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.
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.
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.
In the second part of the month of July I harvested the radish seeds. They were dry and ready to harvest.
This year I had a lot of celery plants that sprouted from last year’s plants seeds everywhere in my garden. I removed around 70% of the plants to make space for the next season plants. I pulled them out with the roots and gave to some neighbors to transplant them in their gardens.
The second year tomato plant was fully infested with spider mites. I removed most of the leaves and I will remove the plant in a week or two. I want to wait for a few of the bigger tomato to be ripe.
The figs started to ripe a few weeks earlier than last year. We dried most of them and also made jam twice. Second time we added some peaches to the fig jam.
I don’t have to worry about saving some cucumbers for seeds. Every time a few hide between leaves and I discover them when is already too late to be harvested. I leave them on the vine until they are ready to collect the seeds.
At the end of May, while pruning my cherry tomato plants, I decided to root a few suckers.
I took 3 red cherry and 2 black cherry suckers and placed them in bottles with water. I separated them in 2 bottles, so I can easily identify them later, and placed them in a dark place in my storage shed.
One week later the suckers had roots already.
Two weeks after I placed the suckers in the bottle, they were ready to transplant in pots. Since we had a heat wave recently and the temperature in the shed got over 100 degrees, some of the leaves were affected by the heat. They were starting to show signs of getting burn. That is when I decided to transplant and move them outside.
A week later the heat damage was more obvious and one of the black cherry sucker didn’t survive as it can be seen in the picture below on the left side.
A month after I started the experiment, the suckers were ready to be transplanted in bigger pots. Since is so late in the season, the only ones that I had available were 5 gallon pots. This will be my 3rd generation of tomatoes of this year.
The 1st generation, which was transplanted in the ground at the end of February, are now starting to ripe.
The 2nd generation, transplanted in pots at the end of May, are setting fruits and the updates can be seen here.
I continued removing yellow and brown tomatoes leaves in the second half of the month of June.
It was also the time to harvest more parsnip plants. The leaves grew too big and the tomatoes plants next to them didn’t have enough air flow.
I transplanted the last eggplants seedlings also. They were long overdue but I finally created some space after removing celery plants.
I harvested onions for the first time and I started the curing process as it can be seen in the picture below.
Since the cucumbers that I transplanted in pots are not doing well, I decided to plant some more and this time my potting mix is 90% home made compost. Part of the reason why they are not doing well is because I didn’t have the right ingredients for the potting mix and I had to improvise earlier this year. This time, I filled the pots with 90% compost and on top of it I used thin layer of potting mix to plant the seeds.
My compost bin was getting full and I was looking into ways of using it. I had two more tomato seedlings to plant and I decided to plant them in pots with homemade compost. Hopefully the compost is not too strong to burn the plants.
I took the potting mix from the previous plants and mixed it with compost. Probably it was about 60% potting mix and 40% compost.
These were my last two tomato seedlings and I decided to experiment with them and test my homemade compost in pots. This is the first time when I use my compost in pots, as I always use it for my in-ground beds.
First step was to get the old potting soil and mix it with a 5 gallon bucket of compost. Afterwards I put a thin layer at the bottom of the pots and and a layer of compost. For the compost layer I split one 5 gallon bucket between the two pots. Afterwards I filled up the pots with the remaining potting mix.
Next I follow my usual process of transplanting seedlings. For more detailed instructions and updates you can check How to transplant tomatoes in pots .
