Planting the vegetable garden and wildlife

Every season that I put in a new crop I mulch the bed, stake the starters, lay a few sticks across the bed to keep out any cats and look at my new beautiful bed with awe.

This month has been a different story.

My cat is a house cat, because cats threaten and kill wildlife. I welcome wildlife on my property. I share figs, grapes, loquats, and plums with squirrels and many varieties of birds. Possums come through here but do no damage and the raccoons wash their hands in my water features which can make it a little muddy, but they do no damage. Many birds are nesting right now and there is a army of cats that belong to neighbors (or no) that is patrolling our neighborhood. I used to tell them that they were welcome to sit in the sun in my yard, but no more. This year they took advantage of my good spirit.

I didn't start planting my heat loving vegetables until almost two weeks ago. I started with peppers, because even though we were still getting this unusual cold, they always seem to be forgiving of the weather. So, the long pepper bed was planted with the Habaneros, Jalapenos, Poblano, Anaheim, all the way down the hotness scale to Sweet Bell's or California Wonder Bell peppers.

Oh, I always love my pepper bed. It is a raised bed so I am able to crowd them in together a little and knowing the growth habits of the different varieties allows me to know who needs a little more room. I am a pepper queen, as they always do so well. They will keep producing until sometime after Thanksgiving or after Christmas in a mild weather year.

Of course they are planted with organic everything - my own compost and mulch (leaves and compost that isn't as broken down). We do have good soil to start with, river bottom soil as the river is just about a mile away. And they like getting only partial day full sun, but late afternoon shade in our hot California summers.

Back to the kicker!
After I plant a new bed I just enjoy watching it, but the next morning I went out to look at my beautiful bed and found a place where digging had occurred, the mulch was piled in an unusual pile. Immediately upon inspection I found the culprit was a cat. Cat feces are not healthy in an edible garden or any garden. Many people try: Cayenne pepper (works until the first rain washes it away) or mothballs (toxic), wiring up a low-current (non-lethal) fence or motion sensor water gun (very expensive). Cats HATE to poop in anything that is wet or step on anything that sticks to or pokes their feet, so some people use chicken wire. My neighbor Cindy resorted to chicken wire. The problem is you can't keep adding mulch or you are just covering the chicken wire and then it is useless and when your plants grow up you can't take the chicken wire out of the bed for the rest of the season.

My method of laying a few branches (saved from pruning) like "pick up sticks", did not work. So I decided to make the bed indestructible to cats. It looks like one of those torture beds seen in films from ancient times. No cat is going to want to come near my peppers anymore. Of course, once the plants fill out I can remove the weapons of torture. Unfortunately is does not look like a perfect Sunset Magazine bed, but it is a real way to keep your beds from becoming contaminated with cat poop!

For some reason it is hard to see the vertical sticks sticking up all over the bed. It is more evident on my paste tomato bed filled with Amish paste and Sausage paste tomatoes which a I planted a couple days after the peppers.

The tomato cage helps to keep them out too. It is hard to see the cage, but it is homemade (out of heavy wire fencing with 6" openings) and has been used for more than 20 years. So, this was an easier bed to secure. Here is a close-up below of the mass of upright sticks!

It also helps to have lots and lots of sticks/stakes. They are useful for all kinds of things in the garden, from this deterring cats use, to staking and supporting new starts, supporting plants laden with heavy fruit, to becoming the uprights for shade cloths (I just use a staple gun to hold the shade cloth to the stakes) during different times when a plant maybe stressed from the sun.

2011 May Day East Sac Garden Tour - for gardeners by gardeners

We had a gorgeous day for a garden tour, yet it did feel warm around noon. We chose an earlier date for the tour this year to highlight different gardens, and also different plants that are in their best form. We showed 7 East Sacramento Gardens. All these gardens are cared for by their owners with love and dedication. The love and hard work showed in the beauty we were able to observe.

We started out at Nina's with her unique sustainable gardens and orchard.

Next we visited Anita's fantastic rose gardens and other perennials. The senses were also filled with the wonderful smells.

Cindy's gardens were next with her rose arbor and perennials. Her garden also demonstrates cooperation as she has a vegetable garden on her neighbor's back property.

Kim's gardens were filled with wonderful plant diversity focusing on shape, form and color. Always changing and interesting.

Then we visited my gardens. Here is a front yard bed with various perennials in a shady bed.

Next were Dave's special garden rooms. We are leaving one garden room and entering another in this photo.

And lastly we visited Noelle's pretty gardens.

The tour was a real success. We all had fun visiting and sharing and we all gained information and ideas to incorporate into our knowledge base and possibly our gardens along the way.

It is April already!!!

It seems quite strange to just now be getting out into the garden this year! I had a four month job developing a huge website with no time for fun free-time activities, let alone for the garden or normal chores. So, here I am checking out my yard to see how my precious plants have survived this very long cold and hard winter.

