Vegetable Gardening views of Pam Peirce

Last weekend I had the pleasure to see a talk by Pam Peirce, Bay Area Guru on vegetable gardening.

Having read Pam Peirce's first book, Golden Gate Gardening and followed both her blog and column in the San Francisco Chronicle, I was interested if I would learn anything from her presentation or if it would simply be a rehash of what I had already learned from her.

To my surprise, it was vintage Pam Peirce but with a new twist on vegetable gardening that again got me thinking of how we gardeners go about our gardening. We get a lot of influence from the people that brought vegetable gardening to the area, which isn't necessarily correct. On top of that Pam Peirce said, I also think that we are conditioned by the seed companies that start sending us vegetable gardeners seeds catalogs at the start of the year. Even though we should be gardening for a Mediterranean climate, we are conditioned to garden like we live in the Midwest or northern Europe.

One thing that Pam said that I have been unconsciously starting to do is to approach vegetable gardening with the end in mind. Thus plant vegetables with thoughts of how and when you are going to be using the vegetables. Now there is no stopping the over-production that we all get in the best part of the growing year. But even here we should plant abundantly the things that we can best preserve and want to have in the off-season. We also need to use our year around vegetable growing season to our advantage.

I have been doing this be altering my vegetable garden based on what my wife buys from the grocery store and planting more of what we use the most of. I also have been working hard on having a constant supply of salad at our dispossal. I still have a small waste on lettuce every now and then, but instead of planting a large crop in April, which I did one year. I am constantly making sure I have a small area in my garden that I can put a small amount of lettuce in year round. For us I need just a small amount and try to start a new batch just as we start to harvest small leaves. This seams to give just about the right distance between crops. I am working now on by how much I need to shorten that in the winter when things grow slow versus the summer when lettuce can grow faster than we can consume and we have our summer vegetables to choose from.

Now one place where I differ from Pam Peirce is how she seems to be focusing in on growing the most amount of vegetables that thrive in our climate. I on the other hand will probably always fight to find ways to make crops that I know will NOT do well in the San Francisco Bay Area and see if I can find ways to make them produce.

None the less my admiration and thankfulness of having someone like Pam Peirce lead the charge in providing the best information about local vegetable gardening is unwavering. It would be nice if each micro climate that had unique vegetable garden challenges had their own Pam Peirce. For now I will just count my lucky stars and keep on vegetable gardening.

Cambiestreet Garden

Giselle's Garden

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Roy Stahl's Vegetable Garden

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Raspberries and Olallieberries

Last year I looked at the border hedge between my neighbor and me and realized that while the pineapple guava where doing ok, they were not the greatest looking plants. The soil was horrible clay and had trees in it before.

Originally, I dug compost in right before planting the guavas. Not bad, but still not good. So at the end of last year I removed the bushes and started a several month effort to get the soil ready. Mind you I don't have much free time, so it may sound like I did more work then I really did. I first dumped some vermicompost in the are (compost done with red composting worms). I am lazy and don't do too good of a job separating the compost from the worms, so I know the soil will have lots of worms. Honestly, I think that is a good thing. Even if the compost worms can't live there forever, they do great things for the soil and to decompose things. I then threw on half composted materials. Later I saw weeds coming up so for two weeks I dumped fresh grass on top and let it get hot and kill the weeds.

I called my local nursery and confirmed that they would get berries in January. After some initial rain storms I got out and turn the soil around and dug down to get the compost mixed in with the clay. Then I finally planted the berries. That has been a month and a half ago and now they are starting to wake up and the woody stalks are getting green. The olallieberries are going to be the last to burst open, but then I do need to get some time so I can put posts in the ground and rung trellis wires.

While I don't plan on entering too much into my vegetable planning software on these, I will record the harvest so I know how much I get out of them.

Even though I wrote Plangarden software, I use it the way I hope others do. Get what you want out of it and ignore parts that you do want to fill out. The gardening software is meant to make your life easier and help you. It should make you work harder or do record keeping that you wouldn't normally do. If it provides assistance to your vegetable gardening, that is what it is there for.

Shitake mushrooms at home

On January 13th we visited the Santa Cruz Mushroom Festival. It was a fun filled event where you could eat many exciteing mushroom dishes that you wouldn't normally even dream of. Mushroom cookies make from Candy mushrooms have a sweet maple taste.

While there we picked up some blocks kits of starer mushrooms for $13 each. Each cube should produce 1 to 1 1/2 pounds of mushrooms (we'll see about that.) And is made from wood chips and rice hulls.

I have posted two pictures on Plangarden.com where you can plan a vegetable garden, but the web 2.0 application can not yet support mushrooms as a vegetable, but that is comming soon.

http://www.plangarden.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=896#896

If you want to visit my post on Plangarden and comment on the pics there, feel free. Here is a small version of one the pictures of the 10 day old Shitake mushrooms.

National Home Garden Club recommends Plangarden

It finally happened. Plangarden got approval from the National Home Garden Club. A great milestone for the application. Thousands of vegetable gardeners test and commented and rated the software. To win the seal of approval, you need to get overwhelming majority of users to approve you product.

Not only did Plangarden pass the test, but the feedback from the users was tremendous. It was also a look at mainstream users and not just early adopters. The lessons learned from the testing will help drive future versions of Plangarden software.