Our Last FREE HERB HARVEST for 2010! Don't Miss Out!

 Download a .pdf of this flyer by clicking here!

The UC Davis Good Life Garden will be converting to it's fall and winter produce plantings next week, so before most of our summer herbs are replaced with lettuces, beets, chard, etc. we invite you to come out to the garden to enjoy the LAST HERB HARVEST FOR 2010! The following herbs are currently available: lavender, basil (green and purple), oregano, chive and mint.

If you are interested, please RSVP to goodlifegarden@ucdavis.edu so we know how many people will be attending. Directions to the garden can be found on our website: http://www.goodlifegarden.ucdavis.edu/location

The give-away is free to attend; we just need you to bring the following items:

* scissors or pruning shears
* a bag to hold your herbs
* wet paper towels to put in the bag with the herbs (if you don't have a refrigerator to keep them in for the day)
* water to drink (because it's going to be hot!)

BE SURE TO WASH ALL HERBS WELL BEFORE ENJOYING THEIR FRESH TASTE!

Our gardener Pat will be there all day to answer your questions about the different herbs and the harvesting process, as well as to direct you to the correct plants. We ask that no one remove entire plants or remove more than half of the leaves or flowers from any particular plant.

We Got Mildew Yes We Do! We Got Mildew, How 'Bout You?

Here is an example of squash with just a few spots of powdery mildew.

 As tends to happen in the late summer, our squash is suffering from powdery mildew.  This problem is pretty easy to identify;  our plants will look like someone tossed some baby power all over them.

It starts small and then just gets worse if left to proliferate.  Powdery mildew sends little tubes into leaf cells to suck out their contents, killing the cells in the process. As leaf cells die and the leaf's surface becomes covered in the white fungus, photosynthesis is reduced and leaves may be lost. Crop volume and eating quality can be reduced.

Here the mildew has been left to keep growing!

So how do you get rid of it organically?  Well, there are quite a few options. 

PREVENTION
According to our own UC Davis Integrated Pest Management, prevention is always the best way to avoid this problem.  In other words, if your garden is prone to this kind of issue, next time you plant squash, melon, pumpkin, etc., be sure to start with a resistant variety.

CULTURAL PRACTICES

You can avoid powdery mildew my making sure your plants receive plenty of sun.  (Because of the location of these plants near the South Building of the Robert Mondavi Institute, these plants do get more shade than others.)  Also be sure to:

• Provide good air circulation by not crowding your plants
• Rotate squash beds on a minimum three-year cycle to reduce the chance of a fungal buildup or reinfection from one year to the next.
• Pull up infected plants and burn or bury them.

We got the dummy whammie--the plants need more sun and they are not disease resistant varieties--so now what?

ORGANIC FUNGICIDES
According to UC Davis Integrated Pest Management, once you have the powdery mildew problem, oils, like neem oil,  tend to work better at eradicating the issue once you have it rather than preventing the problem. 

You may also want to try a biological fungicide like Serenade Disease Control Concentrate, but like UC Davis Integrated Pest Management states, "While this product functions to kill the powdery mildew organism and is nontoxic to people, pets, and beneficial insects, it has not proven to be as effective as the oils or sulfur in controlling this disease."

HOME REMEDY
For those of you interested in home remedies, it seems that you can also try making your own spray of one part skim milk to 9 parts water.  Skim milk works just as well as other types of milk--whole, low fat etc., but no fat means no odor!  Read more about this research finding here:  Using Milk to Control Powdery Mildew.

Did you get the gift of powdery mildew this summer?  If so, what did you do to get rid of it?  Let us know!

Chive Harvesting

Let me start off this entry by saying that I am one of those people whose anthropomorphic skill set extends beyond projecting human characteristics onto animals and inanimate objects.  I do the same with plants, and I believe that our proud chives need some attention!  They were mistakenly overlooked in favor of  the ever-popular basil, lavender and mint plantings at last week's free herb harvest.  I think it may be because people don't know how awesome they are!  They are hearty (hard to kill), perennial, beautiful (their flowers are gorgeous), and can be a delicious part of every meal!

At our next harvest (date TBA) check out our chives!  Harvest the stems that are not yet flowers like the one below.  Do you see how it is about to grow a flower yet, but hasn't?  This is a good choice.  Snip it at its base so we avoid that unattractive chive stubble!