Many plants are bursting out with new life. Yea! We have had a couple gorgeous days and the honey bees are very busy in my gardens. I sure wish everything had been pruned before this. I am doing some catch-up pruning of vines and other over-due chores.

A few invaders have decided to take over where my mulch has been utilized by the microherd and is almost showing the soil now. Well it would be showing soil if the oxalis and cleavers hadn't filled in these places. So, I have spent 5 hours over a few days earlier in the week pulling out these two invaders who thought they were 'home free' in my gardens. No, it is not gone, not by a long shot, but several beds are looking good enough to get another layer of mulch for this season or even the year depending on sun exposure and how fast it breaks down.

Yesterday, my friend Nina gave me a bunch of boysenberries canes ready to plant; that were in need of being planted soon. So, today, instead of continuing my battle with the invaders in fully developed beds, I developed a new berry bed. I had been thinking about starting this bed for the last year. This bed is on the west side of the yard and is next to the raspberry bed. The soil is nice in this new bed which hadn't grown anything productive for years. Many years ago it used to be my main vegetable garden; now abandoned for the wooden raised vegetable beds I built towards the back of my property. These beds have lasted for 25 years. This year I will need to replace a board or two on a couple of them, but the redwood has held up quite well over the years.

Back to the boysenberries. So, I got 4 canes planted before it was time to call it quits today. Tomorrow the rest will be planted and I will come up with a structure to support the new plants. My friend Kim was such a help today, she is a hard worker. Working with a buddy is very inspirational. The time flies by that way.

Ever wonder why gardeners are always such a happy group??? Well, there is a bacteria in the soil that actually generates Serotonin in our brains. It is said that this works better than Prozac and we have all heard about a town where the citizens went on Prozac to be happy.  So one of the best things about gardening is the concept of being sustainable by growing food, having a beautiful garden bed full of life, getting some good exercise and vitamin D and a good shot of Serotonin that makes us happy. What else could we need?

I will add boysenberry pictures tomorrow, as it is pitch black now.

PEPPERS in JANUARY ?

Did I mention that this picture was taken in 2011???  or was it December 31 at 9pm???

Yes, your thinking is correct. These peppers were just picked from the vine in my raised bed full of peppers at the New Year! We have had more than our share of cold weather this winter. Lots of nights down in the 20's. Some winters we have no actual freeze nights!  I remember one year about (maybe 15 yrs ago) when we had such a bad freeze (18 degrees) that all my citrus fruit on my two lemon trees and one grapefruit tree froze and then spoiled. That was a very sad year indeed!
Okay back to peppers. In the middle of this January we picked a few more nice red peppers too and they were great!
You can see I gutted the medium hot long pepper that looks like an Anaheim pepper, yet this one is one of those whose name I cannot remember without going out and reading the tag. I believe it is hotter than Anaheims though.
Here is the next step: Ha! Chopped!

Now to make something wonderful from these beautiful peppers!

This is the vegetable side of a fantastic pasta! As you can see, it includes leeks, carrots, green garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers of course, a tiny bit of olive oil and some tomato paste, I see I put in fresh rosemary and probably celery seed, freshly dried oregano and basil from the garden. I can almost smell it cooking! And to top it off, I served it with homemade sourdough whole wheat seed bread.

This is my own recipe that I have improved over time and I can tell you that it is great! So we brought in the NEW YEAR with wonderful fresh and healthy homemade food, including vegetables and herbs from the garden!  Happy New Year to all of you!

What's growing in winter?

December in the garden includes onions, leeks, garlic, swiss chard (of course), my new bed of potatoes and my full long bed of sweet and chili peppers.  I never got broccoli or other brassicas planted in fall (of course I was out of the country much of the time).

Sometime near the end of November I went out with a huge basket and harvested all the basil late at night before we were to get a hard freeze. I also harvest lots of my beautiful red peppers that cold dark night. Fresh pesto in winter is very special. We had a lot of pesto/pepper pasta dinners around that time.

The most amazing thing is that it is December 30th and I have plants full of peppers. Unbelievable, especially because we had a streak of cold weather that we don't see very often in Sacramento California. We also have had quite a lot of rain in the last two months. Of course the rain (and snow in the mountains) is really really good since we just came out of a couple dry years.

Very soon now, it will be time to set up my seed trays and start seed for early spring planting. The solar panels on the greenhouse will generate the energy to run the heat pad and the grow lights. Now that Christmas is over, it is the time to lay out my garden plan and decide what seeds to start. My freezer has two very large jars filled with seeds waiting to be chosen this year. Living on a city lot, there are limits to the space I have available for planting. Of course I use almost every patch of ground to grow something. So, within the next couple weeks our spring seed choices will be posted.