358 Fall Garden Prep. The Catalina Cherry.

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358 Fall Planting Tips TRANSCRIPT FULL

Farmer Fred    

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Farmer Fred 

Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener, or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.

FALL PLANTING TIPS, Pt. 1

Farmer Fred

Have you done the necessary work to have a thriving fall vegetable garden? You might know which crops you’ll be planting, but what about the soil? What have you done to give those new plants a great start? We talk with Sacramento County Master Gardener Gail Pothour about how they prepare the vegetable gardens for fall planting at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. And also how they are thwarting future vegetable pests. And at the Fair Oaks Vegetable Center, they will be trying out some interesting new vegetables, as well. Gail has the details. Also, we find out more about a cherry, that is really best left for the birds. It is a California native shrub or tree, the Catalina cherry.

We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let’s go!

Farmer Fred

We're here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. It's a September Open Garden day on this Saturday, and we are with Sacramento County Master Gardener Gail Pothour. Gail works here in the vegetable section where they're revamping and starting to do fall planting. And we're going to find out all about the plants they're putting in and how they're doing it for the cool season. It’s cool season vegetables here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. But, Gail, you do have this one pepper, a warm weather sweet pepper, that looks like it's terribly diseased, but it's not.

Gail Pothour

No, we do still have our sweet peppers in. They're producing really well now that the heat has sort of subsided. So we'll be taking those out shortly. But the one you're referring to is called Candy Cane Chocolate Cherry sweet pepper. And it has this variegated foliage that I think is actually quite attractive. So it would be pretty in an edible landscape. I would think you could use it as a little shrub. It's green with this cream variegation on it. And at the first couple of Open Gardens we had, everyone was saying, “oh my gosh, what's wrong with that pepper? It's diseased”. So I put up a sign that said, it looks like it might be diseased, but it's not. It has variegated foliage. And the pepper is kind of small. I'm going to say maybe three or four inches long, a little bit narrow. And the fruit starts out green with stripes and it ends up red with kind of brown stripes on it. It's thin skinned, so it's not a thick sweet pepper.

Farmer Fred

So the fruit is variegated as well. Right.

Gail Pothour

 Yeah, it is. And I think it's very attractive. And I grew it at home last year and really liked it. It was prolific. And so we've grown it again this year out at the Hort Center.  And as I say, it got a lot of attention because people thought it was having problems. So I also want to mention that because of the variegated foliage, it doesn't have as much chlorophyll in it. So the white parts of the variegation tend to maybe burn a little bit in our heat. So we do have shade over it to kind of keep it from burning.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, the leaf variegation is interesting, it's like splotches of cream color with a medium green and some dark green leaves. And the fruit looks like it changes color, too, from a yellow-green to, what is that, a deep red or a purple?

Gail Pothour

It goes kind of reddish brown with little darker stripes, kind of brownish stripes. I really like it. And I like things that are a little unusual looking, and this definitely is. But it's a good pepper. As I say, it's not thick-walled. It's thin. But... It doesn't have very many seeds, as I recall, when I was cooking with it. So, yeah, it's a nice variety, I think.

Farmer Fred

Candy Cane Chocolate Cherry sweet pepper is its exact name. And the fruit is really beautiful. It is small, like you say, about three to four inches. But when you take a look at that foliage, you go, man, the leaves are curling. There's this cream-colored blotching going on.

Gail Pothour

And Green spots, yeah. Green spots. So it looks like it could have some kind of a disease, perhaps. But it's just a variegated foliage.

Farmer Fred

You can't judge a book by its cover.

Gail Pothour

That's right. 

Farmer Fred

All right. Let's move into the fall garden area and yes, we'll move into the shade, too, because even though it's nine o'clock in the morning, it's going to be a warm day here in September. And there are a lot of empty beds here that look like things will be going in.

