By Susanne von Rosenberg, UC Master Gardener of Napa County

Happy Spring! Spring officially arrived on Thursday, March 19, at 8:49 p.m. If you're feeling like most people right now, though, it feels less like a happy spring than a really uncertain time.

Our gardens can help us cope with the challenging times that life throws at us whether it's a new global virus or personal issues. If you are one of the lucky people who have a garden, even if it's just a few pots on a balcony, you have a ready-made way to help you feel calmer and even improve your immune system and mood. Many of us will have more time at home than we usually do in the next few weeks; let your garden be part of your refuge.

Research shows that just being in nature, or even viewing scenes of nature, reduces anger, fear and stress and increases pleasant feelings. Exposure to nature not only makes you feel better emotionally, it contributes to your physical wellbeing, reducing blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension and the production of stress hormones. 

There is evidence that being able to see nature from a window or having a plant in their room can also reduce pain for hospital patients. Being in, or seeing, nature can even help you be more compassionate. Functional MRI studies show that when participants viewed nature scenes, the parts of the brain associated with empathy and love lit up, but when they viewed urban scenes, the parts of the brain associated with fear and anxiety were activated. So you can benefit greatly from your garden just by looking at it or being in it.

You may want to bring some of the joy of the garden inside by making a bouquet. Get creative. You don't need a lot of flowers; interesting branches and grasses can make a beautiful bouquet.

Gardening is also good for your immune system. The microorganism Mycobacterium vaccae is ubiquitous in soil. A fat found in this microorganism strongly stimulates the human immune system. The same bacterium boosts serotonin levels in the brains of mice, and it's very likely doing the same for you.

M. vaccae thrives in typical backyard gardens or anywhere soil is enriched with organic matter. Gardeners are exposed to it through inhalation and ingestion of small particles any time we dig outside or eat produce plucked from our gardens.

A scientific hypothesis called the Hygiene Hypothesis theorizes that one reason humans today suffer from higher rates of stress and allergies is because we are no longer exposed to the same soil bacteria that our ancestors were. Some scientists refer to those bacteria as “old friends.” As part of our modern lifestyle we've lost (or reduced) contact with our old friends. Luckily, we gardeners are regularly reacquainting ourselves with them.

You can reap even more health benefits in the garden. One of the best ways to reduce anxiety, as you probably know, is to tune into the present, rather than worrying about the future or having regrets about the past. Taking just a few minutes in the garden to really see and experience what is going on can help you become much more present.

Notice the flowers, the insects, the birds, the movement of the plants. All of them will connect you to the here and now and help your worries fade away. You can go further by meditating or doing simple yoga or stretches in your garden, weather permitting. You can find great resources online for all of these activities. Or if you like to journal, consider sitting in the garden while doing so. It will make this quiet time even more restorative. Or you can simply brew yourself a lovely cup of tea and take it outside to enjoy.

On the other hand, maybe you like to work off your anxiety through exercise. I'm sure that somewhere in your garden there are weeds to be pulled, plants to be pruned, or mulch to be applied. Each of these tasks is an opportunity to work off some stress. For me getting the big weeds out is particularly satisfying.

It's also helpful in these stressful times to keep making plans. Work on the design of your flower beds, or your vegetable planting schedule, or even consider a complete redo of your garden. Carefully planning your vegetable garden will maximize your yield, and a beautiful flower bed can deliver joy to many.

For some folks, getting things done is a great way to reduce anxiety. If you're a regular gardener, you probably have a list of projects that you would like to get done…someday. How about tackling that storage shed you've been wanting to clean out for a while? Or getting all those tools cleaned and sharpened?

Whatever you do, I wish you the joy, satisfaction, and calm that gardening can bring.

The UC Master Gardeners of Napa County are volunteers who provide UC research-based information on home gardening and answer your questions. To find out more about upcoming programs or to ask a garden question, visit the Master Gardener website (http://napamg.ucanr.edu) or call (707) 253-4221 between 9 a.m. and noon on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays.

By Susanne von Rosenberg, UC Master Gardener of Napa County

Growing some of your own vegetables is one way to contribute to a more sustainable world. Locally grown food, if grown correctly, has a much smaller environmental footprint than food imported from elsewhere. The good news is that you can make your vegetable garden even more sustainable by a few simple practices: reducing the inputs, minimizing waste and building your soil.

