I am continually amazed by how easily and quickly weeds grow in my garden. While I “baby” the plants I like with water, food and TLC, the weeds grow without any effort on my part. In fact, they seem to thumb their figurative noses at me when I do attempt to curtail their growth.

In the past, I have inadvertently uprooted a desired plant. With a quickly drawn breath, I immediately replant it, only to have it usually die anyway. A weed, on the other hand, will almost always replant itself if I leave it on top of the soil with any root system remaining at all. More often than not, it revives itself and continues on as if nothing had happened.  

It is the time of year when weeds begin to prevail. Although honestly, I find that weeds are opportunistic in any season. I spend many days puttering around my garden, hoe in hand, uprooting and removing weeds.

I actually do not begrudge the effort as any time spent outdoors, for me, is a plus. What I do resent is the time spent removing weeds rather than in more pleasant garden pursuits. The proliferation of weeds and their seeming ability to grow by the hour is at times daunting. If you do not destroy them as small seedlings they will mature within days and distribute their seeds with abandon.

One of the weeds prevalent in our area is bittercress, also known as hairy bittercress, less-seeded bittercress or, more aptly, as popweed. It is a particular nemesis of mine. Bittercress is extremely prolific and will mature in only six weeks.

What intrigues and frustrates me about bittercress is its seed distribution system. These weeds are well camouflaged in my garden, and if I do not find them before they scatter their seed, the battle is lost.

You can easily kill them by pinching them or by disturbing the root system. But if you allow bittercress to mature and then try to pull it up, you will be rewarded with a mouthful or face full of seeds. The plant can literally shoot seeds for yards in all directions. Given that each plant can produce hundreds of sticky seeds, you have reproduction heaven.

Bittercress are the bane of wholesale nurseries as the seeds travel so far and travel on pots, in the water and in the soil. It's a good practice to remove the top half-inch of soil from any nursery plant before introducing it into your garden.

The key to weed removal is to get it when it is small. But getting down on my hands and knees is becoming harder as I get older. So I look for ways to avoid that effort. Often just scuffing the seedlings with my foot works well. It may look like I'm doing a soft-shoe routine, but it is effective.

Recently I purchased a long-handled tool with a stirrup-shaped blade. The stirrup shape allows me to get under the plant and uproot it without disturbing the soil much. However, many weeds will re-root unless I banish them completely, so I carry a bucket with me and deposit the weeds there. This method does require some bending but that's preferable to getting on my knees. For the cracks in the driveway (there are more post-earthquake), I use a sharp stick. The stick works great on the straight lines but requires a little finessing in the acute corners.

Weed killers abound at hardware stores and nurseries. Glyphosate, sold under several brand names, has been used to kill weeds since its registration in 1974. It readily kills emerging weeds without affecting the soil or leaving a residue. Always read and follow herbicide instructions.

I have found glyphosate effective in my yard's gravel areas, where weed removal is a problem. It has worked well except during winter, when it seems to take forever for the plant to dry up. The sprayed weeds do eventually die, but they remain upright and yellow for quite awhile and are as unsightly as the healthy weeds. I have not found a better method for killing weeds in gravel areas other than getting down on my knees and pulling them out by hand.

For more information on weed eradication, consult the Napa County Master Gardener web site (address below).

Workshop: Napa County Master Gardeners will hold a workshop on “Propagation and Seed Starting” on Sunday, March 1, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., at Yountville Community Center in Yountville.Master Gardeners will discuss and demonstrate several types of propagation methods, including division, soft wood cuttings, grafting and seed starting.  Learn about the tools and techniques that lead to successful propagation and have a hands-on experience. To register, contact the Parks and Recreation Department at 707-944-8712 or visit its web site.

