If you walk through the home improvement stores’ garden shops, you will be transported to a world of colorful flowers, beautiful trees, and plants of all types. Don’t spoil it by checking the prices. Just soak it all in. You might even encounter a few bees filling up on nectar. But then you realize that their corporate headquarters are not nearby. Nor have they been online checking Valley temperatures. The sad thing is that if you take home a bunch of these bedding plants, gorgeous flowering petunias, or even the perfect tomatoes, you will likely end up disappointed. It’s not that the merchandise is of poor quality. It’s that the planting cycle is way off. That is, we’ve passed the point when most of these plants would have thrived.
I receive notices to check posts on Facebook from the Imperial Valley Gardening Community or other gardening groups. Last week a discouraged gardener was wondering why his plants were so demolished, so desiccated. The posted photos backed this up. The responses were thoughtful and helpful. One echoed my experience exactly. It took me years to readjust my planting schedule to valley seasons. When a lot of the nation is under snow or simply freezing, I should be sowing empty pony packs or other containers with lettuce and tomato seeds to get ready for “winter” planting. Meanwhile, local box stores have transformed their garden centers into Christmas tree lots. Meanwhile, I’m searching for garden seeds and potting soil.
You can go online and view seed catalogs. I recommend Peaceful Valley, Nichols Garden, or Bene Seeds, all small businesses. Order from them even when it’s snowing elsewhere, but do it earlier than that. This past season I didn’t have a good crop of greens. The arugula was fine, but the lettuce and mizuna didn’t yield a decent crop. In October I’ll return to Butter Crunch and Black Seeded Simpson for my lettuce. What’s coming in now are the tomatoes: Early Girl and cherries.
An odd thing happened that will make you appreciate what farmers have to deal with. A weather spike. Two weeks ago, the Southwest encountered a heat dome. Temps are up 25 degrees from average. Curiously, only the Romas were affected. And just half of a fruit was rotten of the few that were harmed. So at first I figured it was overwatering. Google info gave me four possibilities, and I’m pretty sure it was the sudden change in temp.
I continued my experiment this year with tulip bulbs. Benjamin Franklin was an inventor and experimenter. He personified the scientific method. Implement the experiment, observe, and repeat. Somehow his approach inspired me, though I’m a lazy experimenter and keep minimal notes. I bought a mess of Holland bulbs, but I planted them too late. Another lesson. However, I did plant some bulbs in partial shade and watered well. I did get blooms. Church bells rang out. I danced. And I had a bunch left over, so I tried again. I planted in a broken wooden barrel, totally in the shade. Two or three bulbs shot up stems. And then the heat dome arrived, ending it all.
But we learn as we go. And as the saying goes, “There’s no such thing as too many plants.” May the weather be with you, but wait till fall in the Valley.
Richard Ryan is at rryan@sdsu.edu
Comments are closed.