March.
Baseball teams are in Spring Training in Florida and Arizona.
Tomatoes are growing in a protected location with 'bottom heat' so
they can be set out in the garden close to the end of April.
We've
all heard the old saying about March coming in like a lamb and going
out like a lion, or is it coming in like a lion and going out like a
lamb? Whatever the exact saying, it correctly alludes to March as a
more schizophrenic month; certainly a truism as far as gardening
goes. On one hand, we are still tending our winter vegetables,
cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce, while on the other we
need to be planning on what we will soon be eating in summer.
Those
of us on the coast can continue to plant more winter vegetables if we
haven't had our fill of all those cabbage family plants. I usually
find I can grow winter vegetables right on into late May in most
years. Some of the winter veggies will 'oversummer' for us; leeks,
fennel, chard and kale will hold on in most summers although they can
look downright ratty once our June Gloom has left us.
Royal
Purple Pod beans can be planted even in February, certainly by
mid-March, I'll have a row growing. This is the only bean that will
germinate in cold, wet soil and they are worth growing even later. I
have had good production from my Royal Purple Pod beans even when
snails have decimated the leaves, they taste great and turn a deep
green when they are cooked. All other beans, in most years, will
need to be planted no sooner than late March or early April because
of their need for warmer soil.
You
can buy tomato starts in March, but I wouldn't want to plant them out
until later in the month. Tomatoes will survive cool soil, but they
will only thrive in warmer soil. If you want to grow tomatoes from
seed, I usually sow mine in February. I start them in a location
sheltered from insects, but still in direct sun – I use a grow mat
that warms the soil to about 70° so the tomatoes get off to a good
start – I sow basil the same way at the same time. Other summer
crops I start in pots to be transplanted later, including
peppers, eggplants and okra, need more heat so I don't even mess with
those until after mid-March. They will be ready to plant out into the
garden come the first of May (allow about 6 weeks to get them up, up
and away).
I'm
awfully fond of lettuce. One of my Summer rituals is making a big
production out of the First BLT of the Year with the L and the T
coming from my garden – if I'm lucky I'll have also baked the bread
myself too. The hard part is getting the L and the T to cooperate
with the vagaries of weather. Tomatoes love heat and to really fruit
they need temperatures above 84° while most lettuce is positively
allergic to temperatures above 75°. There are some varieties of
lettuce bred to be less heat sensitive – Jericho and Summertime are
the two I'm most familiar with – look for them in seed catalogs and
try planting lettuce plants north of taller plants to give them more
shade.
In
a fit of fanaticism, I once grew lettuce year round. I created a bed
just for lettuce. I stapled a copper snail barrier to keep those
salad lovers out to my wooden raised bed, and set up a series of
little misters to spray the plants twice a day with a cooling mist.
But the most significant feature was an old window screen (frame and
all), resting over the plants on four 18” wooden stakes (easily
purchased at a local garden supply store). The screen proved to be
the most effective part of the whole operation. I was able to grow
lettuce thru the brutal Californian summer right on into the middle
of October, when a heat wave and an irrigation failure contrived
together to completely fry the remaining plants. Fried lettuce has
about the same appeal as month old sushi. If you want lettuce all
summer you might give this – or some of this – a spin in your
garden.
March
is a month filled with activity – daylight savings time now starts
at the end of the second week and boy do gardeners need that extra
hour! Look at what you have in the ground and begin to imagine full
size tomato, pepper, eggplant and basil plants growing there. Try to
contain yourself and get a reasonable view of what you really can
plant. Check out the suggested planting spaces on the plants you
want; measure to see how many you can reasonably accommodate. No,
don't multiply by four! (We all do it anyway, don't we?)
Now
that we've gotten ourselves into the garden and have a few things
growing, I want you to begin to think about your soil. Here's a
lovely little exercise that will tell you more about your garden
soil: Dig into a place in your garden, going down about nine inches.
