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!
This month we had a record breaking heat wave. There were 2 days with 114 F degrees and unfortunately a lot of smoke from the worst fires California has ever seen. The time in the garden has been limited because it was difficult to be outside, and breathe.
In preparation for the heat wave, I built a wall from a tarp to protect the young avocado tree, planted just this spring, and some neighboring fruit trees and plants. Luckily most of the summer vegetables were mature enough or almost done producing, so I wasn’t as worried as with the previous heat waves.
The spider mites attacked to my 2nd generation tomato plants, so I had to remove some infested leaves and treat the plants with neem oil.
I had a few tomatoes that weren’t too pretty and were getting wrinkled, so I blended them and froze them flat in ziploc bags. They will come in handy this winter when we’ll make sups, stews, sauces etc.
Another project was to amend the peppers and eggplant garden bed and since I couldn’t find any manure, I used Osmocote fertilizer and a layer of planting mix on top. I never thought that there can be a shortage of manure 🙂 More proof that we live in unprecedented times.
I also removed most of the first generation of tomato plants because they were not producing anymore. They did a good job keeping shade for the other plants during the hottest heat wave of the year. It was time for them to go and make space for the cool season vegetables.
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.
This month I removed 2 of my best producing tomato plants of the season: the red cherry tomato and the 2nd year beefsteak tomato plant. I harvested 779 cherry tomatoes weighting 20.5 lbs and 161 beefsteak tomatoes weighting 46.5 lbs.
We had a few heat waves and I was afraid I will lose the 10 feet tall cherry tomato plant due to the heat, so I ended up watering it too much. I think I accidentally drowned it.
I cut the beefsteak tomato almost all the way down and left just a little bit in case it will decide to give new growth for a 3rd year.
The seeds from the radish plants that I pulled out in second part of July were ready to be removed from the pods.
The dragon fruit started having a lot of flowers recently and I pollinated about 30 flowers in 3 days. This year I started collecting the pollen in a small container and used it to pollinate other flowers. I store it in the freezer between pollination sessions for the next wave of dragon fruit flowers. This technique was suggested by the local gardening group and it improved my success rate immensely. I have been using the same pollination technique for the cherimoya trees for the past few years.
The flowers open only during the night time and stay open just for a few hours. They must be hand pollinated during the night time, between 10 PM and 12 AM.
I moved the pots with 2nd generation of cucumbers from the temporary location next to the avocado tree and dragon fruit because they were getting too big.
We were lucky to have a lot fruit from our fig trees this year. I have been drying them using our dehydrator and I also made another round of jam. This time I mixed the figs with small peaches from our tree and this is by far, one of the most amazing jams I’ve made!
I harvested more peppers (Gogosari) than we could eat and made some pickled peppers, one of my favorites, so we can eat them during the off season. I also saved seeds from the peppers for the next year.
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.
Today’s projects were to remove more eggplant and pepper plants, adding manure to the trees and grapevine and transplant seedlings to larger pots.
I decided to leave a few pepper plants for the next year as an experiment This is the first time when I’m trying this with peppers. I tried doing this with tomatoes in the past and unfortunately they had spider mites and powdery mildew, which transferred to my new plants in spring.
I had to purchase potting mix from Armstrong gardens because my local Costco doesn’t have the potting mix yet as it’s too early in the season .
March 10 update: the mix was not good for the seedlings, they started growing after a few weeks. You can read more about it in the seedlings update post
I filled up the containers with soil and prepared the holes.
Then I transplanted the seedlings.
I filled up 3 large trays with pots.
I added steer manure at the base of my fig trees, mixed it with the soil and then watered thoroughly.
Today I took advantage of the fact that the soil was wet and I planted more seeds where I had some available space in the garden.
Here I planted red cherry radishes next to the ones planted a month ago. I like to stagger them so I have a continuous harvest.
I found a spot in the garden with eggplant and pepper plants that didn’t have any fruits on them, so I removed them to make space for radishes. I also pulled out the onion and the weeds and prepared the soil for planting.
I added some compost from my compost bin and mixed it into the soil.
The third project of the day was to plant some beets.
I had a beet plant left in the garden from the last season to flower and attract pollinators and around 2 months ago I picked up the seeds and put them in a bucket (I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them). After moving the bucket around a few times, I forgot about it and today I noticed that it was not covered and the seeds got wet from the rain, so I had to do something with them.
I also noticed that in one of my broccoli containers, a beet plant had popped out. I researched if beets and broccoli grow well together and after the confirmation, I decided to experiment and planted the beet seeds in the same container with the broccoli and cauliflower.
The last project of the day was to plant the pepper seeds for the next season.
I like to use the organic potting soil from Costco as my seed starting mix, but they only sell it during spring and summer time. Last year I didn’t have any potting mix left to plant my seeds, so I used a different seed starting mix. I still have some left from last year, so I will do an experiment in a container with 6 squares.
I had enough seed starting mix to fill 2 squares and I used Costco potting mix in the other 4 squares. I planted the same type of bell pepper seeds in all of them and I want to see if there will be any difference between the plants.
The experiment between seed starting mix and potting soil (circled squares have seed starting mix)
For the large container, I plant about 4-5 seeds in each square and just press them into the mix with the pencil .
