Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Spring vegetables can be planted now from nursery starts. Begin your garden with broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, chard and onions. It pays to grow your own!

• Potatoes can be planted this month. Plant red, white, yellow, blue and russet for a variety of uses and flavors.

• Raspberry, blackberry, loganberry, and boysenberry vines should be planted now for delicious, home-grown berries.

• Prune wisteria trees and vines by cutting out unwanted long runners and removing old seed pods. Don’t damage flower buds that are clustered at the end of short branches.

• Fruit trees are still available as bare-root trees, but only for a short while longer. Start your orchard now!

The Spring Vegetable Garden

A few lovely, warm spring days finally give us the chance to get outside and enjoy the sunshine. And what better way to enjoy it than to set out some spring vegetable plants in your garden or raised beds. The warm days and chilly nights that we get this time of year are perfect for many delicious vegetables.

You can now set out seedlings of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, onions, chard, sugar snap peas and lettuce. From seed you can start beets, carrots, Swiss chard, lettuce, peas and spinach.

Cabbage and broccoli are members of the cole family. “Cole” is the Old English word for cabbage and is the name given to a group of vegetables that share a common ancestry and a family preference for cool weather. Other garden relatives include cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, kohlrabi, collards, turnips, radishes, bok choy and baby bok choy.

Seeing these plants side by side, you might find it hard to see what cabbages have in common with kohlrabi or broccoli. But the diverse appearance of cole family members comes from a single remarkable family trait — the ability to thicken various plant parts. Thus the kohlrabi has thickened stems; broccoli has thickened immature flowering branches; turnips and radishes have thickened roots; and with cabbage, the thickening forms the heads.

Lettuce also needs cool weather to be at its best. There are many different kinds of lettuce: looseleaf has tender, delicate, and mildly flavoured leaves; butterheads, also called Boston or buttercrunch, form loose heads; romaine, also called cos, grows in a long head of sturdy leaves and crispheads, also called iceberg, forms tight, dense heads. Leaves come in various shades of red and green. You can set out plants and plant seeds at the same time to have successive crops this spring.

Root crops grow well in the spring also. Carrots are easy to start in the cool, spring weather. Carrot seeds are tiny and germinate best in damp soil when the soil temperature is between 50 and 60 degrees. Beets, onions, radishes and turnips all grow very rapidly in the spring.

Peas are perhaps the most popular spring vegetable. There’s nothing quite so sweet and delicious as fresh garden peas. Dwarf varieties grow 18 to 24 inches tall and stand best with some support. The tall varieties grow 6 to 8 feet high and need poles or string, or wire trellises to climb. You can grow shelling peas or edible-pod varieties, also known as sugar peas, or the flat edible-pod varieties known as snow peas, popular in Asian cooking.

Take advantage of this nice spring weather and start your vegetable garden producing now.

• Plant bright and cheery primroses to brighten your flower beds and boxes.

• Plant peas in well-drained soil for a spring crop. Protect from birds with bird netting or lightweight row cover.

• Blueberries make delicious fruit on attractive plants that you can use in the orchard or the landscape. Choose varieties now.

• Clean out bird houses. Remove old nesting material and scrub the inside with a solution of one part bleach to nine parts water.

• Cut branches of forsythia, pussy willow, quince, spirea, and dogwood and bring them indoors to force them into bloom.

The Pie Plant

Rhubarb – the name alone starts pie lovers’ mouths watering. Rhubarb is a very cold-hardy perennial vegetable grown for its leafstalks that have a unique tangy taste used for pies and sauces. Native to western China and Tibet, it grows best where the ground freezes in the winter. In the spring, up shoot new leaves and bright red, succulent stalks from which pies and sauces are made. While the leafstalks are edible, the leaves themselves contain oxalic acid and should not be eaten.

Rhubarb will grow and produce on most soils, but grows best in fertile, well-drained soils that have good organic matter content. Careful soil preparation will help rhubarb stay healthy and productive for many years. The planting area should be cleared of any weeds, especially tough, hard-to-control perennial weeds. Good garden drainage is essential in growing rhubarb. If necessary, build a raised bed to help ensure against rotting of the crowns.

