Gardening Tricks That Don't Work for Shit

We read somewhere that we should procure a plastic snake to scare off birds that were picking at our seedlings. That would dissuade them and plants would grow. Right? Wrong!

It did maybe scare away birds, but it also scared off the family member we shall not name; the one who was supposed to water our seedlings in our absence. It's harder to grow seedlings on a drip irrigation system. Until they come up and develop deep roots, you have to make sure the area is evenly moist.

The family member that shall remain unnamed thought the snake might be real and he carefully avoided the bed. The seedling, unwatered, died.

Los Angeles San Fernando Valley. Four Seasons

Los Angeles gets 4 seasons, just like everywhere else.  Seasons go as follow:

October-November: FALLish-SUMMER: Scorchingly hot but maybe some leaves drop. We get super excited. We carve pumpkins, children trick or treat in T-Shirts and we thank native Americans by eating the sweet-potatoes that have been curing in a dark spot (did you know that unlike regular potatoes, sweet potatoes can't be eaten right away? They need to be cured to be sweet).

December: WINTER. Average rainfall: nil. Average temperature: a frigid 70 degrees. But the sun is lower in the sky and night falls around 5 pm. So maybe, perhaps, less sunlight in some areas. We wear Santas' Hats and do holiday shopping in flip flops.

January-February-March: SPRING! Flowers everywhere. Sometimes gallons of rain fall on your head, sometimes no water at all for say, years.

April-September: SUMMER. Temperatures fluctuate starting in the mid 80s and reaching as much as 115 degrees where I live.

So while my poor mom in France scrutinizes the sky for patches of blue and prays for temperatures over 50 degrees, I cruelly send her pictures of the San Fernando Valley where the garden looks like this:

Tomatoes plants are human-sized:



Tomatoes are timidly showing up



Corn is shoulder-high and the flowers have come out. The bags are not Halloween decoration, or ways to scare birds but my attempt at harvesting pollen from corn flowers. Because in small vegetable gardens, especially in urban gardens, bees can be hard to find and since we get no wind, there needs to be a way to pollinate.  I wrote a post about it here.



This is the ears'  silk that will need pollinating:





We have turnips the size of our heads.



Beets can barely fit in my hand.



Carrots are ready to pick.



Onions are producing humongous flowers that are too pretty to cut.





Beans come in such abundance that they're starting to haunt our dreams



Strawberries are turning from flowers to berry in the blink of an eye.




And pretty flowering vines are trying to devour the house.

Saving Water (and Money) With Permaculture in My Los Angeles Urban Farm

Here are the pros and cons of having an organic permaculture vegetable garden in your backyard:

PROS:

• saves water
• makes you feel giddy about saving water (in case you're one of us dorks that get giddy about that stuff)
• saves money on water bill, duh.
• giving vegetables to your neighbors results in 63.2% decline in risks of being tackled to the ground resulting in broken ribs and ensuing doctors and lawyers bills. 
• turns your garden into a heaven for bees.
• gives you interesting things to look at when you're bored/procrastinating.
• lifts your mood and spirit. Grounds you. 
• makes you feel connected to nature, humanity and yourself.
• saves money on groceries. In the Spring and summer of 2017, we bought very little fruits and vegetables and we definitely produced more than we could consume.
• reduces Farm to Table distance to nothing. Many of the things we grow never make it to the table. I'd say it is more Farm to Mouth at our house. That means no transportation, no refrigeration (smaller carbon footprint), no loss of nutritional value + makes you feel like hipsters
• helps you stay physically active in ways that sure beat going to the gym.
• gives you and your significant other something safe, non-fattening and inexpensive to indulge in.
• but mostly, saves water. That was the original goal and despite producing hundreds of pounds of vegetables over the last two years, we keep saving water.  Here is my proof: 

CONS

• becomes hard to keep up and ingest an ungodly amount of fruits and vegetables.

Winter and Fall Planting in Southern California

The end of the growing season means the start of the next one. We keep telling ourselves that we should let the beds 'rest.' We should do a cover crop. Only the moment we see a bit of bare earth we have to plant stuff.  So here it goes.

I am trying to convert the tiny bit of grass we still have near the pool into a wild flower meadow. I planted tons of seeds. I mean TONS. Well, really a few tiny bags, but you know what I mean.

And this is all that grew. I don't know what it is. Yet.


I planted a few purple fingerling potatoes and those adorable little leaves came out.

By the way, Whole Foods was selling 3 bags, one pound each of multi color organic potatoes. I put them into a dark cabinet next to a few onions and they all urgently germinated. I think that buying seed potatoes, a few scrawny sad looking wrinkled things for $6.99 is the con of the century when a single organic potato out of the cuppboard can be sliced and planted ten times over.

But I digress. Here is our first little purple potato leaves. Awww ....


This is them a few weeks later. No longer purple.



November is the perfect time to plant lettuce mixes. If you plant seeds too early then the top soil dries off too fast for the seedlings to survive, but in the cool months they do very well.