Master Gardeners are volunteers who help the University of California reach the gardening public with home gardening information. Napa County Master Gardeners ( http://ucanr.org/ucmgnapa/) are available to answer gardening questions in person or by phone, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9 a.m. to Noon, at the U. C. Cooperative Extension office, 1710 Soscol Avenue, Suite 4, Napa, 707-253-4143, or from outside City of Napa toll-free at 877-279-3065. Or e-mail your garden questions by following the guidelines on our web site. Click on Napa, then on Have Garden Questions? Find us on Facebook under UC Master Gardeners of Napa County.

 

In this the season of giving, perhaps you have received or given orchids. An orchid can be a gift that keeps giving because, if it receives proper care, it will often bloom again. And orchids don't take a lot of care during the year.

The orchid family is the largest in the plant world. Orchid breeders have produced some wonderful color combinations. Shortly after World War II, the orchid industry took off in Santa Barbara, a repository for orchids from around the world. Today we find beautiful and affordable orchids in hardware stores, groceries stores, flower shops and nurseries. Unlike most consumer goods, orchids have actually dropped in price.    

Most retailers tend to carry tropical orchids, which need more water than many other types. In summer, I put my orchids outside and water them almost daily. Indoor orchids may need watering only once a week.

When selecting a plant, look at the flowering stem first. Don't buy an orchid whose buds are all open; you want the flowers to open slowly when you get the plant home.

Orchids need a lot of light. If you plan to keep them indoors, put them near a window where they will receive a lot of natural light but not so much that they might burn.

In the wild, orchids grow on trees with their roots exposed. They grow from trunks and branches. And they survive untended on the light, air and rain water. Once my husband and I were hiking in Bothe State Park in Calistoga, and we found an orchid in a fairy ring, the site where a mother tree has died and “babies” have come up around it. We did not disturb it.

Years ago, when the orchid nurseryman Rod McClellan was still alive, he would have an annual spring showing of cymbidium at his nursery in South San Francisco. He was an engaging person and wore highland plaids for this event.  

Cymbidiums usually bloom in the spring. They need winter's chill to set flowering spikes. At that time, the McClellan nursery was reproducing orchids via meristem propagation, removing a growing tip and placing it in agar. This technique produced many small plants quickly. McClellan was also breeding orchids to produce different colors and also introduced hanging cymbidiums, with a spike that hung over the side of the pot. I got my first mini-cymbidium from this nursery. Last year, one of mine had 11 hanging spikes. It is hard to resist these wonderful plants.

I have since acquired many orchids that need different care than cymbidiums. Most are tropical, and I keep them in my screened house during the summer so they get plenty of water, light and air flow. In winter I move them to my passive-solar hothouse and watch them daily.

All orchids need occasional repotting. Nurseries sell potting mix for orchids, but I have been making my own for years.   It is a well-draining mix of equal parts orchid bark and red lava rock. I plant the orchids in pots with mesh sides so that they will get good air circulation. These mesh pots need support so I put them inside another pot to keep them upright. If you are repotting a large orchid, put white plastic peanuts in the bottom of the pot to improve drainage.

In the spring and summer, I feed my orchids with an organic mixture of bone meal, blood meal, cottonseed meal and fish pellets. In the fall, I give them 0-10-10 to bring out the blooms and help them overwinter.

Napa Valley has an orchid society that meets monthly at the Napa Valley Senior Center in Napa. The society has an annual sale in the spring, where you can meet avid collectors and get your orchid-growing questions answered.             

Workshop: Napa County Master Gardeners will conduct a workshop on “Rose Pruning and Maintenance” on Saturday, January 17, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at University of California Cooperative Extension, 1710 Soscol Avenue, Napa. This workshop will feature demonstrations on rose bushes to show and explain proper pruning techniques. Master Gardeners will discuss various types of roses, common rose diseases and routine maintenance including watering and fertilizing. Online registration (credit card only) Mail-in registration (cash or check only).

