My gardening adventures in the Los Angeles area
In the second part of December, I started my warm season plants. I planted seeds of tomatoes, peppers and eggplants.
I also transplanted my 2 globe artichoke plants into 1 gallon pots.
This month was it was guava month, which was the most abundant of all fruits. So it was the perfect time to try guava jam, which came out very flavorful!
My artichoke plant multiplied like crazy, it had a lot of baby plants and I decided to split them. It was hard to figure out exactly how many they were until I split them, I ended up with 10 different plants. I left 2 in the same spot, transplanted 5 in the ground and 3 in pots. Some of them had nice roots, others just a small root or none. I transplanted the ones that didn’t look so good in pots.
I don’t have much space in the garden, so I decided to transplant the artichoke between my mint, they don’t get much sun in that area, but I hope it won’t affect the plants too much.
I planted more radishes in the space were I use to have the eggplants.
I didn’t have enough garlic to fill the entire area when I planted the garlic a month ago, so I got some more garlic and planted it. It’s a different variety than the first one. Both of them were bought from the grocery store, grown in California, but I don’t know the variety.
I also planted mare spinach seeds, since not all the seeds I planted a month ago germinated. This is 3rd round of spinach seeds … fingers crossed!
The squirrels are staring to prepare for winter and are hiding nuts in my garden. They messed up one of my broccoli plants and the arugula 3 times in one week! I had to transplant the broccoli plant 3 times and it’s still alive 🙂
During the second half of September, we had a few days with temperatures in the 80s and I was able to do some work in the garden. I had to relocate mature plants to make space for the cool season plants. I didn’t want to be late with my cool season plants like last year, so I decided to start early.
One of the tomato plants was getting infested again with a lot of spider mites. The spider mites love the heat and low humidity weather that we’ve had lately and they multiplied fast. I removed most of the leaves and sprayed the plant again with neem oil.
The cucumber plants that were in the ground stopped producing fruits for some time. So I decided to remove them to allow more sun to get to the peppers and eggplants.
In order to make space for the cool plants in the garden beds, I removed and relocated a few mature plants. I removed the celery, arugula and strawberry plants from the garden bed where the big tomato plant is. I purchased a new type of garden soil, Amend from Kellogg, and I mixed it into the existing soil. Afterwards, I planted parsnip, carrots, beets, onions and radishes.
Because my seedlings are not ready to be transplanted outside yet, I purchased 6 seedlings of purple broccoli and transplanted them in the same garden bed.
I used the homemade compost in another garden bed. Because it was enough to cover only about 75% of the space, I will use planting mix and manure for the other 25%.
Last year I compromised my cool season plants because I didn’t remove or relocate mature plants and I planted the cool season crop between a few leftover plants from the warm season. Another mistake was that I transplanted seedlings too late in the fall. Hence this year I decided to do it right and start fresh with my garden beds and a little earlier.
As space is always a problem in my garden, I was planing to relocate the strawberry plants in pots. But after I read an article on Greg Alder’s blog in which he had transplanted strawberries next to the fruit trees, I got inspired to do it the same way.
First I prepared the new location next to my apple tree, by removing the layer of wood chips. Afterwards I watered the place a few times to be sure the water gets at least 4″ deep and made holes for the strawberry plants to go in.
Next I removed the plants from the old location and cut all the runners to have only individual plants and placed them in holes in the new location.
Next to the strawberries I had a few arugula plants that needed to be relocated also. I decided to move them into the other bed with homemade compost. I also watered the new location until the water got at least 4″ deep into the soil, and then I relocated the arugula plants.
Because I moved my blackberry plants from the 5 gallon pots into bigger ones, I also had to relocate the parsley plants. As a result of that, I moved them next to the arugula plants as the space was already prepared.
I created the new potting mix needed to transplant the blackberry plants. In order to do that I took the old potting mix from the parsley plants and mixed it with bark, peat moss, perlite, fertilizer and garden lime. The experiment with the potting mix tried during the quarantine wasn’t successful, so now that I could get all the ingredients, I did it by the original recipe.
In the beginning of the month, when we had the record heat wave, I moved the blackberry plants in the shade next to some trees. And surprise, all the tips the touched the soil developed roots. I cut them and placed them in 4″ pots, hopefully I will get more plants by next year.
I decide to transplant the other Blackberry plant directly into the ground, so I can see if it will be a difference between the plants next season.
A friend planted a few raspberry plants last year and he harvested a lot of fruits this year. Since my kids love to eat berries, I want to give it a try. The variety that I found is called Willamette.
Next year I should have strawberries, blackberries, blueberries and raspberries if everything goes well. We’re all looking forward to it!
Another project was to fertilize the papaya, dragon fruit and artichoke plants. I finally found some chicken manure at Armstrong gardens.
This month I tried for the first time the air layering of cherimoya and fig trees, hopefully I will have positive results in a month or two.