Building your soil is the best thing you can do for healthy plants. It helps sequester (store) carbon, and it provides an opportunity to reuse garden waste on your property. I hope you compost your fruit and vegetable scraps (nothing diseased, though) and other garden waste.

Compost is a wonderful soil amendment and mulch. Natural biological processes will help break down those materials that need to break down, and earthworms and other soil critters will mix the amendments into the soil without you having to lift a finger.

Other things you can add to the soil include shredded newspaper (if your newspaper uses soy-based inks) and cardboard. You can use overlapping layers of cardboard covered with a layer of mulch to help control weeds. In those parts of your garden that stay moist, the cardboard will break down completely in three to four months.

It's also a good idea to avoid tilling or turning your soil. Tilling or turning your soil reduces the organic matter in your soil. Most plants, once you're done harvesting, can simply be cut down. Leave the root mass in the soil to add organic matter.

You can further improve your soil and sequester more carbon by growing cover crops. Don't turn the cover crops into the soil; just cut them down, chop them up and leave them in place as mulch.

Reducing inputs simply means buying less stuff to support your garden and using less water. By now, we all know how to reduce our water use: use drip irrigation, mulch and monitor your plants to make sure that you don't over- or under-water them.

So how can you buy less “stuff” such as plants and seeds, fertilizer and weed- or pest-control products? To reduce your need for fertilizers, you can plant cover crops in the winter, especially legumes such as fava beans to fix nitrogen in the soil. In healthy soil, nutrients already in the soil are more available to your plants.

If your soil does need more nutrients, try to find local sources of manure. (Manure should be composted before it is applied to your garden.) If you buy fertilizer, apply the same principles that you do for your other purchases: figure out where the ingredients come from, and buy as local and sustainable as possible.

To reduce your purchases of plants and seeds, grown your own plants from seed, share your seeds with other gardeners, and save seeds from open-pollinated varieties. It makes sense to share your seeds because fresh seeds (no more than two years old) produce the best plants.

Growing your own plants from seeds is fun. It allows you to grow more varieties than you can purchase and to have plants when the nurseries may not carry them. For example, the ideal time to set out broccoli and cauliflower seedlings for fall harvest is in mid-August, but just try finding seedlings for these crops in nurseries in August.

Some of the best ways to control weeds are to control where you water using drip irrigation. Mulching also helps minimize weed germination, or you can hand-pull or hoe weeds, of course. As long as a weed has not set seed, add it to your compost. It's just more organic matter. Bindweed (field morning glory), blackberries and Bermuda grass can sprout from bits of stems and roots, so allow them to dry out completely before adding them to compost or using as mulch.

Healthy plants, properly tended, will be most resistant to pests and diseases. For insect pests, you can hand-pick the critters. (I sometimes shake plants over a bowl if a plant has been invaded.) Or you can wait for natural predators to arrive and take care of them for you. Look first to non-toxic methods, such as spraying aphids off with a garden hose

If you hand-pick critters, cool mornings or evenings are best because insects will be much slower when it's cold. Plants also have their own forms of defense. They produce compounds in their tissues to help deter predators. Consider ignoring some damage. Plants communicate with each other through hormonal signals from their roots, and the plants near the one that is being attacked will also produce defensive compounds.

There are many ways to make your vegetable gardening more sustainable. The important thing is to keep improving.

For more about caring for the soil:

Healthy soils for a healthy California. Check out the Home and Garden section.

https://ucanr.edu/sites/soils/

Building soil health:

https://ucanr.edu/sites/Nutrient_Management_Solutions/Management_Goals/Build_Soil_Health/

Tips to improve home garden soil:

https://ucanr.edu/sites/soils/Soils_for_Homes_-_Gardens/

Master Gardener Workshop: “Growing Tomatoes in the Home Garden” on Saturday, April 4, from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., at University of California Cooperative Extension, 1710 Soscol Avenue, Napa. Learn tips and tricks for cultivating great tomatoes including the latest research on care. On-line registration (credit card only) or Mail-in/Walk-in registration (cash or check only) or call 707-253-4221.