Try to get below any mulch and get into the area where the roots
will live. Get approximately a cup's worth of soil and put it in a
pint container. Add a tablespoon of alum, you can find a lifetime
supply in the spice section of any supermarket. Fill to within ½
inch of the top with water and shake vigorously. Allow this to stand
for at least an hour, but 24 hours is better. Now observe what you
have in your jar.
Observe
carefully without disturbing the water too much. You will see that
the soil has self-sorted into layers. The bottom layer is sand. The
middle layer is called silt or loam and on top there is a layer of
clay. The water should be clear, any floating debris in the water is
mulch or compost material called organic matter.
The
thickness of the separate layers define your soil. If sand is the
predominate layer, your soil is sandy and will not hold water or
nutrients. If clay is the thick layer, you will need a large dose
of patience because your soil is hard to work, but is more fertile
than the sandy soil. If your middle layer is the fat one, your soil
is the dream of those on either side of you and you should play the
lottery more often because you are blessed with good fortune! Most
of us, though will experience the two dominant layers operating
together to create our own unique set of opportunities and problems.
Every
characteristic of clay soil is the opposite of a sandy soil. Silt is
the 'silent majority' of the soil community. We all want silty soil.
Few of us have it.
Looking
at this chart, you can see if you have a sandy soil, you will need to
water more than a neighbor with a clay soil; like wise you will have
to consider more nutrients because your soil won't store them. You
will be able to plant earlier in the spring because your soil will be
warmer than a clay soil, but you'll need to add a lot more organic
matter more frequently. It isn't good or bad, it's just different.
Characteristics of Soil Components
|
Property/Behavior
|
Sand
|
Silt
|
Clay
|
Water
holding
|
Low
|
Medium +
|
High
|
Aeration
|
Good
|
Medium
|
Poor
|
Drainage rate
|
High
|
Medium
|
Slow/Very slow
|
Soil organic matter
|
Low
|
Medium +
|
High
|
Decomposition of organic matter
|
Rapid
|
Medium
|
Slow
|
Speed of warming
|
Rapid
|
Medium
|
Slow
|
Compactability
|
Low
|
Medium
|
High
|
Storage of nutrients
|
Low
|
Medium
|
High
|
Resistance to pH change
|
Low
|
Medium
|
High
|
Sandy
soil will more readily forgive mistakes of too much fertilizer, too
much water and so on because it holds nothing for any length of time.
Not even a grudge.
A
clay soil is higher in nutrients for plants and takes less water to
get a crop. But screw up with clay soil and it holds grudges for a
lot longer. If you even walk on clay soil when it is wet, you can
create clods that will haunt you as you try to plant later in the
year.
Neither,
though is ideal. Silt, in the middle, is what gardeners dream about.
A soil that is neither too much clay and is therefore easier to work
nor too sandy that holds no nutrients for the garden crop. If you
have too much sand or too much clay, take heart, I have a solution in
two words:
organic
matter
Organic
matter is any material that used to be a plant. Technically,
it is anything that used to be living, but I would rather you skip
disposing of the bodies of your victims until you get to be a much
better gardener. Stick to plant material for now.
Yes,
compost is one of the organic materials you can add to your soil, but
it's not all. Anything that used to be a plant is fine. My
preference is for slightly unfinished compost. And I'm glad you
asked why, because I am dying to explain it.
Finished
compost is delicious. I love the stuff – but UNfinished compost
has chunks in it that you can identify what it used to be – it
hasn't quite broken down completely. This material still needs
critters of all sizes to finish into a dark unidentifiable compost.
Those critters are the key to soil fertility. They are multi-celled
animals like earthworms or they are fungi or bacteria or critters
that are a little of both, 'actinomycetes.'
Penicillin is one of the actinomycetes – and that smell of good
garden soil that smells musty and sweet? That smell is the smell of
actinomycetes. We want to have all these creatures in the soil
because the plants derive the nutrition from them that past
generations have tried to add with various fertilizers.
I
don't have any scientific proof, but I do know from many years of
gardening, we are being asked to buy a lot more stuff than we need.