Gail Pothour

Right. We have taken out, oh, I'd say probably half of the vegetables in our beds. Two of our beds have confirmed nematodes in them, and we have fusarium in probably all of our beds. So we have two beds that we're doing a nematode remediation. So we do fallowing and soil solarization and planting resistant varieties. So in this one bed here, we're solarizing this year. And the other bed, bed number two, we have done solarizing, with a winter cover crop. It's going to be this year. We're going to do a cover crop that is supposed to do a little bit of nematode fumigation. I know a lot of the mustards can do that. There's some research out on different mustards that  release chemicals that kind of fumigate the soil. But we're going to be putting these two beds that have confirmed nematodes with the cover crop that maybe it will help with reducing the population of nematodes. We'll see.

Farmer Fred

I believe it was you that told me that nematodes are very plant-specific.

Gail Pothour

No, fusarium is.

Farmer Fred

 Oh, never mind. 

Gail Pothour

Yeah, verticillium gets on a lot of things. Nematodes get on a lot of things. Fusarium, my understanding in my research, is that it's host specific. So the fusarium that gets on tomatoes, which I say we probably have in most, if not all of our beds,  only affects tomatoes. Basil has its own fusarium and different ones. So yeah, so we're just kind of cautious on what we can grow out here now.

Farmer Fred

Well, it's mid-September and yet you still have the clear plastic on this bed and everything I've ever read about soil solarization, they talk about doing it during the hottest time of the year. Probably from late June through August. How long have you had this plastic on this bed?

Gail Pothour

 It's been on a couple months.

Farmer Fred

That seems like you've killed everything by now.

Gail Pothour

At least in the top 10 inches, maybe. So it'll be coming off, I would assume, at our next workday, probably. The plastic that we use is UV protected. So it holds up better than just a regular painter's plastic or something you could get at a hardware store. So it has held up really well in this heat. Sometimes, if it's a thinner plastic or not UV protected, it'll break apart. And that kind of defeats the purpose because then air gets in and it dries out. You want to keep it moist under the plastic so we do have our drip irrigation lines beneath the plastic that does come on periodically. But it'll come off soon because we're now approaching the cooler part of the year, we hope.

Farmer Fred

Now, on this bed that you've put the plastic on, you have sealed all the edges by tamping down the edges, the perimeter, and then putting dirt on top to keep the plastic in place.  Does having that on for two months with expensive drip lines underneath, does that damage the drip lines?

Gail Pothour

You know, I don't know. I don't think so, because we've done this every year. We've solarized a bed every year for the last 20 years. And it's this original drip line, I believe, in almost all the beds. So I wouldn't think it is harming it. At least there's no evidence of it.

Farmer Fred

 The point of the water, and we talk about this when we talk about soil solarization, that as you're preparing to solarize a bed, you water it very thoroughly. And that helps carry the heat even lower into the soil. How often are you turning on these drip lines while the plastic is on or while the plastic is covering the bed?

Gail Pothour

I think it's on the same irrigation schedule as all of our raised beds. We have one valve for these four beds and another valve for that one. So they come on a couple times a week. And I think for 20 minutes, any longer, and it starts running out the bottom of the bed. But because it doesn't have a separate irrigation timer, it's on the same one that does our regularly irrigated beds.

Farmer Fred

So I'm sure that someone around here has stuck a soil thermometer down there to see what the soil temperature is with this plastic on it for two months.

Gail Pothour

Well, I know Curtis (MG Curtis Parnell) has. He's the one, this is kind of his project. I have not talked to him about it, but generally it would raise it to about 125, 130 degrees. And with the heat we've had this summer, it could have been even higher than that. But it only tends to reduce nematodes and fusarium, which we have as well in this bed in the top foot.

Farmer Fred

Now, you did say that you know that there were nematodes in this bed, and you put the plastic on, and that may do it. But did you say that you're going to do another little insurance move and put a cover crop instead of edible crops in here?

Gail Pothour

Right. The two beds that have confirmed nematodes, this year we're going to put in a cover crop. There is a mustard, it's called mustard trifecta, I'm trying to think, something like that, that we'd like to try. It's got several mustards and they release different - I think it's gluconates - or something. It's something that is released into the soil from these brassicas that acts as a soil fumigant. So we might try that. 

Farmer Fred

[9:17] I'm sure that after listening to this, somebody has the question is, “well, where did you get that special UV treated plastic that you're using that is more resistant to ripping from the sunlight or in the wind?” And if I recall correctly, wasn't this a big roll that's been around here for years that was bought commercially, and that company isn't around anymore?

