DryStoneGarden

Rocoto Pepper

I think I’ve mentioned before that our garden is in one of the foggier micro-climates of the Bay Area, so a lot of the classic summer veggies are hard for us to grow. A few things like peppers and tomatoes are too important to give up on, so we’ve tried different varieties to find out what might work best. We seem to have found the right pepper for our garden. We’ve been getting a bumper crop of peppers from our Rocoto, Capsicum pubescens, sometimes known as the Peruvian Tree Pepper.
It doesn’t seem to need the heat that other peppers do. It’s our third year since we bought it as a 4″ at Annie’s. The first year I just potted it up, no fruit. The second year, after I transplanted it into the garden in the spring, it looked unhappy for several months, and then recovered at the end of the summer to put out maybe two dozen small peppers. This year we’ve had all-we-can-eat peppers since mid-June, and the plant shows no sign of slowing. We’ve been harvesting them green, when they have a nice pepper flavor and medium heat; three or four green ones in a sauce make it noticeably hot, but not fiery. A lot of people wait until they turn red and very hot, but not me. My stomach still remembers a plate of stuffed and baked ones that I ate in Peru thirteen years ago.
So far, I’ve just let it grow without pruning or shaping, and it has become a leggy seven footer without much ornamental presence. I’ve seen bushier, self-supporting ones in sunnier sites, but ours definitely needs the bamboo poles to keep it upright.

Our Rocoto staked to a Bamboo Tepee

There’s a devoted website, rocoto.com, by a Bay Area enthusiast, with recipes and photos and info about growing them.

Folks in Anita’s winter vegi classes were interested in what specific varieties to grow, so I thought I’d post the list of what we’re growing in our Richmond Annex (fog belt, zones 9b and 17) garden for this winter. Everything we’re growing is a variety that we’ve done at least one of the past three winters here, which seems a little boring and unadventurous, but should produce reliably.

Favas Beans
Snap Peas ‘Cascadia’
Beat Greens “Lutz Salad Leaf’
Romaine Lettuce ‘Freckles’
‘De Cicco’ Broccoli
Yellow Onion Sets
Garlic ‘Nootka Rose’
Kale ‘Dwarf Blue Curled’ and ‘Dinosaur’
Mustard ‘Red Giant’
Arugala
Mache
Miner’s Lettuce

A pretty standard list, everything reliable. Alpine Strawberries, a Rocoto Pepper, Regular and Garlic Chives, and a couple of Blueberries are the year-round residents. We’re still harvesting Celery, Leeks, and Zucchini’s, and we’ll probably plant out more Snap Peas and Kale or maybe Rainbow Chard in those spots in February.

Fava Blooms

Anita is teaching a class at Heather Farms about planting a winter vegetable garden and as part of the prep she asked me for a list of reasons to have a winter veggie garden. She’ll probably do the Socratic thing and get the class to come up with its own list, but I thought I’d post my list and see if anyone had other things to add. The winter veggie garden for us is loosely defined as the Oct/Nov planting and the Feb/March planting times with harvests starting in February and lasting into the summer or beyond.

1. Favas!!!!
2. The winter garden requires less time and effort than the summer garden — less watering, fewer pests (more slugs and snails, but fewer leaf miners, cabbage loopers, and marauding baby skunks), less staking & pruning? (peas need training and favas need some kind of support, but that’s compared to beans, tomatoes), onions and garlic and many other cool-season crops are ridiculously easy
3. A few of those winter crops are specialty items — Favas turn starchy by the time they make it into stores, Mache (corn salad) can cost as much as $3/oz, I never buy Garlic Greens or Shallots but love them from the garden, you can never use a whole clump of store bought Parsley, Collards and other greens taste best with a touch of frost in them, I’m trying to think of other highlights of the winter garden?
4. It makes for healthy soil and insect populations — nitrogen-fixing cover crops are fundamental, the winter garden provides food for the microbes and insects to keep those populations high, living mulch protects the soil from rain
5. It looks better — it avoids that bare, bleak, abandoned look that a veggie garden can get
6. Favas!!!!
7. It’s productive – it takes advantage of our mediterranean coastal climate, we always get a warm spell in January, and February and March often alternate rain with sunshine in a way that many plants like, productivity is measured in bushels per acre, so get bushelling
8. Fog belt tomatoes may be lousy but the early spring greens are world class
9. You don’t stop eating food in the winter, so why would you stop growing it?
10. It’s the easiest time to plant other perennials so why not edible perennials — strawberries and artichokes do best with late October planting, bareroot blueberries are available in February
11. Have you seen the price of arugula at Whole Foods lately?
12. It gives you something to blog about
13. Snap Peas!!!!
14. All the cool organic farms are doing it
15. Did I mention Favas?
16. Satisfaction — you have to temper your expectations, some things will fail, but it is conversely immensely satisfying to eat a home grown meal in early February