Master Gardeners are volunteers who help the University of California reach the gardening public with home gardening information. Napa County Master Gardeners ( http://ucanr.org/ucmgnapa/) are available to answer gardening questions in person or by phone, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9 a.m. to Noon, at the U. C. Cooperative Extension office, 1710 Soscol Avenue, Suite 4, Napa, 707-253-4143, or from outside City of Napa toll-free at 877-279-3065. Or e-mail your garden questions by following the guidelines on our web site. Click on Napa, then on Have Garden Questions? Find us on Facebook under UC Master Gardeners of Napa County.

 

 

 

If you are surrounded by colanders of berries, baskets of zucchini, tons of tomatoes and armfuls of flowers, it must be August.  Harvesting vegetables before they “get away” from you and become giants, or squishy remnants of their once voluptuous selves, is one of the main tasks for gardeners in August.  

Other crops that gardeners will be enjoying this month include beets, carrots, shallots, peppers, eggplant, summer squash, potatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers, melons, endive, lettuce, peas and beans of all varieties. If you have more than you can use, consider donating to the county food bank, or call the U. C. Cooperative Extension office (707-253-4221) for canning, pickling, freezing and drying techniques to preserve your fruits and vegetables. You will welcome these fresh tastes of summer in the dark of winter.

One sign of a beginning gardener is a reluctance to pick the fruits of one's labor. But as experienced gardeners know, harvesting vegetables, herbs and flowers often encourages the plant to produce a new flush of growth. The reason plants make fruits and flowers is to ultimately produce seed. When you harvest your garden's bounty, many of your plants will make another effort to produce seed. The result is often a whole new crop.

Between enjoying and preserving your harvest, keep up with watering and fertilizing. After a few hot August days, a morning or two of fog from the coast often cools our valley, but the garden's water needs remain high. Patrol your garden each day to note how plants are doing. A wilting plant may mean a clogged water emitter, or a critter eating roots or tunneling beneath.  

Weeds have often gone to seed by now. Remove them carefully to avoid spreading their spawn across your planting beds. I like to sneak up on big, seedy weeds with an open garbage bag and a sharp pair of shears. I slip the garbage bag over the head of the weeds, gently closing the bag around it and then snip or pull out the rest of the plant. My method contains the seeds and saves me time scraping them out of the bed again when they germinate after fall rains.

Now is the time to till beds for fall plantings.  After removing the weeds, dig in well-composted organic matter and add fertilizer if needed. U. C. Extension recommends composting and aging any fresh manure, including chicken, cow and horse manure, before you add it to your garden beds.  If you buy bags of manure at your local garden center, it has usually been aged. Give your beds a thorough soaking, and then let them rest at least a week before planting your next crop.

Ready to start producing compost at home from your garden and kitchen waste? Good soil is important to all gardens, and the best amendment for all soil types is compost. Compost lightens our heavy Napa County clay soils, helps soil retain water, increases microbial action (a good thing) and furnishes or replaces nutrients necessary for plants to grow. To learn how to make your own compost, come to the Napa County Master Gardener workshops on August 23 in St. Helena and September 6 in Yountville. (Details follow.)

Except for peas, which can be planted directly in the garden now, most winter crops are heavy feeders. Sweet peas and edible peas both fix nitrogen, the element most other plants need.

If you had peas or beans in your summer beds, consider replacing them with autumn cole crops, such as Brussels sprouts, cabbages, collards, or kale. You can start seeds for these vegetables now, or buy seedlings next month to plant out then.  

Seeds can go directly in the ground now for your winter kitchen garden.

Carrots, turnips, rutabagas, chard and Asian greens can all be sown directly in the garden now, as can almost of the lettuces, mustards and endives.

Spring-sown annual flowers might be looking a little peaked by now. Cut them back or pull them; cut back perennials when they finish blooming.  

The season for garden color is not over. For instant gratification, set out petunias, chrysanthemums, marigolds, zinnias, wax begonias and bedding dahlias for color until frost. Sow seeds of calendulas, poppies, primrose, violas, wildflowers, sweetpeas, and snapdragons for late winter and early spring blossoms.