Gail Pothour

Yeah, (the late Sac. Co. Farm Advisor) Chuck Ingels purchased it 20 years ago in about a 3,000-foot roll. So, we've been using it every year because it holds up. Unfortunately, it's not available to home gardeners. So, we do have a garden note or an environmental note, I guess, on cover cropping and soil solarization that explains the thickness that you should get, the mil. And just know that it isn't going to hold up all summer if it's too thin. But if it's too thick, it also can be detrimental. It doesn't let the sun in as much.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, two months is about the max for doing a soil solarization project.

Gail Pothour

 Yeah, and if you don't have the UV-protected plastic like we do, two months might be a little long. It may start to decompose. But as long as you've done it during the heat of summer, in our hottest months, which were quite a few hot months this year, it should heat up substantially in just four to six weeks.

Farmer Fred

One more note on this. You're putting in a cover crop, and I said, not an edible one, but there are edible cover crops. There is fava beans, for example. The problem, though, with fava beans, and I remember Chuck Ingels, who was the brainchild of the whole Fair Oaks Horticulture Center 30 years ago or so, would say, be sure to chop that fava bean off as it begins to flower because you want to keep the nitrogen in the soil. But if that's not your point, if the point is maybe just to see if it thwarts nematodes or not, it would be to let it fruit and then harvest the fava beans come late winter, early spring.

Gail Pothour

And I've done that at home because I grow a fava bean that's called Crimson Flower. So it has a real pretty rosy red flower. The more common one is a white one. And it's hard to find that. So I grow it and save seed every year. So I do let it go to maturity. Typically for cover crops, you want to cut it down, no matter what the cover crop is, as it's flowering. That's when it's most nutritious. Because then what happens if you let it go to produce the fruit and the seed, some of the nitrogen is used to produce that fruit or seed. But you can still get a lot of benefit from a cover crop that you let go all the way to maturity. So you would cut down the plant, dig it in, turn it under, or use it as mulch or whatever, and you'll still get some organic matter. You'll get some nitrogen. Some of the nitrogen that would have come from the atmosphere that is affixed to the roots would then go, some of that would go to preparing the, I guess, nutrition for the fruit or the seeds, but there will still be some there. So you do get some benefit.

Farmer Fred

I noticed that on your other beds here, you have straw, which is a wonderful mulch and it too, as it breaks down, feeds the soil. Will you be doing the same when you plant the cover crop? And at what point would you put the mulch on? Do you wait for the cover crop seedlings to appear first? Or do you just put a thin mulch on right after you've planted?

Gail Pothour

Yeah, we usually put a thin layer of straw on when we plant it because we do want to keep it from drying out. It's still going to be warm in September and possibly into early October. And so we'll put the straw on, not a real thick layer, perhaps. But yeah, it does a great job of keeping the soil moist, keeping it from drying out and repelling water when we finally get rain. And it does decompose and provide some organic matter. So, yeah, straw is great. It has gotten expensive over the last few years. Straw used to be pretty inexpensive, but now it's getting kind of pricey.

Farmer Fred

And trust us, you want straw. You don't want hay. 

Gail Pothour

 No hay. Hay is the same with straw bale gardening. We also do straw bale gardening out here. And if you use hay, you're going to have a chia pet. I mean, that thing is going to sprout all over. It's more nutritious because it's alfalfa or grass hair or whatever.  But straw is what you want for straw bale gardening or for mulch.

Farmer Fred

 All right. So let's talk about cool season gardening; and actually preparing your soil for the fall garden is great because if you've had summer crops in there, well, that soil is kind of depleted. So in the beds that don't have nematodes where you're not doing soil solarization, how are you preparing the bed after taking out whatever crop was there at the end of summer?

