My gardening adventures in the Los Angeles area
March was a balanced month between fruits and vegetables with good diversity. I harvested more than double compared to last year.
The 2 better boy tomato plants are still producing and tomato harvest was in the first place this month. Still hard to believe that in March I harvested so many tomatoes 🍅.
This month I harvested a few huge papaya fruits, including a record 5 lbs 5 oz one.
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.
March is the month of radishes. The radishes below are much bigger than they look in the picture, the small red one in the middle is a regular size one. The other red ones are the size of a mandarin.
I had some bigger broccoli, but I don’t have pictures, we made a very delicious broccoli soup last week.
This is the last month for pomelo.
The papaya plant has new papaya fruits and the old ones are growing much faster than during the winter months.
The cherry tomato plant transplanted on February 28 as shown in this post is growing fast and it has flowers.
The lemon tree has a lot of flowers.
One of the zucchinis planted on February 28th has died because we had a few nights with very low temperatures.
Below are the peppers and eggplants planted on March 7.
Below are 4 of the tomatoes planted on February 28, next to the carrots and celery, which are good companion plants for them.
We had a lot of rain recently and the radishes and lettuce love it, they grew a lot lately and are covering the peppers and eggplants transplanted on March 7.
Below is a tomato from last year that I pruned a few weeks ago, on March 7.
Below are the peppers and eggplants from the last year that I trimmed and hopefully will produce again this year.
The tomatoes, eggplants and basil that I had to keep outside for the last few weeks because of the space limitation inside the house. The tomatoes are doing extremely well, they look very sturdy.
I harvested most of the broccoli and made a very delicious broccoli soup. I will give the plant a few more weeks to see if they will produce more.
The strawberries are starting to ripen.
Below are pictures with 3 different varieties of figs.
The cocktail grapefruit is starting to bloom. It grew bigger and stronger after taking a break last year from producing fruits.
The artichoke has a flower already, 2.5 months earlier than last year. Yay!!
The newest addition to the garden: an avocado tree.
The asian pear started to bloom also.
Today’s projects were:
I removed all the radishes that were growing next to the red cherry tomato plant and I planted a new variety.
I had a few loquat trees growing into small pots, but since I didn’t have space for them in the garden, I neglected them and they didn’t grow much. I recently saw a video about growing trees in containers and loquat and guava were among the trees that do well in containers, so I decided to give it a try.
I used the mix that I had left from the one that I prepared on March 7, as showed in this post, and transferred the loquats into 5 gallon pots.
I added the starter fertilizer and earthworm castings to the mix.
I had a small guava tree growing right next to a pomegranate tree, but I could not let them grow that close to each other. Because of the space limitation in my garden, I moved the guava into a 5 gallon pot.
The dill that I planted in December didn’t do well, so I planted more seeds today.
My tomato seedlings have been growing a lot and today I decided to plant them in the garden. I removed the beets to make space for them.
After 5 years of gardening I decided to finally follow the instructions from the planting soil bag. I put a layer of 3 inches of planting soil and I mixed it with 3 inches of my garden soil. Normally I would just add the planting mix into the newly prepared hole for the seedlings.
Below is a picture of my tomato seedlings that were too big to keep inside the house and they were at risk of breaking.
I dug a 13″ hole in the ground, around double the diameter of the pot.
I removed the lower leaves from my tomato seedling.
I put the starting fertilizer, epsom salt and the ground egg shells into the hole and I placed the tomato in the ground.
After I filled up the hole with soil, when I got to about 2″ from the top, I added the worm castings and covered them with a thin layer of soil.
I watered the tomato 3 or 4 times all the way up and let it drain to make sure the water got all the way down to the roots.
Last year I started practicing companion planting and found out that carrots are good companions to tomatoes. I planted 2 varieties of carrots in the rows from the picture below.
When everything was planted, I watered the soil thoroughly.
March 23 update: The leaves of my tomatoes are sun burned. It’s not a big problem, I’ll simply remove the leaves and the plant will continue to grow new ones.
I was somewhat expecting the leaves to be affected since I didn’t have time to harden the seedlings due to a lot of rain. The weather forecast showed mostly cloudy for a few days and I was hoping that the seedlings will be fine. Usually, 1 week before planting in the garden, I would take them outside for 1 hour on the first day, and then gradually increase the exposure to sun every day .
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