I plant it into a small patch not far from the kitchen (in the same bed where I plant my herbs). In a month or less, I'll clip them straight into my plate.  I mulch a lot so they hardly need any washing.



Once upon a time, I planted innocent strawberry plants in a well-defined raised bed. Now the strawberries have taken over and replanted themselves with no regard for the beds. I'll have to do something about it no doubt or they'll creep into MY bed soon.

A Salad Bowl in the Garden

Here is a genius idea: instead of planting heads of lettuce, just scatter lettuce mix and less than three weeks later (depending on the season) you get this:



All you need to do then is clip the lettuce as needed when it's time to make a salad.  The leaves are so young that they have no time to fill with bugs or dirt. Washing them is therefore easier and uses up far less water. Best thing is, as soon as you cut, the lettuce carpet starts growing again.

Like a beard, but edible.

This genius idea I got from my brother in law (So I guess he's the genius, not me). It's likely that you already know this and that what is genius to me is common sense to you. But as I explained earlier, I am new to this gardening thing.

Here, I happen to have the lettuce seedlings right next to my herbs (thyme, parsley) and my onions. So I can clip everything, I head right into the salad bowl, rinse and dry and voilà!

The Little Watermelon That Could

One of the joys of composting if you are the kind of person who loves surprises in the garden, are the self-planting visitors.  People say not to put seeds in the compost for precisely that reason. But then where would be the fun?

This is the story of a little watermelon that we did not plant and that went on to give us huge juicy watermelons -- four in total. One, and then after we harvested it, three more.

This little guy planted itself at the foot of a small grapefruit tree and in the hottest, sunniest part of the garden, against flagstone, where the temperature must easily reach 110 degrees for months at a time. But no matter, our wee lad was not discouraged.







First flower and a friendly visitor.

First fruit, all fuzzy and tender...


and then starting to grow...



and grow...



and GROW!



The hardest part was to know when to pick. We agonized for days and googled the hell out of it:Was it the stem that shriveled? Was it the size? The spot underneath that should turn yellow or ocre? What was yellow? What was ocre? Was it the proper shade of ocre?

Until a visiting friend of ours, who lives in the country of Vermont, took one look at it and said, "It's ready."

We said, "but how do you know," "but... it's... just... the stem... the color... the hollowness..."

He just bent down and picked it.

And it was perfect.

It's August and Everything Is Juicy

All this year, we planted melons, corn, cucumbers, and watermelons. At first we whined that things were not going fast enough.

Had we planted too early? Our suspicions that we sucked at gardening grew until BAM! Nature knew what to do even if we didn't.

It has been an extraordinary August harvest. We can't keep up with the picking or the eating. Here are a melon, a cob of corn, a couple of cucumbers and a watermelon that are growing so fast that we can see the difference in size from the morning to the evening.

July Is Fruity

This is our best year so far for plums and grapes. We've had tons of rain this year and perhaps this rain is why the growth has been spectacular.  When I was growing up in France, we waited for late summer and even fall for plums and grapes. Here we harvest as early as July.



We painstakingly wrapped each cluster in paper bags as soon as they began to ripen to protect them from birds, squirrels and dirt. It worked!

Until it didn't.

Some of the fruit did not mature evenly. Still delicious and it's nice to outsmart the squirrels for a change (or did they outsmart us? we asked ourselves, as we ate the --literally-- sour grapes.)




So many plums on some of the branches while the other branches remained bare. We think it was due to not enough bees. Next spring we are considering a hive.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Cucumbers but Were Afraid to Ask

For those of you who found this post via google search and are disappointed that this post is, in fact, actually about cucumbers, I invite you to stay anyway. This tedious post about cucurbitacea might be the vegetable equivalent of a cold shower.

**A note of warning to readers who want to know about the cucumber vegetable, this post contains some graphic photos of cucumbers and is filled with cucumber-related language.

Cucumberus Stercus also know as a turd-looking cucumber

Cucumbers are impolite creatures that will grow anywhere if you don't give them something to climb on.

Cucumber can start growing slowly but when they do start they are a little scary.

Here is my husband about to make the rounds to the neighbors' houses to try and give them cucumber. I told him to not think of returning home until the tray is empty.



Oh, no one complained when we offer them tomatoes. Somehow cucumbers are not received with the same level of enthusiasm. So my husband knocks on doors. We see curtains stir but nobody answers.

I'm thinking we could freeze them until Halloween (the cucumbers, not the neighbors) and give to unsuspecting kids. That and a toothbrush.


I tried my hand at pickling cucumbers but that's only kicking the problem down the road: that means months from now I still will have to EAT CUCUMBERS :(((((

The moral of the story:  Do not plant 12 cucumber plants for a family of 4. Plant 2 and even that might even be too much.

July Harvest in Southern California

Almost overnight, our garden has grown a Ratatouille...









Time to get cooking!

Oh wait. we went on a vacation for a week and look what the harvest table looks like now: