it's no muss, no fuss. It's perfect for a single or two person household that doesn't produce a lot of compost. It would also work as an overflow method for folks using worm bins as their # 1 composting method.

You can find the composting technique that thrills you. The important point is that none of these rich materials, food or garden waste, ends up in a land fill. All of the plant wastes from the kitchen and table are the best components for a rich garden and they are free! The benefits of composting for your garden and keeping valuable material out of the landfill are a double whammy of 'why this is important!' You don’t need to worry about doing it perfectly... everything rots eventually.

If you are building a compost pile, you don't need to buy a black plastic container or any other kind of device. The black plastic composters were probably designed back east and made black to absorb more heat; we don't need it here, having plenty of heat (usually) to go around. A simple thee feet by three feet by three feet pile will do. One thing to be careful about is to keep your kitchen scraps covered with some 'carbon' kind of material or you may attract rodents. Just the simple precaution of burying food scraps under a decent layer of dried leaves will help prevent a mouse problem.

A smelly compost pile has too much water. Hold off watering for a few days, work in some dry carbon material without more wet and soon it'll be OK.

Rodale's book on composting is listed in the notes section. Get it, it's a great resource.

For apartment dwellers, condo owners and others with no easy access to land, vermicomposting is the answer you are looking for! And you didn't even know you had the question! It's easy, the result can be used on plants in pots and your garbage need never grace the entrance of a landfill ever again!

You will need

• 10 gallon bin or 20 gallon bin
• 1 lb or so of worms (you can start with fewer, the population will expand to account for what you feed them)
• Cardboard or newsprint
• Kitchen waste
  

Most home stores sell two storage bins that work very well for vermicomposting.  The smaller bin is a 10 gallon container by Rubbermaid called Roughneck Storage Bin #2214-08. It’s dimensions are 9” x  21” x 15” , comes with a lid and is available in various colors.  This size works well for a family of two. 

A worm bin can be made of wood, but plastic seems to work better longer because it won't rot. Your bin must be tightly covered – worms cannot live in light and you don't want them to escape! Punch or drill holes around the top third of the vertical walls to allow air to circulate – punching them with a nail is best because any larger of a hole will be an escape hatch for the explorers in your worm population. You should do the same thing with the lid. Oxygen in the bin will allow the breakdown of materials to proceed aerobically, which means it won't stink and your worms won't suffocate.

Wet a sheet of cardboard or a section of newsprint – soak thoroughly and wring out to where it is as moist of a well wrung sponge. Worms will use this as bedding, and eventually you'll need to replace it
as time goes by.

Red wigglers will reprocess kitchen waste such as: vegetables, fruits, eggshells, teabags, paper coffee filters, shredded paper towels, and coffee grounds. They particularly like pumpkin, watermelon and cantaloupe. Avoid citrus fruits because they are too acidic for them. If you pamper your worms by cutting food scraps into small pieces, the worms can finish them off that much faster. I am not, however in the business of making life wonderful for a bunch of worms – I throw my stuff in whole and they take care of it sooner or later. Burying the food scraps into the bedding will help you avoid fruit flies and adding meat or fish to the bin is not advised for many reasons.

Feed the worms your scraps as you have them available -ideally, no less than twice a wee – however, I have gone on vacation for a week and fed my worms nothing in that time and did not come back to a hell hole of a worm bin. Don't stay up nights worrying about them. These worms prefer a pH of something close to 7 and the temperature needs to be between 50 and 84 F. Don't let the bin dry out – keep it moist like the compost pile.

Harvesting the vermicompost can be done several ways, but the way that is easiest and therefore my choice is called 'side-harvesting.' Feed the worms on only one side of the bin for a few weeks which will cause the worms to migrate to that side. You can then begin to harvest the worm compost from that unoccupied side of the bin where you will eventually, once you've finished harvesting (over a few weeks), begin to add fresh bedding on that side causing them to migrate to the new bedding and allowing you to harvest from the second side.

You can make a it lot more complicated than this, but you have better things to worry about, yes?

In planting seeds, please note that root crops are never planted in containers to be transplanted later. There is a really good reason for this: they do NOT transplant well. Onions, and onion family members are the exception. Carrots and parsnips abhor being transplanted and beets and turnips suffer so much shock it is not worth the trouble.

While I often start lettuce in six packs in a sheltered location, it can sown in the soil directly as well. I like to do both, when a plant will let me do both because they each have advantages and drawbacks. Plants that are transplanted will suffer some shock in the transplant and that will slow them down a bit. However, plants grown directly in the garden are often subjected to harsher conditions that can overwhelm a small plant; a hard rain, pests that consume the whole plant while it's small. If you can, start plants both ways to maximize your chance a good harvest. Fava beans, garbanzo beans, lentils and peas can also be grown either in containers or directly sown.

Slower growing small plants, though, really do benefit from growing in a sheltered location. In this group, I put broccoli, kale, cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. These are also plants that one should set in the ground lower than they were in the original container, so transplanting them makes great sense.

This is a busy month – and the more you do early, the happier you will be! As the month rolls along, sunset gets earlier towards an unreasonable hour and you'll regret the missing outdoor light.

Start These In Containers	Start These In The Ground	Move to the Ground from Containers
More of the cabbage family! Fava beans	Beets Carrots	Cabbage family members from early September
Lettuce	Fava beans	Fava beans
	Garlic	Leeks
	Lettuce	Onions
	Other green leafy vegetables
	Turnips

Refer to the text for exact dates.

Winter Squash With Pecans And Bleu Cheese

• 4-1/2 pounds winter squash

• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

• 1 cup pecans

• 1 cups crumbled Roquefort or other bleu cheese

Heat the oven to 425°F. Halve the squash, leaving the skin on, and scoop out the seeds, then cut into 1-inch cubes; you don't need to be precise, just keep the pieces uniformly bite sized or so.

Throw onto a hot grill until tender.

Toss the hot squash into a bowl and scatter the pecans throughout, crumbling the cheese over all and toss together.

This can be a wonderful side or you can get more involved and create a main course dish from it.

david