If your mulch is getting thin in spots, plump it up now. Mulch will help keep weeds down and soil from eroding when the rains finally come.

Workshop: Join Napa County Master Gardeners for a “Back to School, Back to the Garden” workshop on Saturday, August 9, from 10:15 a.m.to 12:15 p.m., at the U. C. Master Gardener Demonstration Garden, Connolly Ranch Education Center, 3141 Browns Valley Road in Napa.
The back-to-school season is a busy time for students, teachers and parents alike. Mid-August is also the best time to start planning the fall and winter garden. This workshop will introduce participants to the concept of year-round garden planning based on the school calendar. It will include many family-friendly activities that can fit into a short amount of time in the evenings or weekends to ensure a successful year-round harvest.Demonstrations and activities include: making compostable seed pots, creating a soil-less seed-starting medium, preparing to start crops from seed, sowing two kinds of kale, and transplanting fall/winter crops into the garden. This workshop is suitable for parents, teachers and children (if accompanied by an adult). Bring a hat, gloves, trowel (optional) and water bottle. Online registration (credit card only)
Mail in registration (cash or check only)

Workshop: Napa County Master Gardeners will conduct a workshop on “Cool Season Veggies” on Sunday, August 17, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., at the Yountville Community Center, 6516 Washington Street, Yountville. The workshop repeats on Saturday, August 23, at U.C. Cooperative Extension, 1710 Soscol, Napa. Grow your own vegetables even when days are short and nights are cold. Learn which vegetables thrive in cooler temperatures, how to protect them from heat when they are getting started, and how to time planting to ensure months of harvest. To register for the Yountville class, call the Parks & Recreation Department at 707-944-8712 or visit their web site. To register for the Napa workshop: Online registration (credit card only)Mail in registration (cash or check only).

Master Gardeners are volunteers who help the University of California reach the gardening public with home gardening information. Napa County Master Gardeners ( http://ucanr.org/ucmgnapa/) are available to answer gardening questions in person or by phone, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9 a.m. to Noon, at the U. C. Cooperative Extension office, 1710 Soscol Avenue, Suite 4, Napa, 707-253-4143, or from outside City of Napa toll-free at 877-279-3065. Or e-mail your garden questions by following the guidelines on our web site. Click on Napa, then on Have Garden Questions? Find us on Facebook under UC Master Gardeners of Napa County.

Napa County Master Gardeners welcome the public to visit their demonstration garden at Connolly Ranch on Thursdays, from 10:00 a.m. until noon, except the last Thursday of the month. Connolly Ranch is at 3141 Browns Valley Road at Thompson Avenue in Napa. Enter on Thompson Avenue.

 

 

Summer in the vegetable bed should be the time you can literally sink your teeth into your garden produce. You prepared your soil well, started or bought quality vegetable plants, and established a reliable and efficient watering system. If your vegetables are not producing as you think they should be, what do you suppose is going on?

If you have ever noticed that your zucchini plants start to form little squash, only to have the fruit wither and fall off, the culprit could be that some of your garden partners aren't doing their job. Squash and their relatives in the cucurbitaceae family, cucumbers and melons, require a pollinator such as bees to set fruit.

Look closely at the blossoms and you will notice that there are two kinds on these plants. Male or staminate blossoms have simple, straight stems, while female or pistillate flowers have a small, fruit-like receptacle at the base of the flower. To set fruit, pollen from male flowers must be transferred to the female flowers. If your local bees or other insects have not visited your zucchini plant, no squash will form.

You can compensate for this lack by doing the pollinating yourself. Using your finger or a brush, gather some pollen from the male flowers and put it gently onto the female flowers. It's best to do this in the morning when blossoms first open, as they are only viable for the first 24 hours. To encourage bees, avoid using insecticides of all types and consider planting bee-friendly flowering plants near or among your vegetable crops.