The UC Master Gardeners of Napa County are volunteers who provide UC research-based information on home gardening and answer your questions. To find out more about upcoming programs or to ask a garden question, visit the Master Gardener website (http://napamg.ucanr.edu) or call (707) 253-4221 between 9 a.m. and noon on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays.

By Penny Pawl, U. C. Master Gardener of Napa County

One of spring's miracles is about to occur. The California Pipevine Swallowtail butterflies will start emerging from their pupas and gather around California pipevine plants to create a new generation sometime in March.  

Last March, temperatures were low. The butterflies did not appear until April. I feared they would be deformed but all were perfect.

The Pipevine Swallowtail is the one floating around dressed in blue and black. It is about the size of a Monarch. The females do not have the blue lower wing.    

To attract this particular butterfly, you need to grow California pipevine (Aristolochia californica). This plant is the only food that Pipevine Swallowtail larva or caterpillars (also known as cats) eat before they go into the pupa. The pipevine plant contains acids that taste bad to other creatures and may even poison them. This feature improves the chances that the cats will make the transition to butterflies.

California pipevine grows in Napa County along creeks and river ways under trees. It even crawls up trees. It is called pipevine because the flowers, which start to bloom in February, are shaped like a Dutchman's pipe with stripes on their sides. I know there is a good plot of these at the Martha Walker Garden in Napa's Skyline Park. John Hoffman, a now-deceased Master Gardener, supplied the vines.  

Pipevine flowers are fertilized by gnats. One day, out of curiosity, I opened a flower to see if anything was inside. There was a gnat flying around. A few months after the flowering, a seed pod forms. The cats love the taste of those.  

I have gathered pipevine seed on occasion but have had no luck getting the seed to germinate. If you leave the seed pod to ripen on the vine, it will attract yellow jackets so I remove any pods I find.

On the other hand, pipevine will easily reproduce from a cutting. The cutting should be as long as possible—three to four feet. Coil it up and bury it one to two inches deep in potting soil in a container. Keep it watered and you will eventually have another pipevine, although it takes a while to get to the size that attracts butterflies. Mine required two summers of growing before any butterflies appeared, and even then, there weren't many.

I water my pipevine all summer and it continues to grow. All summer long I see the butterflies fluttering along the fence the vine is planted on. Checking the underside of the leaves and the newer stems I find eggs in groups of eight to ten. I collect some of them and raise them indoors.   Others I leave on the vine and I see the beautiful cats all summer. The cats do have some predators, but because of the toxins they have consumed, birds leave them alone.

It takes a lot of pipevine meals before these cats go into the pupa stage. When I move the group into the house to raise them, I know I have made a five-week commitment to feeding and cleaning their enclosures daily. Then they go walkies (as I call it) and make the pupa.  

More about walkies: all the cats I have raised, of every type, do the walkies before they settle down and make the pupa. They are releasing liquids and finding the perfect spot to make their pupa. It is amazing how far they will crawl. Occasionally a butterfly emerges in my house from under the table or another place, because the cats have escaped and walked to a hidden spot.

The pupa is made by shedding their outer skin. Moths weave a cocoon web around themselves. Once they become a pupa, the waiting game begins.

Some will emerge from their pupa in a month and go on to lay more eggs. Others will take almost a year to transition. Sadly, like all butterflies, they have a short life—only about six weeks.

To learn more and enjoy more about pipevine swallowtail, visit these websites:

https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=29626

http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/butterfly/Battus/philenor

https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=17456

The UC Master Gardeners of Napa County are volunteers who provide UC research-based information on home gardening and answer your questions. To find out more about upcoming programs or to ask a garden question, visit the Master Gardener website (http://napamg.ucanr.edu) or call (707) 253-4221 between 9 a.m. and noon on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays.

By Donna Woodward, U. C. Master Gardener of Napa County

Twice a year, Napa County Master Gardeners conduct vegetable field trials. Members of the field-trial committee plant three different varieties of the same vegetable and monitor the results so we can share what we have learned with the public.