Space rhubarb plants 3 to 4 feet apart with the crown at the surface of the soil. For each plant, prepare a large hole and mix in 3 to 4 inches of compost or well-aged manure and a handful of fertilizer such as 5-10-10. Firm the soil around the roots. Water the crowns after planting and keep them well watered, especially in hot weather.

Rhubarb responds well to fertilizing. Give each plant 1 cup of 10-10-10 fertilizer each spring applied in a circle around the plant, after you finish harvesting. Keep weeds pulled around the plants. An application of composted manure or leaves is beneficial in late fall and early winter, but do not cover the crowns as this may promote rotting.

During the first year after planting, the stalks should not be picked, since food from the leaves is needed to nourish the roots for the next year’s growth. One light picking may be taken during the second season if the plants are vigorous. Beginning the third season the stalks may be harvested by pulling them off. Choose only stalks that are 10 inches tall and one inch thick. The stalks may be harvested a 4-6 week period, as long as they are long and thick. Stop harvesting leafstalks when the plant begins to produce slender stalks, a sign that its reserves are low. Rhubarb is harvested in late May through June.

When summer temperatures rise, plants will go semi-dormant until it cools down again. In summer some stalks will grow taller – up to six feet and bear small, creamy white flowers. Just remove them as they appear as the blossom robs the nutrients from the plant and affects the quality of the stalks.

Rhubarb should be given some shade in our area. Find a good location and you will be harvesting delicious stalks for years to come. It is one of the easiest, long lasting, high yielding, great tasting, nutritious crops you can grow in your home garden.

• Cabbage, broccoli, lettuce and other cool season vegetables can be started now from seed. There are many wonderful varieties available on seed racks.

• Clematis that bloomed last summer can be pruned now. Wait on spring-blooming varieties until after they bloom.

• Bare root fruit trees, grape and berry vines, and ornamental trees and shrubs are still available.

• Last chance to spray peach and nectarine trees for peach leaf curl before the buds break open. Use copper spray for the best results.

• Onion plants can be set out now for early summer harvest.

The Primrose Path

What happier choice of blossoms to start a spring garden than primroses? Even the Latin name comes from primus, meaning the first. This is a large family of plants having 400 to 500 species, mostly occurring in the Northern Hemisphere. Some are hardy garden species and others are only for heated greenhouses. Only a few are well adapted to the long, hot, dry summers of most parts of California.

The most popular are the polyantha hybrids, often called “English primroses”, which do very well in this area. Planted in a good location, they will come back year after year, larger and more floriferous each time! Flowers have just about the widest range of colors possible: white, yellow, gold, orange, pink, red, maroon, blue or purple, and often have yellow centers, called eyes. Planted as a mixture they are a dazzling display for three or four months of the year: January through April.

All primroses have leaves that stay close to the ground and are arranged in a circle and in the center is a flower stems that rise up above the leaves. The new ‘SuperNova’ primroses flower atop 6-8-inch-tall stems with a cluster of bright-colored flowers. Individual flowers are an inch across and clusters contain a dozen or more. A colorful new line of primroses are called ‘Primlet’. They features clusters of smaller double flowers that are tightly held like rosebuds, leading to the common name rosebud primrose. They are a fine choice for a small container.

Primroses are best appreciated right at your feet, where you can enjoy their perfection at close range. Plant them along a path for a colorful walkway. Suitable primrose companions for a moist, partly shaded spot include astilbes, ferns, hostas, forget-me-nots, and Bethlehem sage.

Provide primroses with rich, woodsy soil enriched with compost, humus, peat moss and well-rotted manure. Choose a place in the shade, in a woodland garden, or in a spot that gets sun in the winter and shade from trees in the summer. Make sure you can water them throughout the summer. A little mulch will help keep the soil moist beneath them. Under native oaks, it is better to plant them in flower boxes or barrels so that you don’t overwater the oak trees in the summer.

Cut off old flower stems as flowers fade and trim off tattered leaves to keep your primroses looking their best. Plants will continue to produce new flowers through April. Give them a light feeding after bloom to strengthen the plants, and mulch them through the summer. When the clumps become thick and overgrown, divide them in May, every 3 or 4 years.

If you don’t want to use primroses as perennials, they also make lovely annual bedding plants. They are available during the winter and spring months and make a colorful display.