I plant my tomatoes together so I can set up a watering system that meets their specific needs: regular deep watering about once a week. So why do all of the plants look healthy and strong except for one, which is wilting?

By poking around into the soil at the base of the plant, I find that the watering system has not failed, but that the roots have been disturbed by gopher activity, drying the plant roots by exposing them to air. Shoving moist soil and compost into the tunnels can usually rescue plants that have been disturbed in this way, especially if they were mature plants with large root systems.

Do your cucumbers taste bitter? Researchers have found that bitterness in cucumbers is due to a chemical compound called cucurbitacin. Production of this compound is controlled mostly by genetics, and appears to vary from year to year and from location to location.

The first line of defense is to plant cucumbers that don't produce the chemical compound. I think one reason lemon cucumbers are a popular heirloom variety is that they are seldom bitter. If you do have a cucumber variety that tastes bitter, note that the cucurbitacin is likely to concentrate in the stem end of the cucumber as well as in and just under the skin. You can cut off those parts and still enjoy the fruit.

If you are growing lettuce in the summer, it too can become bitter as it ages. Lettuce is a cool-season vegetable and prefers temperatures below 80 degrees. When the weather gets warm, lettuce will start to produce a flowering stalk, and at that point the leaves will taste bitter.

Since you can't leave lettuce in the summer garden for long, plant small amounts a few weeks apart and harvest the plants regularly before they get too old. Planting lettuce where it will be shaded in the afternoons can help keep it from bolting too soon. Also, if you like crisp lettuce for your salads, pick and refrigerate your lettuce in the morning. If you wait to pick in the afternoon, the leaves will be somewhat limp.

If you planted melons, the big question is, are they ripe yet? Many types of melons, such as cantaloupe, signal their ripeness by “slipping." A slight crack completely circles the stem where it is attached to the fruit. If the fruit comes off easily, leaving a smooth cavity, the fruit is ready to eat.

Some types of melons, such as Crenshaw, casaba, and honeydew, do not slip. Watch fruit for a change in color, usually to yellow, and feel the blossom end to see if it is softening. Some melons give off a wonderful aroma when ripe.

Watermelons are a different genus from other melons, and assessing ripeness is different. Rapping the side of the fruit with your knuckles is a tried and true technique. A light or metallic sound indicates that the fruit is still green. A dull, hollow sound indicates ripeness. Watermelons also will have a white or yellow spot where the fruit rested on the ground, and tendrils close to the fruit will darken and dry up.

Napa County Master Gardeners are ready to answer these and all your garden questions, all summer long. Enjoy your summer produce.

Workshop: Napa County Master Gardeners will conduct a workshop on “Cool Season Veggies” on Sunday, August 17, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Yountville Community Center, 6516 Washington Street, Yountville. Grow your own vegetables even when days are short and nights are cold. Learn which vegetables thrive in cooler temperatures, how to protect them from heat when they are getting started, and how to time planting to ensure months of harvest. To register, call the Parks & Recreation Department at 707-944-8712 or visit their web site. Workshop fee is $10 for Yountville residents, $12 for others.

Master Gardeners are volunteers who help the University of California reach the gardening public with home gardening information. Napa County Master Gardeners ( http://ucanr.org/ucmgnapa/) are available to answer gardening questions in person or by phone, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9 a.m. to Noon, at the U. C. Cooperative Extension office, 1710 Soscol Avenue, Suite 4, Napa, 707-253-4143, or from outside City of Napa toll-free at 877-279-3065. Or e-mail your garden questions by following the guidelines on our web site. Click on Napa, then on Have Garden Questions? Find us on Facebook under UC Master Gardeners of Napa County.

Napa County Master Gardeners welcome the public to visit their demonstration garden at Connolly Ranch on Thursdays, from 10:00 a.m. until noon, except the last Thursday of the month. Connolly Ranch is at 3141 Browns Valley Road at Thompson Avenue in Napa. Enter on Thompson Avenue.