California Native Plants, colorful foliage

Fall Color for the Santa Cruz Mountains

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The end of daylight savings time signals to me that autumn is really here in our mild California surroundings. We may not have as many fall color foliage trees and shrubs as other states but we love ours just as much.  Besides we don’t get snow two days before Halloween. Can you imagine? Enjoy these crisp mornings and warm days and to make your garden more compelling, try mixing in trees and shrubs with bold leaves and a wide range of autumn color.

Bright trees and shrubs add color flashes to fall gardens. Sasanqua camellias have already started blooming and will continue to flower throughout the winter. In addition to asters and rudbeckia, Japanese anemones are the stars of the border at this time of year. The electric blue flowers of dwarf plumbago contrast with reddish leaves as night temperatures dip. Summer Snowflake viburnum, Encore azalea, Endless Summer hydrangea and loropetalum are blooming now, too.

But what about vivid foliage in the garden? Which plants put on the best show in our area? Here are some of my favorites.

We are all familiar with the brilliant fall color of Japanese maples. Bloodgood is probably the single most popular upright purple-leaved variety seen in gardens. Beautiful in color and form, it’s easy to grow and fits nicely in the smaller garden.

A great tree for the gardener interested in edibles is the Fuyu persimmon. This beautiful small tree is ornamental with glossy green leaves and also offers a dramatic fall display in shades of yellow, orange and red. Bright orange fruit begins to develop in late October and clings to bare branches usually through December. The tree looks more like it’s covered with holiday ornaments than fruit. And have you priced persimmons in the store lately?

Blueberries are a must for the edible gardener. They can used to make a beautiful hedge that provides showy red or yellow fall color.  Because of our colder winters here in the mountains, we can grow both northern highbush which are self-fertile and southern highbush which produce better with another type to pollinize them. They can be great foundation plants around the home as well as in the garden.

A vine that lights up with the onset of autumn is Rogers Red California grape. If you have an arbor, wall or fence that need covering quickly, this is your plant. The green and gray leaves are transformed in autumn into great draperies of rich, scarlet red leaves with clusters of summer fruit turning all shades of purple.

Japanese barberries are deer resistant, low water-use small shrubs that make them superb hedge plants, background plants against fences and foundations or accent plants. Red or lime colored summer foliage changes to orange, red or amber in the fall. I love the graceful growing habit of many of the varieties but there are pillar forms and also dwarf types.

Bright foliage on trees like red maples, liquidamber, Chinese pistache, ginkgo, ornamental pear, cherry or crabapple, dogwood, goldenrain, locust, katsura, oak, redbud, sumac and witchhazel all add to the fall drama of the landscape.

Light up your garden as the light fades and the days shorten. I know my garden needs a greater variety of fall color than just the Japanese maples in pots on the deck and the barberries. Maybe I’ll add a purple smoke bush with leaves than turn luminous scarlet to add color flashes to my fall garden.
 

edibles, fertilizing, organic fertilizers, organic gardening, pests, soggy soil, sustainable gardening, vegetables

Lindencroft Farm- a CSA part 2

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Lindencroft Farm is a great example of a local family doing what they love and making a living, too. You can see it in the new crop of Necores carrots just sprouting and being watched over by the family farm cat that was sitting on the edge of the retaining wall. Linda explained this is one of her favorite carrots because she doesn’t have trouble with it forking and it isn’t bothered by summer heat. Every  crop that is grown on the farm is researched for best flavor and vigor.

Linda Butler  starts all her vegetables from seed, and grows year-round. Some are started directly in the beds while others are started in flats and transplanted later. Cole crops, such as broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, would get eaten by bugs and birds would eat them as fast as they germinated so these are started in flats.

Walking around, I saw many Italian names as she specializes in Italian peppers. She gets seed from organic seed companies in this country, Italy and France.  Some of her favorite vegetables are Rosa Bianca eggplant as it is almost never bitter. She also likes Red Russian and Lacinato or dinosaur kale.

Tat soy and bok choy are favorites in the CSA boxes. She grows beans of all types– french filet, romano, shelling. Golden beets ( my personal favorite ), all kinds of potatoes- fingerlings, Russian banana, red thumb, German butter, red lasoda and other heirlooms. The beds overflow with life.

