California Gardening Guides

In tough times folks start thinking about planting vegetables. As I’m too angry to blog this morning I thought that instead of a rant I’d post a few useful links for Californians on how to start a vegetable garden.

All gardening advice is local. One of the tricky things about California is that we live in a Mediterranean climate and most of the information on what, how and when to plant vegetables is written for places where it snows. So here’s a few links courtesy of our Extension Service that should help you get started with your vegetable garden:

Burpee California Planting Guide

Vegetable Gardening Handbook for Beginners (by friend of the blog Yvonne Savio)

Sacramento Vegetable Planting Guide

UC Master Gardeners of San Mateo & San Francisco Monthy Garden Checklist

San Joaquin Valley Planting Guide

San Diego Vegetable Planting Guide

Happy growing!

The Perfect Crisis Vegetable: Prickly Pear Cactus

Unsurprisingly, during this crisis, the Root Simple inbox and phone line has come alive again with questions about growing vegetables. My response is always the same. Grow the stuff that’s easy to grow in your climate. To that I’d add that you should consider edible perennials.

In our climate the king of edible perennials is the prickly pear cactus (Opuntia ficus-indica, but note that there are many other edible Opuntia varieties). The young pads (nopales in Spanish) are coming into season right now. The fruit, called tunas, are ready in the fall.

With prickly pear cactus you get a vegetable and a fruit in one easy to grow package. It’s so easy to grow that your problem will be keeping it from taking over your entire garden and your neighbor’s garden. Plant things like broccoli and carrots and, depending on your soil and experience level as a gardener, you’re in for a lot more work and, likely, disappointment. Trust me, I’ve killed a lot of vegetables in the past twenty years. I’ve never once killed a prickly pear cactus.

Luther Burbank’s allegedly spineless prickly pear.

We have one specimen that came with the house and another that I picked up a few years ago: Luther Burbank’s spineless variety that, well, isn’t actually spineless.

My favorite method for preparing and eating the pads is to scrape them with a knife to remove the spines (you don’t need to peel the skin off). I then chop and boil the pads for five minutes to reduce the sliminess. Then I fry the pads in a pan with onions. You can also just chop the pads and eat them raw in a salsa with tomatoes, onions and hot peppers.

Some other resources from our blog for what to do with prickly pear fruit:

A prickly pear fruit cocktail

Juicing prickly pear fruit

Prickly pear jam recipe

If you’re not in our warm and dry-ish region a good resource for other edible perennials is Eric Toensmeier’s book Edible Perennial Vegetable Gardening.

Can’t grow prickly pear? Tell us your favorite easy to grow edible perennial in the comments!

Plant Vegetables!

I’m trying to put things in perspective this morning. I have a lot of anxiety about family members in denial and my own fears about the response to COVID-19 in this failed state we live in. That said, what we’re going through is nothing compared to what other people in this world have to deal with now in Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria to name just a few troubled regions. We have the luxury of sheltering in place rather than the horrors of life as a refugee.

But a run on our supermarkets has me thinking that I need to walk back on one of my worst blog posts, “Homesteading Heresy: On Giving Up Vegetable Gardening,” in which I announced that I was no longer planting vegetables. While we have plenty of avocados and eggs it would be nice to have some greens other than volunteer nasturtium and nettles. I had two seasons of failed vegetable gardening but that should have prompted a redoubled effort rather than the defeatism that I offered. I’ve taken the step of deleting that post. And Kelly planted some vegetables yesterday.

Stay safe and check in on your neighbors. Share your harvest.

Straw Bale Gardening Update

I think I’ve put a name to an all to common gardening experience. I’ve got what I shall, from now on, refer to as Tomato Disappointment Syndrome or TDS for short. TDS recognizes a unspoken reality of vegetable gardening: that for every lush and productive tomato plant there exists at least ten spindly, diseased specimens hiding in backyards.

Without careful soil stewardship, just the right amount of water and diligence about not growing tomatoes in the same place every year TDS will visit your household. Since I’ve had tomato disease problems for years I decided to grow them in straw bales this season as I did, successfully, back in 2013.

Unfortunately, my straw bale tomatoes succumbed to one of three possible problems:

  • Improperly conditioned bale. I may not have spent enough time adding nitrogen to the bale.
  • Root-bound seedlings.
  • Herbicides in the straw.

I’m leaning towards a lack of nitrogen caused by not following bale conditioning instructions carefully. Herbicides in the bale are also possible or some combination of all three of the above factors.

Allow me to also theorize, building on the foundation of TDS, that success in vegetable gardening is inversely related to one’s propensity to brag, write or boast about vegetable gardening on, say, a blog or social media account. Perhaps I should just shut up and take care of the soil or pay more attention to my bale conditioning efforts and cease the grandstanding.

Make Magazine: Online and Free

Update: It appears that the archive was taken down at the request of the magazine shortly after I wrote this post. Thanks Sean for letting me know!

I was sorry to hear that Make Magazine and its parent company Maker Media are calling it quits. Founder Dale Dougherty promises to bring the concept back at some future date but until that time there’s some good news. You can access all issues of Make Magazine for free at Archive.org.
An article in Tech Crunch quotes Dougherty,

“We’re trying to keep the servers running” Dougherty tells me. “I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We’re not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I’m committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program.” The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.

[Update 6/9/19: Dougherty tells me he’s been overwhelmed by the support shown by the Maker community. For now, licensed Maker Faire events around the world will proceed as planned. Dougherty also says he’s aware of Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey’s interest in funding the company, and a GoFundMe page started for it.]

I wrote an article on drip irrigation for Issue 18 and have to say that it was a pleasure to work with the Make editorial team. Unlike other publications I’ve written for, the editors at Make knew a lot about the technical details of the subject matter and worked hard to ensure accuracy.

Speaking of technical details, the only thing I’d change if I wrote that article again is that I would recommend 1/2 inch drip irrigation tubing instead of 1/4 inch in the interest of keeping things simple and reducing the need for multiple fitting sizes. I stand by the rest of my irrigation pontifications.