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!
The spider mites invaded about half of my eggplants. I removed most of the leaves and I will wait to see if they will recover this late in the season, usually they have no problems regrowing the leaves and producing fruits during the summer and early autumn months.
Below are a few before and after pictures.
I removed most of the celery plants that were growing between my pepper and eggplants to give them more light now that the days are sorter and the weather gets cooler.
Another project was to remove the leaves that were attached by the spider mites from my potted tomato plants and spray them with neem oil.
I removed the papaya plant which dried out and rotted. I was surprised by the look of the roots and how easily they came out of the ground.
Because this year I had a lot of Fuyu persimmons I dried many of them. I cut the fruits in half, then cut them in slices about 1/4 inch thick and dried them for 12 hours at 135 F degrees. My food dehydrator was very busy this year since it was a very good year for fruit trees.
This month I also planted my garlic between the cauliflower plants.
The first papaya tree looks worse with each passing day. I picked up the fruits as they started to change color, but the taste is not that good, so we made compote. We boiled them with water and a little bit of sugar and it came out quite good, similar to pumpkin flavor. There are a few pictures below showing the difference between the 2 papaya trees.
This month I harvested the seeds from the two large sunflowers. These are my first sunflowers since I started gardening in the Los Angeles area. As a teenager I had my share of sunflower harvest as my grandparents grew thousands of sunflowers to make oil from the seeds.
Some of the tomato plants died and I removed them. As a result I have only 2 plants left in one of my tomato garden bed.
The peppers and eggplant seedlings were ready to be transplanted. They are volunteers which sprouted from the compost that I used for my tomato plants in containers.
I removed the celery from one of the rectangle containers to make space for the seedlings. Then I tried to purchase some manure to amend the potting mix, but chicken manure is nowhere to be found at any store. I’ve been told at Lowe’s that they haven’t had any in the past few months. Armstrong Garden had only steer manure, but one of the workers told me that it has a lot of salt in it, so I went home empty handed.
Searching in my storage, I found a bag of Osmocote. I didn’t use Osmocote in a few years, but with the shortage in manure, I decided to use this bag.
This month I started planting seeds for the winter season. I have cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce and artichoke seeds so far. I hope that the artichoke seeds will sprout, but I’m not 100% sure since they are about 6 years old.
I started preparing the eggshells that I’ve collected for the past few months and I will grind them at a later time. There are quite a lot of them and it will take me a few hours to make the powder.
In this posts I will talk about my homemade eggplant stakes and other small projects that I did in the second half of May 2020.
Because this years eggplants were doing so well, it was time to install a support system for them.
A few years ago I made some stakes from wood and inserted them in the ground. By the end of the season I noticed that most of them started to rot because they were getting wet when I was watering the plants. So next season I came up with an idea and purchased 3/4″ PVC pipe and cut it at an angle in about 1.5 foot long pieces. Then I inserted my wood stakes into the PVC pipe so that only the PVC is touching the ground.
Below are a few pictures with the installed stakes. I use twine to tie the plants to the stakes.
The second year eggplants experiment din go very well. I had 8 plants left from last year and they produced only 2 very small fruits on them. In the meantime, the plants from this year have at least 2 fruits each and much bigger.
The plan was to keep the plants from last year since they were bigger and can support much bigger fruits, some fruits can get to almost 2 feet long. But the old plants were attacked by spider mites and their growth was affected. Because the spider mites started to spread to other plants, I decided to remove all the plants from last year.
I try to fertilize my papaya trees once a month. I think 2 months have passed since the last fertilization and I used about a half bag of chicken manure. They have a lot of papaya fruits. The first 2 fruits are starting to get yellow/orange, and in a few weeks I will harvest them.
My old watering wand started to have more and more problems. In the end I was not able to stop the water from the wand handle and it was getting very inconvenient to water the plants and the trees. I didn’t plan on spending a lot of money on a new one, but I saw many people recommending rain wands. It wasn’t cheap, actually it was almost 3 times more expensive than my old one, which had 9 different watering modes.
With my old wand I had to be very careful not to brake the plants when I was watering. The head didn’t have too many holes, which created high water pressure and the multiple settings made things even worse.
The new Dramm 14804 One Touch Rain Wand with One Touch Valve, 30-Inch, Green handle is a little bit shorter than my old one, but it doesn’t seem to affect my watering in any way. In conclusion, I’m very happy with the new addition to my gardening tools.
In this post I will explain step by step how to transplant eggplants and use fish as fertilizer. I have been freezing fish bones and skins for a while now for this purpose. It works well as a later in the season fertilizer as it’s dug deeper in ground and it releases nutrients as the plant grows bigger and its roots reach the fish.
Today I transplanted the last 3 eggplant seedlings into the garden and now my in ground garden is officially full!
In the picture below are the eggplants that will be transplanted. They are Millionaire and Shikou varieties and I started them from seeds which I saved last year. You can see how I grew them from seeds in the 2020 Seedlings update post.
I start the transplanting process by making a hole about 1 foot deep in the ground. Then I place the fish at the bottom and completely cover it with soil. The next step is to add my usual ingredients: half measuring scoop of starter fertilizer, half scoop of grounded eggshells and quarter scoop of epsom salt.
Afterwards I remove the plant from the pot, gently split the roots a little bit and place it in the hole. Then I cover the eggplant with soil up to about 1 inch from the ground level. Next I add the earthworm castings and cover it with a very thin layer of soil, leaving a small hole for the water to accumulate when I water the plants.