Gail Pothour

We would prepare it just the same way you would in the spring when you're preparing for your summer crop plantng. And so we will add some organic fertilizer, some nitrogen. We use a pelleted chicken manure (Nutri Rich). I think it's 4-3-2, so it's not high in nitrogen. We'll put that in the soil. If we need to add some compost, we will do that. Generally, we add that about every other year because we already have a lot of organic matter in the soil. And you prepare it just like you normally would: rake it, get the clods out. We take the irrigation off and get the bed prepared, and then put the irrigation lines back on. If we're growing things like carrots or root crops that need to have really friable soil, we'll be sure that we use a digging fork to kind of get down and break it up a little bit. We've got pretty sandy soil here, which is probably why we have nematodes. So we don't have that big of an issue. At home, I have a lot of clay, so it's hard for some things to penetrate that. But we'll just prepare like you would your spring garden. We do have a summer cover crop growing right now, buckwheat. It'll come down probably next week. And we'll chop that down, turn it under, and wait a few weeks before we'll plant. You want to give it a chance to decompose a little bit.

Farmer Fred

I think I'm looking at the buckwheat over there with the pinkish flowers, and it is just a pollinator restaurant. It just attracts so many different varieties of pollinators.

Gail Pothour

Exactly. The common buckwheat that's used for a cover crop, it has white flowers. This is a red flower, Japanese type, because this is our Asian bed that we did this summer. And I think it's just more attractive. It's really a pretty flower, but it does have an off smell. To me, it smells like a cat pooped in your bed. 

Farmer Fred

[16:01] That sounds interesting. Well, let's go over there and smell.

Gail Pothour

It’s not a great smell, but the pollinators love it. So they're just swarming all over it. Yeah, it's not a great aroma.

Farmer Fred

And you said it's a Japanese buckwheat. Do you know the variety?

Gail Pothour

I got it from Baker Creek seeds and it's called Rose Red. And it's a Japanese buckwheat. Most buckwheat you're going to get as a cover crop has white flowers.

Farmer Fred

Look at all the bees on there. That's great.

Gail Pothour

They're everywhere. And what I did at home this year after I harvested my potatoes, then I planted buckwheat and I turned it under just last week. So it's good in the summer if you have a bare spot rather than just leave it empty. You grow something like this in the summer. It does need warmth, so you have to grow it in summer.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, this Rose Red buckwheat, besides having sort of a rosy flower on it, the stems are red, too.

Gail Pothour

They are. Not all of them, but most of them are. And this variety seems to have gotten very tall. Sometimes they only get a couple feet tall, but this variety has gotten quite tall. I'd say maybe four feet.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, it likes it here, but it's going to come out.

Gail Pothour

It's going to come out because it will go to seed and then it will become a weed. But it's a good weed. We did have some buckwheat last year we planted. We've had it coming up in our pathways this year. So we let it go to seed.

Farmer Fred

Can I pinch this buckwheat stem and flower off?

Gail Pothour

Yes, you may. But it has little seeds that look like little chocolate chips, you know. Oh. Yeah, it's regular buckwheat. You save the seeds? Yeah, and I do. I save the seeds because the red variety is a little more difficult to find. I grow it and I will let a patch of it go to seed and save it.

Farmer Fred

Okay. I would think the easiest way to do that is as the flowers are dying back, clip off a stem of flower heads and put it in a paper bag.

Gail Pothour

Yeah, you could. What I do is generally I'll section off my bed, say, okay, this front half, I will let them go to seed, whereas I will cut the rest of it down. And I just let it form the seed on the plant itself, and the plant starts to age, and then I cut it down. 

Farmer Fred

Now, for cat poop smell.

Gail Pothour

Yeah. It's not a great smell.

Farmer Fred

Now, you're talking about the smell of the flower.

Gail Pothour

Yeah, the flower. Yeah. It's the aroma of when I go out in my garden and I find that my neighbor's cat has pooped in my bed. That's the smell.

Farmer Fred

To me, it smells more like dog poop.

Gail Pothour

Okay. Well, at any rate, it's not a really nice fragrance. You wouldn't want to have it as cut flowers in your house, perhaps.

Farmer Fred

Or in your car. 

Gail Pothour

But yeah, the pollinators love it. We have little butterflies and bees and flies, and I mean, they’re just all over it.

Farmer Fred

It smells like, hmm, “it’s time to scrape my shoes”.