You will get big beautiful tomatoes if you use all those expensive
fertilizers, but it's not a sustainable model and you'll get good
tomatoes without the expenditures and you'll save money. If you go
about using fertilizers, I think the fertilizers either kill off the
actinomycetes and fungi in the soil, or make your garden a very
inhospitable environment for them, I'm not sure which, but I am sure
that the addition of fertilizer in the long term ruins the fertility
of your soil. And I believe this is true about chemical and organic
fertilizers alike, although, organic fertilizers tend to be milder
and therefore less harmful than the chemical ones.
A
few fertilizers, though are the exception. I have used, and if I
need to, I will use again, including alfalfa meal and cottonseed meal.
Alfalfa meal has nitrogen, but is noted for inspiring rather than
hindering microbial activity in the soil. I have used it in the
beginning of the summer garden as the soil begins to warm. I used to
use it all the time, but got lazy and now only use it when I think I
need to get things rolling.
Cottonseed
meal is a provider of nitrogen and somehow seems to release the
nitrogen over a long period of time, unlike most fertilizers that
seem to have only a very short beneficial effect. If you elect to
use cottonseed meal, go out of your way to find organic cottonseed
meal – the commercial cotton crops are doused with unending amounts
of chemicals, and many of the commercial fields are planted with
genetically modified cotton these days. I haven't used cottonseed
meal for about 6 years, although if I was putting corn into a soil
that had marginal fertility, I would not hesitate to use it.
Look
at the list below. If you haven't yet, get orders off to the seed
companies to get your seeds for the summer. Get cracking now and
you'll reap huge rewards this summer!
Warm
Season Vegetables
Basil
Lettuce
Leaf, Genovese,
Beans
- drying
Black
Turtle, Cannellini, Hutterite Soup, Jacob's Cattle
Beans
– Lima
Christmas
Beans-
snap
Roc
d’Or, Romano, Royal Burgundy, Romano, Blue Lake
Sweet
Corn
Golden
Bantam, Stowells Evergreen, County Gentleman
Cucumbers
Lemon,
Mideast Prolific, Japanese, Armenian
Eggplant
Pingtung
Long, Rosa Bianca
Melons
Jenny
Lind, Ambrosia, Hales Best, Golden Midget, Small Shining Light
Okra
Star
of David, Clemson Spineless
Peppers
(Sweet)
Banana,
Pimento, Cubanelle, Marconi,
Peppers
(Hot)
Ancho,
Corno di Toro, Anaheim, Jalapeno
Pumpkins
Small
Sugar, Howden
Squash
(Summer)
Zahra,
Lebanese White, Black Beauty, Yellow Crookneck
Squash
(Winter)
Sweet
Dumpling, Red Kuri, Queensland Blue, Musquee de Provence
Tomatillo
Purple
de Milpa
Tomatoes
Black
from Tula, Juane Flamme, San Marzano, Black Krim, Stupice and
millions of others!
|
Start
These In Containers
|
Start
These In The Ground
|
Move
to the Ground from Containers
|
|
More
tomatoes
|
Still
some of the
|
Ultra-early
tomatoes
|
|
Peppers
|
Winter
veggies
|
Lettuce,
cilantro,
|
|
Eggplants
Basil
|
Beets,
radishes, lettuce, cilantro
|
Any
perennial herb (marjoram, oregano, etc)
|
|
Summer
squash
|
Purple
beans (early)
|
|
|
Winter
squash (late in the month)
|
Green
beans (later)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Refer to the text for exact dates.
Beets
In Orange Juice
By
now you should have the beginnings of a beet harvest – and if
you've followed my lead and put in some Golden beets, these sweet
treats from the garden can be treated nicely this way. Other beets
will stand in readily, but the golden beets in the juice is
exquisite.
With
the beets sliced into thick slices, I parboil them to the point their
skins will slip off easily, and they are just beginning to be soft
enough to eat. They usually have to cool quite a bit, but once you can handle them, slip the skins
off and compost.
Put
the beet slices in a skillet with orange juice. Add a little
cinnamon or other spice you think will compliment the beets and saute
until tender.
Serve
as a side dish to a simple, earthy meal. They are fantastic.
