Pest control, pretty poppies, soil temp
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Turn to worms: Worm castings are recommended for control of insect pests on plants. They contain an enzyme known as chitinase that breaks down chitin, the major constituent in the exoskeleton of many insects, including whiteflies, aphids and leaf miners, as well as spider mites. You can purchase worm castings (a euphemism for worm poop) by the bag or bring red wigglers into your life for a constant supply of their excretions. Keep your worms fed with vegetable and fruit peels, coffee grounds, eggshells, tea bags and shredded newspapers. You can find bins and trays for growing red wigglers through a multitude of Internet vendors when you search “make your own worm castings.” YouTube videos also instruct how — for a minimal investment — you can construct your own apparatus for growing worms and harvesting their castings.
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Veggies by the pot: You may be wondering about growing vegetables in containers and which types are most suited to this option. Fast-growing vegetables are the best candidates, and at the top of this list are members of the nightshade family — tomato, potato, eggplant and peppers, whether sweet bell peppers or chile peppers, from relatively mild jalapenos, to hotter serranos, to still hotter cayenne peppers, to scorching habaneros. Although chiles are hot to the palate, they are sensitive to extremely hot weather, especially when growing on patios or adjacent to stucco walls where reflected heat can burn them, so they need shade cloth overhead in extremely hot weather. Pole beans are also fast growers that lend themselves to pots as long as a trellis is in place to accommodate their vertical growth. Finally, okra, a member of the hibiscus family, is a fast grower highly suitable for container growing.
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Going underground: Most root crops can be planted in Southern California throughout the year, and now is as good a time as any to start them. In all four seasons, you can grow carrots, radishes, parsnips, beets, leeks and onions from seeds; you can grow conventional potatoes from potato pieces, as long as each is showing a couple of eyes; you can grow garlic bulbs planted from single cloves. Sweet potatoes are different. They have no botanical relationship to the more common potatoes that we bake, roast or make into French fries. Sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family and must be grown from slips. If you put a sweet potato or sweet potato pieces in the ground, they will send up shoots but not produce any new sweet potatoes. However, if you take these shoots or slips and root them in water, you can then plant them out and they will foster the growth of sweet potatoes in the soil. You can also take a sweet potato and balance it with three toothpicks in a glass of water — as long as most of the tuber is submerged — and witness the growth of new slips with roots that can then be detached and planted out in the garden. When rooting a sweet potato in a glass of water, make sure the pointed end of the tuber is above the water surface, with the blunt end beneath it.
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Plenty of pop: When it comes to poppies, it is easy to fixate on the California poppy at this time of year. However, there are several others worth planting that, like our native poppy, germinate effortlessly from seed. The Mexican tulip poppy (Hunnemannia fumariifolia) is a spellbinding yellow version of the California poppy that is borne on taller stems and has larger flowers. This poppy has finely cut, blue-green foliage and clear butter-yellow flowers, and multiplies from its own seeds. These drop in place year after year, eventually naturalizing drier portions of the garden. Mexican tulip poppy demands well-drained soil and full sun, but once these conditions have been met, it blooms with reckless abandon. If stems are cut before flower buds have opened, blooms will look good in a vase for a full week. Peony poppies (Papaver paeoniflorum) have dense peony- or roselike blooms in white, pink, red, burgundy or purple and grow effortlessly from seed. The chalice-shaped Oriental poppy (Papaver orientale) flowers — which grow up to 6 inches in diameter — range from pink to purple but may appear in salmon as well. Iceland poppies (Papaver nudicaule), those cheerful annuals in white, pink, salmon and orange, are also known as Champagne glasses on account of the shape of their flowers. They’re guaranteed to gladden your garden and your heart.
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Too cold, too hot, just right: Soil temperature is the best indicator of when to plant vegetable seeds. Seeds germinate quickly when soil temperature for the species in question is right. For instance, if you want your tomato seeds to sprout soon after planting, the soil should fall between 70and 95degrees. Radishes will sprout virtually throughout the year as long as temperatures fall between 45and 90degrees. You can find a list of vegetables and the range of optimum temperatures at which their seeds germinate at aces.edu. When you get there, type “soil temperature conditions for vegetable seed germination” in the search box. You can then determine the temperature of your soil in two ways: by acquiring a soil temperature thermometer for less than $15through an Internet vendor or by visiting cimis.water.ca.gov. When you get there, click on the “Data” tab at the top of the home page and you will be taken to a list of weather stations throughout California, which in our area go as far east as Riverside, as far west as Santa Monica, as far north as Santa Clarita and as far south as Irvine. When you click on “Run Report” after finding the weather station nearest you, your soil temperature will be found in the far right column. It is of interest to note that, as of the middle of this April, the soil temperature throughout California was 5-15degrees below the minimum recommended planting temperature for the seeds of most warm-season crops, including tomatoes, peppers, melons, squashes, cucumbers, eggplants and okra. Planting seedlings of these crops, of course, can proceed even if the best temperature for seeds hasn’t arrived.