In the spring of 2018, we chose sweet peppers for our trials. The three varieties chosen were Gypsy (a hybrid), Golden Giant (a hybrid) and Jimmy Nardello (open-pollinated).Seeds for both hybrid varieties were purchased from Burpee; the Jimmy Nardello seeds came from Baker Creek.  

We started the seeds in 4-inch pots in a greenhouse and planted the seedlings in our gardens between April 25 and May 5. Drip irrigation was recommended. Since peppers like rich soil, we were advised to amend the soil with compost and add a balanced fertilizer, such as 5-5-5. We planted the peppers 18 to 24 inches apart and were cautioned to keep them well-watered in hot and dry weather but to avoid getting water on the fruit.

All three varieties produced plenty of tasty sweet peppers. Jimmy Nardello was a pretty, bright red pepper with a sweet, slightly spicy flavor. Gypsy was a yellow-green pepper which also had a piquant flavor. Golden Giant, true to its name, produced very large, rounded fruit with thick flesh. The others were elongated, tapering from broad shoulders to a pointed tip.

Our committee generally reported good results for all three varieties. All benefited from some support, but it was especially important for the Golden Giant. Small tomato cages worked well. The peppers did not suffer much insect damage, the only report being in mid-September. All three varieties were somewhat vulnerable to sunburn and blossom-end rot.

Participants completed a survey rating the three varieties, on a scale of 1 to 5, for flavor and productivity. The scores were all high, ranging from 4.3 to 4.6, with Gypsy taking the honors.

However, in accumulating the participants' comments, a more complicated picture emerged. Individual experiences were often contradictory. The only variety that got predominantly positive reviews was the Jimmy Nardello. It received the most praise for flavor and was also the most prolific. It was the earliest to mature, about a month earlier than the other two, and continued to produce long into the season.

Reactions to the other two peppers varied widely. Comments regarding Golden Giant's flavor included “bland,” “delicious,” “good but not outstanding” and “bitter.” Comments on Gypsy were also at odds: “prolific and tasty;” “not prolific enough and not tasty or sweet;” and “best taste; pretty colors.”

How do we explain the difference between the numerical scores and the comments? Apparently rating by numbers doesn't tell the story. The comments bring out some of the variables that can influence outcomes in such trials.

Growing conditions can vary widely within Napa Valley. Soils, sun exposure and elevation can differ even within a small area. The pepper variety that performs best for you may well depend on the conditions in your garden. There was also some variability in how participants followed recommended cultivation guidelines. A few tweaks in growing practices might yield different results. We gardeners all know that trial and error is a great teacher.

Perhaps naming a winner isn't the most important outcome of this trial. All three of these pepper varieties can produce excellent fruit, as can many other sweet pepper varieties. The most valuable lessons relate to growing peppers in general:

Peppers are susceptible to sunburn. Planting them close enough for the leaves of plants to just touch will help protect them from sunburn.

Leaf puckering is a symptom of phosphorus deficiency. Phosphorus affects the health and growth of the plant and helps the fruit to set and develop. Dig some into the planting hole when transplanting. Most pepper plants appreciate a few tablespoons worked and watered into the soil every couple of weeks during the growing season. If leaf puckering occurs, use more.

Garden-grown sweet peppers are delicious. They are a wonderful addition to green salads, stir fries and other dishes, adding color, flavor and nutrition. If possible, make room for sweet peppers in your vegetable garden this spring.

Workshop: “Sustainable Vegetable Growing” (Four-Part Series) on Sundays February 23, March 1, March 8 and March 15, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., at the University of California Cooperative Extension, 1710 Soscol Avenue, Napa. For more details & online registration go to Online registration (credit card only) or call 707-253-4221.

Workshop: “Spring and Summer Vegetables” on Sunday, March 8, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., at the Yountville Community Center, 6516 Washington Street, Yountville. Do you want nutritious, easy-to-grow and utterly fresh food from your garden this spring and summer? To register, call the Parks & Recreation Department at 707-944-8712 or visit the department's web site.

The UC Master Gardeners of Napa County are volunteers who provide UC research-based information on home gardening and answer your questions. To find out more about upcoming programs or to ask a garden question, visit the Master Gardener website (http://napamg.ucanr.edu) or call (707) 253-4221 between 9 a.m. and noon on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays.