Part 3: How and What to Plant

Once your garden beds are ready… in April (or earlier)… it’s time to plant them! Many wonderful crops love the cold nights of late winter and spring and will produce wonderfully at this time of year. In fact, just about anything can be transplanted at this point except tropicals like basil, peppers, tomatoes and eggplants which will need some protection against potential frost or heavy rains (basil is incredibly sensitive to going below 40 degrees or having wet leaves for prolonged periods). Crops that do great now are all the leafy greens, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, potatoes, peas, beets, carrots, many herbs, onions (they’ll be smaller than fall planted onions), and many more.

We highly recommend transplanting your vegetables into your garden. This allows you to baby them as seedlings on your window sill or in a hoop house or cold frame. But  mostly, your transplants will spend only half their life in your garden (compared with all of the life of direct seeded crops) and therefore will have less time that they are exposed to pests and diseases. Transplants give stronger growth with fewer problems, plus you can grow more sequential crops with transplants since each crop spends less time in the ground than something that is direct seeded. In our experience you can grow anything from transplants!

If you don’t grow your own vegetables from seed, there are some very specific recommendations for where to buy your nursery starts. Big Box stores buy their nursery starts mainly from giant nurseries outside the county. These big nurseries grow the basic varieties that usually are not well adapted to our Sonoma County climate, but their names are easily recognizable to us consumers. The prime example is the ubiquitous Black Beauty Eggplant found at most nurseries in this county. This eggplant variety needs more heat and day length than you can get in this county unless it’s a particularly hot summer and you live in the sweltering Cloverdale or Geyserville areas. This eggplant is best suited to the central valley and Imperial Valley deserts!

Likewise, heat loving brandywine tomatoes do great in hot summers in Santa Rosa or Windsor or Healdsburg, but a brandywine in Sebastopol or another cool climate is often a real challenge (like the past two colder-than-usual summers we’ve had). Also take note that some of the nursery plants sold at Farmers’ Markets are sold by local nurserymen, not farmers. While it’s great to support these local nurserymen, not all of them grow their own nursery starts to harvest and fruition and therefore they may not know the qualities and appropriateness of the variety to our Sonoma county climate and local micro climates. But a farmer selling his or her own nursery starts is selling varieties that have been proven to work in their farm’s climate and they can tell you a whole lot more about the variety’s peculiarities, needs and appropriateness!

In one bit of Tomato advice… if you’re looking for a super early, full size tomato, look for russian varieties with the mention of “early” or “cold tolerant” in their description – many of these have performed exceptionally well for us year after year allowing us to bring full sized, field grown, heirloom tomatoes to market 6 or 7 weeks prior to other farmers! Pair these early tomatoes with some standard mid/late season tomatoes and enjoy fresh tomatoes from your yard starting in early summer and lasting deep into autumn. We transplant our early Russian varieties into the fields in late March and our regular tomato varieties in late April and May.

It is important to approach your garden as a living, breathing continuum, where plants are continually being harvested and transplanted. Many gardeners only transplant once in the late spring and harvest those plants until they’re done. But if you start early in March (or never stop in the fall/winter) you can continually produce healthy food from your own garden. For instance, a new planting of 6 to 10 lettuce plants every 3 to 4 weeks can provide a few salads per week for a family all year long! Likewise, follow a crop of February sown peas that get harvested in June with a July planting of broccoli to harvest in September followed by beets transplanted in September for harvest in February, etc.

In addition to sequential planting, also try Companion Planting. Traditional companion planting is often based on chemical interactions between various plants, but there are other interactions to be aware of (and take advantage of) as well. For instance, we love to transplant lettuce plants in between our broccoli plants (transplant them all at the same time with the standard spacings, 16” to 20” for broccoli and 6” to 8” for lettuce plants). We get twice the crop from the same area; the broccoli protects the lettuces from hot sun and wind making it more tender and tasty; the salad helps keep the broccoli weed free and maintains soil moisture by shading the soil more than the broccoli; the lettuce will harvest first before the broccoli fills out and covers all the soil with its shade. What makes them great companions is that both their root zones and foliage zones occupy different spaces thereby making them great companions rather than competitors!

Lastly, rather than mentioning front yard gardens just in passing, I’m going to make a plug for them: Front yard gardens make a bold and beautiful statement about your values. Rather than lawns or xeriscaping, think about local  food production – right in your own front yard. Let your neighbors see what you’re doing. Share your techniques with them and learn from their experiences. Don’t hide your food in the backyard, show your children that you value the food you grow. Plant it in the front yard where you walk past or through it multiple times a day to and from school and every other time you step out your front door to go somewhere! Share in your bounty with your neighbors. Host weekend produce exchanges to share extra vegetables between all the gardeners in your neighborhood. Make your food production visible and celebrate it! And besides… it’s a lot easier to put delivered compost on your front yard garden beds than it is to wheelbarrow it all the way around to your backyard!

