Information on Growing Vegetables

UC Davis has some great resources for growing vegetables. You can find information on specific crops, pests, compost, diseases, irrigation and much more more! Lots of it is in Spanish as well. There are many publications you can download for free.

Flower beds

I shop at a nursery like others shop at the grocery store perhaps, throwing pretty and interesting plants in to my cart with no grand plan or scheme about where they're going once I get home. I have learned to never, well hardly ever, buy one of anything. Instead I buy odd numbers of some new plant, 3 or 5 or 7 typically.

I'm trying to stick to a very rough color scheme for my backyard flower border. It's mainly pink and purple and white, with some yellow thrown in here and there because I already had these day lillies and coreopsis and didn't want to just throw them away.

This weekend I cruised the nursery, a bit like a hungry person goes grocery shopping. It was a beautiful day, just right for planting some new stuff and I wasn't quite trusting enough to start the vegetable garden going, although I've often enough planted tomatoes and peppers and such in March. But the storms have been more severe than normal and I don't want things getting trampled by the rain. So I thought flowers a safer bet somehow. I tried a new nursery. They had some fantastically interesting plants and cute displays but the basics, for me, like labeling things as perennial versus annual were missing. And there were some of what I consider basic plants missing. I'm guessing this means they are catering to someone even more ignorant than myself--not a good sign!

I picked up some gorgeous things but I'm going to have to go look at the labels to see what I ended up with that was new. Some cosmos and candytuft were the knowns, and then a handful of new things. The flower bed definitely needed filling and this just about did the trick I think. Pretty soon the daisies and coreopsis and penstemmon and lavender will be bursting out and filling in even more.

Today it rained a bit in the afternoon, perfect timing for the new plants I think, giving them a nice settling in drink after a warmish morning.

Recognizing plants

I had just read an entry about lambs quarters over on Veggie Gardening Tips and was wondering what they actually looked like, so I went to Google and clicked on images and searched. Found this great page of images of all kinds of herbs and plants.

Brussels Sprouts

Calling all recipes for Brussels Sprouts!

They took forever it seemed, but my plants all have knobby little Brussels Sprouts growing up the stem. If you've never seen sprouts on the plant, it's something. I'll try remember to go out and take a picture tomorrow if it's not pouring down rain. The sprouts look like some weird mutation growing up the stem, on the top of which are a few bundled leaves that look a bit like a cabbage, but looser.

I've had many people look at me with strange looks when I confessed to growing Brussels Sprouts. (And I keep wanting to type brussel sprouts, without the S but I'm pretty sure the S is supposed to be there.) Anyway, the general look of amazement and puzzlement is generally followed by something akin to "And you're growing these why?"

I'm growing them because I was looking for plants suitable for my first winter vegetable garden. The broccoli did fantastic and is a definite repeat. The cauliflower grew beautifully but the snails invaded and ruined my appetite for them. The sprouts look good--but the last time I tried to cook them I got raised eyebrows at the dinner table. My girls are pretty good at tasting about anything. One tasted and stopped at that. The other tasted and ate them because she didn't want to hurt my feelings. I think I steamed them and then tossed them in butter and sauteed them a bit.

So now I've grown them--but need to learn to cook them in some palatable fashion. They are quite pretty!

Fallen Fruit

Fallen Fruit - I think I've posted about this before but saw it on the Yahoo Picks and was reminded of it again. They've mapped out where fruit is available in their neighborhood, either on public lands or hanging over into public lands. I know that when my trees are in full production mode (in a good year) I give away bags of fruit to friends and neighbors. Even then, I can barely keep up with the apples in particular. Although my fruit is all in my backyard and hence inaccessible, this almost makes me want o plant something out front, except we don't get much foot traffic by here. It would be cool if the cities organized to use the public land to help feed the hungry and homeless. So much could be done!

Snails and Cauliflower

I have a confession. I hate and detest and despise snails. My children think it's funny. When I was little, I had a morbid fear of them and if I saw one, I would stand and scream, staring at it intently. I'd somehow gotten it into my head that when you weren't looking at them, they could actually move very quickly and only moved slowly when they were being watched. An aversion to snails is bad enough but when you live in Oregon where I grew up, there are a lot of snails to watch out for! And slugs. I hate those too but we don't get them down here in California like we did up there. Still, the snails find me and while I don't have the morbid fear of them I used to, I still hate them: hate touching them, squashing them, and anything else to do with them. I have, in fact, been tempted to get chickens merely because I heard they'll eat snails! Of course, they'd probably eat all my vegetable garden as well!

But back to the cauliflower... I grew these great gorgeous heads. It's the first year I've attempted cauliflower. But when I cut the head off the stalk I saw millions of snails embedded up inside the head of cauliflower, between all the gaps. Okay, maybe more like 20 or 30. But lots! I swear they were too big to get out. I think they crawled up inside when they were small and were now trapped. And I really lost my appetite for cauliflower seeing them all over it.

So I found some pet-safe snail bait and will be sprinkling that around I guess. I try to keep the garden as organic as I can easily, but given my extreme inability to touch snails I think I'm reduced to bait. Unless someone out there has some alternate ideas that work. The beer in the pie pan didn't catch but 3 or 4 when I tried that earlier. What a waste of a good beer!