Also, I just think it’s good form. Please comment if you have other reasons that I didn’t think of.

dodge vegematic with winter squash

Rumors have been circulating that fruits and vegetables might be illegal to grow in the front yards and hellstrips of some Bay Area cities, but the city of Richmond investigated and found that there are no ordinances against them. The investigation came from the top, from our mayor, Gayle Mclaughlin.

‘“If it is indeed a Richmond law, I would like to ask the city attorney’s office to change/cancel this ordinance and bring it to council for a vote ASAP. I would be happy to sponsor such an ordinance change.” 

Assistant City Attorney Mary J. Renfro came up with the definitive answer, reached after consulting the city’s Health, Public Safety and Welfare and Zoning codes. 

While some legal provisions require yard maintenance and “prohibit nuisance conditions that might attract trespassers and vermin,” none of them suggests that it is impermissible to grow fruit or other edible plants in the front yard.

It’s good that the mayor checked on vegi gardens and established that they’re okay, because there has been a front yard vegi garden movement in my Richmond Annex neighborhood for the last couple of years. Six gardens within a block of each other grow vegetables (these are small blocks with 2-5 houses per block, so that’s a high percentage) and, a couple of blocks away from them, another one converted their lawn to vegetables three months ago. 

onions and juniper

The first of the gardens, the one that began the trend, is a front yard of veggies grown in raised beds of mortared stonework from the juniper/ivy era of California landscaping. It is far and away the tidiest of the gardens, and it produces an impressive quantity of food throughout the year. Even when large sections are only bare dirt and small seedlings or when the plants get raggedy at the end of their harvest period, the walls and the orderly planting style and to some extent the pom-pommed junipers always make it clear that this is a well-maintained garden.

carrots and juniper

Photos of more gardens are below.

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variegated iris

We’ve been collecting photos of the winter vegi garden for a class that Anita will be teaching in the fall at Heather Farms, and this is our latest and possibly last crop of photos. We’re letting some things–the mache, the meadowfoam, the miner’s lettuce–go to seed, and a few things are entering or yet to reach their harvest phase–the favas and alpine strawberries, and later the onions and garlic–but most of the garden is now heading towards the summer phase, so this might be the last of the photos. One of the ideas of the class will be that folks should try to have a lot of flowers, including natives and perennials, mixed in with the edibles to attract beneficials. I put rest of today’s photo harvest below.
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golden mummies & aphids

Please excuse the rather unpleasant photo. Aphids are gross, but golden mummies are one of the best things I ever learned about IPM.

We’ve had a couple of outbreaks of aphids this spring, first with the lupine when it put out a big flush of new growth and now on our kales as they begin to bolt. Golden mummies are the brownish, mummified carcasses of parasitized aphids; wasps lay their eggs in the aphids and the larva eat the aphids from the inside, leaving the dried husks. If you aren’t familiar with them, click on the photo and you should be able to see the difference. In the garden, another way to tell the difference is that aphids move and mummies don’t.

When you see an outbreak of aphids, the presence of golden mummies is one sign that natural predators are present. Count the aphids and golden mummies on a leaf, and, if the outbreak includes at least 10 percent golden mummies, the natural predators will deal with the outbreak for you. Spraying would kill the natural predators along with the aphids and therefore be counterproductive, though aiming a spray of water against the aphids to knock them off (which actually kills a large percentage of them, while not harming the beneficials) is okay if you want to speed the process. 

In the photo, I count 14 golden mummies (mostly on the right, but three in the population of aphids on the left) and estimate about 100 aphids, so our IPM is working. Our earlier outbreak on the lupine was the same way, and it resolved itself without intervention.

ryan 4/22