If you missed the other parts of  “Take it from the Farmer…. Growing Tips for a Beautiful Garden”:

Part I click here

Part II click here

(c) 2011 Paul Kaiser

Paul Kaiser is a leader in ecological agriculture who was recently recognized with an international award for his work in biodiversity and pollinator conservation on his farm, Singing Frogs Farm. Paul served in the Peace Corps in The Gambia, West Africa. He worked with several rural agrarian communities to develop sustainable land use management systems, turning degraded lands into economically viable and biologically diverse and resilient farmland. Since then Paul has received dual Masters Degrees in Natural Resources Management and Sustainable Development from the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica and the American University in Washington D.C. In the last five years, Paul and his wife Elizabeth, have married sustainable land management with local food production at their biodiverse and family friendly  Singing Frogs Farm in Sebastopol.

Part II: Building Healthy Soil

When I was a child, my image of starting a new garden each spring included the back breaking work of turning over the soil with a shovel or garden fork to get rid of the weeds and loosen the soil. Of course, this job was usually hoisted on me by my parents since it IS back-breaking work! However, one of the easiest ways to start a garden or even revive a garden from a prior year is actually quite painless – sheet composting or sheet mulching (there IS a slight difference). You can ask just about any retail shop or grocer for their used, un-waxed cardboard boxes if you don’t have any at home. Rather than forking up your weeds and soil, just cover the weeds with a layer (or two) of cardboard and then cover the cardboard with fresh compost or mulch! (You can either remove the packing slips and tape from the cardboard before laying it out in your garden or you can remove them later in the summer when the cardboard has decomposed and the tape surfaces as you tend your garden).

The cheapest method is sheet mulching: lay out the cardboard and place some mulch (straw, wet leaves, grass clippings) on it to hold it down. Then, after 2 to 3 months of weed suppression and decomposition you can cut holes in the decomposed cardboard and plant your vegetables into your native soil. However, Sheet Mulching such as this is neither the easiest way nor the best way to start your garden.

We prefer Sheet Composting! Buy your compost by the yard, and cover your sheets of cardboard with 3 to 6 inches of compost instead of mulch! Then, after watering the compost (or letting the rain do that work for you) and waiting a few days to a week (or more if your compost is particularly “hot,” stinky and active) you can transplant your vegetable starts (or sow your seeds) directly into the compost without puncturing the layer(s) of cardboard! Over time (a few months) the cardboard will decompose and the plant roots will dig deep down into your native soil – as will the earthworms come up into the compost helping to mix your soil and compost together!Make sure you use a compost that is recommended for filling raised beds and not solely as a soil amendment (ie: a compost that can be planted directly into, such as Sonoma Compost’s “Mallard Plus”). Sheet Composting is not only easier work than Sheet Mulching, but can be done more quickly and immediately, and will result in much better weed suppression as well as much healthier vegetable plants and crops due to the abundant compost (though it does cost more money to purchase the compost)!

If you choose to use the Sheet Composting technique or have some raised beds to fill, buy your compost by the yard – or better yet, have it delivered! We’ve tried Grab ‘n Grow and Wheeler Zamaroni for buying compost by the yard and both of them failed us (and we’re not the only farmers who consistently report this). They were nutrient poor and $40 to $80 per yard. However, we swear by Sonoma Compost’s various compost blends made almost entirely from local, Sonoma County ingredients (at only $20 per yard), though you’ll have to live with the little bits of plastic garbage in the compost. Or, you can go the expensive route and buy bagged compost blends from a nursery that usually come from Mendocino or Humboldt and are typically very good but nutrient levels can vary greatly between brands and even within brands from bag to bag.

Whatever you choose, it should be very dark in color (almost black) and should have a very strong aroma of rich, fresh, compost. The lighter colored soil amendments typically use lava rock (from Lake County mines) or peat or sphagnum moss (very environmentally bad products to purchase) as cheap fillers which give good soil body but dilute the available nutrients. (Lava rock is a very, very long-term nutrient source of minor importance, but it is used too frequently.)

We also recommend the use of your chickens (or your neighbor’s chickens) to clear ground of all weeds and weed seeds for gardening space! But that’s a more involved process fraught with peril and fun! Fence them in where you wish your garden to be and they will clear it for you, of weeds, seeds and insects!

To be continued soon with:

Part 3….. How and What to Plant

If you missed “Take it from the Farmer…. Growing Tips for a Beautiful Garden, Part I” click here.

(c) 2011 Paul Kaiser

Paul Kaiser is a leader in ecological agriculture who was recently recognized with an international award for his work in biodiversity and pollinator conservation on his farm, Singing Frogs Farm. Paul served in the Peace Corps in The Gambia, West Africa. He worked with several rural agrarian communities to develop sustainable land use management systems, turning degraded lands into economically viable and biologically diverse and resilient farmland. Since then Paul has received dual Masters Degrees in Natural Resources Management and Sustainable Development from the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica and the American University in Washington D.C. In the last five years, Paul and his wife Elizabeth, have married sustainable land management with local food production at their biodiverse and family friendly  Singing Frogs Farm in Sebastopol.