The last step is to water the plants 3-4 times to make sure the water gets all the way down to the roots.
I will monitor them over the growing season to see what difference the fish fertilizer will have on the plants and I will post updates.
May 28 – 12 days after the eggplants were transplanted, they have a lot more leaves and are growing nicely.
In this post I will explain step by step how to transplant eggplants in pots. I used 5 gallons containers for each seedling.
Here are the eggplants that I transplanted today. I started them from seeds and grew them indoors, then gradually hardened them. If you’d like to read more about their lifetime story, please take a look at this post.
Firstly I filled the pots with potting mix, which I made using my recipe. If you’d like to see how it was made and which ingredients I used, click here.
Afterwards, I made a hole in the middle and I added half scoop of starter fertilizer, a quarter scoop of epsom salt and half a scoop of grounded eggshells. The measuring scoop that I used is the red one from the picture below.
The next step is to place the eggplant seedling in the hole and cover it partially with the potting mix. Afterwards I add the earthworm castings and cover it with a thin layer of potting mix, as seen in the pictures below.
In the next section I will periodically post pictures with the eggplants throughout the season.
The first picture is from today, April 30.
The main project of the day was to transplant peppers and eggplants. Below is the list with all the projects presented in today’s post.
Most of the seedlings are ready to be transplanted in the garden, but I currently have some winter vegetables that I would like to keep for a few more weeks. I had a location in my garden with radishes that did not do that well, so I removed them and transplanted 6 eggplants and 4 peppers in their place.
A few months ago, on February 15, I moved a few eggplant seedlings into 1 gallon pots, as you can see it in the seedlings update post. It was time to split them up into individual pots.
In one of my tomato garden beds I have a lot of volunteer celery from last year’s plants seeds. I removed some and relocated them into another spot in my garden, between 2 old trees.
Next project was to transplant basil into the tomato garden beds, because basil is a good companion plant to tomatoes. Same as the eggplants, I had 3 or 4 plants in each pot and I split them up before transplanting.
Last year I planted garlic and onion on the edges of my garden beds. I didn’t harvest all the garlic, so this year they spouted again in groups. I split them up and planted them between peppers and eggplants.
I had a few pots that will be empty for another month, so I decided to plant radishes in them, since they should be ready to eat in 1 month. Because I had some extra space after removing the volunteer celery, I planted radishes there too.
While going through my seeds collection, I discovered a very old packet from 2012 with gold rush bush beans. Since their planting time in my zone is between March and August, I decided to give it a try. I planted them in 4 of my 5 gallon pots. Fingers crossed!
Today my projects were:
My zucchini and summer squash were getting too big for the containers I had them in and they needed to be transplanted outside. I removed the radishes in the picture below to make space for zucchini.
I added half a bag of potting soil and mixed it into the ground.
I had 1 zucchini plant left and 4 summer squash. I planted the zucchini next to my other 2 zucchini plants that I transplanted a few weeks ago (bottom part of the picture).
I also planted radishes next to the zucchinis.
The next project was to add more potting soil to a grapevine that I got from a friend.
I prepared a mix using old soil from another pot, added two 5 gallon buckets of wood chips, one 5 gallon bucket of peat moss, half bucket of perlite and half bucket of steer manure.
I took the grapevine out of the pot and added the new mix at the bottom and sprinkled some starter fertilizer on top of it. I placed the plant on top of it and watered it.
Armstrong Garden was giving free strawberry plants with a purchase when I bought the ladybugs 2 weeks ago. I transplanted it into a bigger pot using the potting mix I just made.
My radishes and lettuce planted on January 11 as shown in this post were getting too big and overgrowing the peppers and eggplants. I removed all the radishes and most of the lettuce.
We made soup from the harvested lettuce.
I transplanted 2 peppers and 3 eggplants and filled up this garden bed.
Today’s projects were:
The tomato from last year had spider mites and I cut most of it and left just the new growth. Below are the pictures before and after.
I purchased perlite, steer manure and peat moss to make more potting soil to plant peas and also transfer the sage plants from the soil to pots.
I had a 5 gallon pot and 15 gallon pot with older potting soil.
I mixed it with 1/2 of 5 gallon pot of peat moss
1/3 perlite
1/3 of steer manure and mixed them all.
I removed the 2 sage plants from the garden and planted them into pots in the new potting mix.
I found some dried peas on my plant, just perfect for the next round of plants. I planted the dried pea pods in two 5 gallon pots.
Another project was to transplant the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants that were too big to keep inside. I planted 2 tomato plants, 21 pepper plants and 6 eggplants in the garden today.
I removed the radishes and sage to plant the peppers and eggplants.
Before and after pictures
Today I cleaned up my 27 gallon rectangle containers. I trimmed my peppers and eggplants and decided to let them grow for the next season.
I also checked the blackberry plant to see if it developed roots.
It was time to check the blackberry plant for roots. I covered the tip with potting soil on December 28 and the result it can be seen in the picture below.
I cut the original blackberry in half and planted the new one in a 5 gallon pot. In order to continue the propagation process, I stuck the tips again in 2 small pots. Hopefully in 1 month I will have 4 blackberry plants.
March 10 update: the blackberry didn’t grow roots, most likely I have to wait for them to start growing before I try to multiply them again.