Gail Pothour

 I know. Yeah, I was just saying, it's not a great aroma.

Farmer Fred

However, you have to really stick your nose in it to really see it or smell it.

Gail Pothour

It's not like walking by and you go, oh, man, what's that smell? No, you've got to put your face down in it. But it's not great.

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FALL PLANTING TIPS, Pt. 2

Farmer Fred

Well, of course, all of this has been a scenic bypass to the question I originally asked is, what are you going to grow this fall here?

Gail Pothour

Well, I know we're going to do a variety of lettuces. We have some that I've started. We have red ones and green ones. We want to do kind of a pretty diagram, you know, stripes of red and green. So we have Pomegranate Crunch and Salanova Red Butter lettuce. And then we have the Devil's Ear, which has kind of a purpley color on it. And then our kind of lime green color is the Australian Yellow variety. And that's what I'm growing now. But we'll have different lettuces. We're going to have Katarina cabbage. It's an All-America selection. It's a great cabbage, small little head. It does really well here. We're doing Hestia Brussels sprouts, which does well here. We've grown it before. I grew it at home last year. It does well. And we've got different chards, and someone's growing a mustard. So we'll do carrots, a lot of different colorful carrots. Don't know if we're going to do garlic this year. We'll have to see if we can find some garlic. But, yeah, it's going to be fun. We'll do maybe a whole bed of peas, different snap peas.

Farmer Fred

Okay, so, and what are you going to use to trellis then?

Gail Pothour

Well, in the past, we've used an old umbrella frame.  Yeah, when the canvas disintegrates,  don't throw that away. You can either open it up just like it was an umbrella and then tie strings to come down and secured to the ground. So, that would be for a tall variety. Or you could collapse it down in kind of a pyramid shape and have them grow that way. And we're going to try something different this year. We have bicycle wheels. 

Farmer Fred

You should have let me know. I would have given you some.

Gail Pothour

I know. This last summer, we did some bush beans. And rather than use bamboo or things that we usually use to kind of support them, we put a row of small bicycle wheels. And so we thought, well, let's get some larger ones. and cable tie them together and support them some way and have a trellis for a piece to grow. I mean, it's kind of fun. You're reusing it, and it's just something different. We like to show different ways to do things.

Farmer Fred

Brussels sprouts, are you starting those from seed or have you already started them? Because I've always heard it's so tough to grow Brussels sprouts here in the hot Central Valley, you need to start them in July.

Gail Pothour

 I did start mine, I want to say it was just around Harvest Day, So early August. And they are currently outside on my compost bin in a cold frame covered in mosquito netting and shade cloth. So and I have an umbrella over it. So they do get some morning sun because they do need some light. But it was protecting them during the heat. So they're doing really well now. And I've got the shade cloth off, still have mosquito netting on to keep the critters off of it. But they're growing really well.

Farmer Fred

 I don't recall hearing you use the words broccoli or cauliflower.

Gail Pothour

That's because I haven't started any yet. We do have one Master Gardener who did start broccoli. It's an All-America Selection called Skytree, I believe. And it was a new winner this last year. And so we're going to try that for the first time. But we don't have anyone starting cauliflower yet. That's kind of a tough one. It's a little more temperamental than a lot of other cool season crops. If the roots get disturbed when you're transplanting it, or if it's too hot or too cool, or it might have insect issues. It may button, which causes it to make a small head prematurely, or it may not make a head at all. And so cauliflower is a little trickier. I have grown Romanesco the last couple years, which some sources say it's a broccoli. Some say it's a cauliflower. Some say it's its own species. So I don't know what it is, but it looks like a green cauliflower with spikes on it.

Farmer Fred

Right, and a lot of side shoots to it.

Gail Pothour

It does, yeah. Yeah. And I've grown it the last couple of years and have had really good luck with it. So it doesn't appear to be as temperamental as regular cauliflower.

Farmer Fred

With the cauliflower, in order to protect the head, do you wrap the leaves around the head?

Gail Pothour

If you're growing a white variety, I think there are some varieties that are self-blanching, but typically on a white variety, you would take the leaves and pull it over the head and maybe tie it to keep it from turning kind