There are a variety of ways you can enjoy this wonderful herb; it's not just for topping your potatoes!  With a milder flavor than onion, chives are usually snipped raw as a finishing touch for salads, soups, sauces, vegetable and fish dishes. Chives also work well in egg dishes such as quiche and omelets.  Here are the top 20 chive recipes according to Allrecipes.com.

Is there an edible that you love, that seems to get overlooked by more popular (common) fruits, vegetables, or herbs?  Why do you think it has an image problem?  Let us know!

FREE HERB HARVEST this Thursday, Sept. 9 from 9:30 AM - 2:00 PM!!

 

Download the flyer above by clicking here.  (Adobe Acrobat is required.)

We're hosting another herb harvest this Thursday, September 9 from 9:30 AM - 2 PM.

Pretty much every herb is available for harvest (oregano, basil, sage, chives, rosemary, thyme, mint and lavender).

If you are interested, please RSVP to goodlifegarden@ucdavis.edu so we know how many people will be attending. Directions to the garden can be found on our website: http://www.goodlifegarden.ucdavis.edu/location

The give-away is free to attend; we just need you to bring the following items:

* scissors or pruning shears
* a bag to hold your herbs
* wet paper towels to put in the bag with the herbs (if you don't have a refrigerator to keep them in for the day)
* water to drink (because it's going to be hot!)

BE SURE TO WASH ALL HERBS WELL BEFORE ENJOYING THEIR FRESH TASTE!

Our gardener Pat will be there all day to answer your questions about the different herbs and the harvesting process, as well as to direct you to the correct plants. We ask that no one remove entire plants or remove more than half of the leaves or flowers from any particular plant.

Birdhouse Gourds

 No gourds yet, but aren't these flowers beautiful?  This season we have an unusual crop growing--birdhouse gourds.  This cultivar has been bred for crafts, so it won't be as tasty as those bred for eating, but they sure do make cool looking birdhouses.  Here is a great post about creating a birdhouse from one of these types of gourds from Life on the Balcony. 

Birdhouse gourd blossom.

This is what the gourds will look like after their conversion to a birdhouse!  Cool, right?

This season has been a little strange for our produce.  We haven't gotten much, and if we do it seems to mysteriously disappear before we are able to harvest it; it could be rodent thieves or over zealous visitor thieves.  Hopefully we will get some gourds soon.  We'll keep you posted!  Anyone else out there ever grow gourds?  Did you end up making a birdhouse?  How did it turn out?  Give us your tips!

Decorating Your Edible Garden with Alyssum!

See our gardener Pat Stoeffel trimming the white alyssum border around our tomato plant bed.

We get great feedback on how beautiful our edible garden looks. (THANK YOU!  We love to hear your feedback!)  We have our campus senior landscape designer Christina DeMartini Reyes to thank for her excellent planting plans!  She likes to use borders of different types of flowers to achieve a variety of goals.  Planting flowers around your edibles not only attracts pollinators, the colors of the flowers provide contrast to the greenery of the fruit and vegetable leaves, they are excellent around the bed borders because they define the space, AND they can act as a type of ground cover.  All of this is great for the garden, but how do you keep it looking good throughout the season?  It isn't easy!

Today when I visited the garden I noticed that our new Good Life Garden gardener, Pat Stoeffel, was trimming back a border of alyssum that was looking particularly rangy.  She had given it a trim a couple weeks ago, but here it was leggy again!  She wants to keep the area looking nice so she is shearing it back by about half to reveal the new bloomers beneath the old!  (See the photos below.)

Do you plant alyssum to attract pollinators to your garden?  Do you use it as a border?  How do you keep it looking fresh and healthy?  Let us know!

Pat trimmed this alyssum back just a couple weeks ago, but now it needs more pruning.  This photo shows a patch of half trimmed, half untrimmed alyssum.  Note how she is trimming about half of it back to reveal the newer growth underneath.

This photo shows a detail of what the new growth underneath looks like.  It looks compact and fresh doesn't it?  We want to get rid of the brown, leggy, rangy stuff to reveal the fresh flowers.  It's kind of like exfoliating your skin to reveal a new fresh layer underneath!  (Okay...maybe not!)

Pat laughs here because she's feeling more like a barber than a gardener!

This is a different patch of alyssum in the garden which nicely frames our bay laurel trees.  This patch has not needed any pruning, yet.  We think maybe it's because the fertility of the soil may not be as high as our tomato bed. 

Blog Recommendation Monday: Keeping a Tradition Alive

The blog A Growing Tradition is about one mans effort to keep his father's (and now his) passion for home grown food alive. Thomas, the blog's author, left his so-called "concrete jungle" for New England to carry on a family home gardening tradition, and pass on  memories of gardening with his dad.

Thomas is a very successful gardener!  I know by the wonderful photos he takes of his produce.  If you wonder what a particular variety is, he lets you know via his informative photo captions.  He also weighs his produce monthly, so you can track his progress.

Another bonus about this blog is all the online resources he links to that lead his readers to interesting articles and videos, inspirational blogs, blogs from around the world, foodie blogs and notable online seed companies.

Thomas not only writes about his gardening adventures but he also actively posts blog entries about both good and bad cooking experiences. Whether he is telling stories, making general recommendations or posting recipes, this blog is one to include in your subscription list!

Corn from our garden: BEFORE and (almost) AFTER

I've said it before and I'll say it again!  I love before and after photos from our garden so I thought I'd share some with you too!

To learn more about growing your own corn access this helpful download about corn from the UC Davis Vegetable Research and Information Center.  This and many other helpful links and resources can be found on the California Master Gardener Program website called California Garden Web.

To learn more about the corn varieties we have growing in the garden visit the corn page on our website.

Here is the corn on June 30 about a week or so...cute!  (Can corn be cute?)  It's hard to believe it will ever amount to much!

Here you can see a couple rows.  Some of the seeds did not germinate.

Here is a photo of that same corn, only this was taken just over two weeks later on July 16.  They grow up so fast don't they?

Now you can see the corn is filling in despite the few that did not germinate.

This is what they look like almost a month after (August 12, 2010) the photos that were taken just above on July 16.

We have two patches of corn growing in our 'Malting and Brewing Bed' just outside of the brand new Brewery, Winery and Food Processing Facility.  Perfect fit, right?

Here is a close-up of the corn blossom!  This is a really interesting variety called 'martian jewels' corn.  The kernels are white, but the cob is a rich purple; the flavor is hardier and richer than most typical sweet corns.

Tomato Staking 101

At the UC Davis Good Life Garden we stake our tomato plants rather than using cages to provide support.  Either way is fine, but we do get a lot of questions about how to go about training your tomato plants using the staking method as it does look pretty neat and it makes harvesting your crops a bit easier.  In order to answer these questions we have put together another "Gardening Along with Arlene" flyer on the topic which you can download here. 

 

 For more details, take a look at these demonstration videos.

Container Gardening Question?

We received a question from one of our readers about the safety of gardening in containers and which container material is the best, but we don't have answer. Does our audience have any information to share on the topic? Any advice would be much appreciated! See our reader's question below.

__________________________

I have a very important question and think UCDavis may be the best place to get an answer....

Is it safe to grow vegetables in plastic containers, such as the "plastic" clay colored pots sold at nurseries, and the black gallon or more containers that many plants are sold in? If drinking water from plastic bottles can be dangerous, can this practice be also?

...and how about clay type pots.... how does one know if they contain lead, and if so does in end up in the plants grown in them?

I have been using containers - to grow tomatoes and peppers- for several reasons, mainly to avoid ground critters...but many other folks use them to grow plants on their patios. If using such containers is a heath hazard, it would be kind of you to let us all know.

__________________________

I wish we had an answer from the UC Davis archives, but I was not able to find one! I am sorry we couldn't be more help! You may want to locate a one of your local Master Gardeners and ask them as well. I know that their are quite a few that read our blog, so stay tuned here too!

Nasturtium is Like a Box of Chocolates?

Have you ever thought you planted one seed and then, much to your surprise, something else came up in its place?

That's what happened to us when we planted our nasturtium seeds. The packet said it was a vine, and, don't get me wrong, we got some vines, but we also got a very happy bush! So much for the trellis we planted near the 'vine' which may be bare for a little while!

Sometimes you never know what you are going to get! It still looks pretty good though don't you think?