I tasted the last of the cherry tomatoes. Rosalita, a red grape type, was good but the white cherry tomato was the best. Herbs grow in several boxes and the farm can’t seem to grow enough asparagus to satisfy the demand.

Insect control is easy,  Linda said. If fungal diseases persist she plants a crop of beans and that seems to solve it. Occasionally aphids or spider mites get the upper had, but rather than spray even with organic soap she finds she has better results by monitoring the plants often and spraying with a hard blast of water or cutting or pulling out infested plants. For fava beans that seem to always attract big black aphids, she harvest the beans and flowers while very young before aphids get a hold.

The farm is entirely powered by 78 solar panels. Recaptured rainwater is stored in a rainwater basin that holds a half a million gallons and is filtered twice before using. They collect this from just 2-3 good winter storms. Water from their own deep well is used in the beginning of the year with the rainwater used in the hot summer months.

I asked Linda if the cool spring this year impacted her plants and she said yes, ‘"Everything is three weeks late."  Our early October rains caused her tomatoes to get fungal diseased so they had to harvest them all, while some of the squash now has powdery mildew and has to be pulled up early. As we were talking she told some workers harvesting squash in another part of the farm to cut out the growing tips so the remaining squash would receive all the energy of the plant to ripen before the weather turns cold. The sunflowers being visited by a flock of chickadees was looking a bit bedraggled, too.

We watched some workers putting up frames for plastic hoop houses that will protect peppers crops from the rains and extend the harvest this year. Even potatoes benefit from this cover as overly wet soil contributes to fungal diseases. Lettuces, chard, kale and other leafy greens would get tattered by the rains if not covered.

Walking and talking, Linda would reach down and pick a sprig of bronze fennel or hyssop for me to enjoy. it’s clear that she is gentle on the earth and a good steward of the land. The entire farm is surrounded by redwood forest and oak meadowland, teaming with wildlife. Her philosophy of farming is to gently coax the best produce by creating as natural an environment as she can. Each year, the farm is healthier, most robust and more beautiful than the last.
 

organic fertilizers, pests

A Community Supported Agriculture Farm in Ben Lomond

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My friend, Janie, shares some of the vegetables she gets in her weekly Community Supported Agriculture box with me. I like leafy greens while she devours the peppers, lettuces, potatoes, beans – whatever is in season and harvested fresh and delicious that week.

I’d heard about a fabulous place in the Ben Lomond hills, so called Linda Butler, the owner of Lindencroft Farm, to arrange a visit. I learned so much from Linda who took time out from running the farm to show me around.

Linda and her husband, Steven, started the farm in 2007. Their 90 acres is zoned mixed agriculture but since some of it encompasses rare Ben Lomond sandhills habitat, they farm just a couple of acres. They have even installed a wide deer corridor separating the growing areas to allow the deer access to their feeding and watering places.Tall fences protect the beds from other critters but they encourage the birds and bees by planting flowers that seed, attract beneficial insects and produce pollen.

Linda has recently installed a couple of bee hives. She became interested in bees when native bees swarmed for 3 years in a row. She put up boxes one year hoping they would set up housekeeping on the farm, but they failed to come again. Undaunted she bought some bees and the hives are doing well. She doesn’t plan to harvest the honey, she just likes bees.

The Ben Lomond sandhills are an amazing ecosystem and the native plants have adapted to the pure white, fine sand. Vegetables, however, like rich soil to thrive. The Butlers solved this by building special raised beds. First they excavated 3 feet of the sandy soil, lined each bed with steel hardware cloth for gopher control and refilled them with a mix of organic compost, aged and composted horse manure and native soil.

Then they surrounded the beds with a redwood frame. From that point on, the beds are never tilled, compacted or otherwise disturbed by machines or feet. They are refreshed between crops with organic compost.

Asked why the beds are all so deep, Linda explained that she rotates crops regularly and wants to be able to plant deep rooted vegetables, like tomatoes, anywhere she wants. There are now 200 beds in production.

For the first couple of crops in a new bed, she grows leafy greens to establish beneficial microbes in the soil. Larger veggies come later and as she doesn’t till the soil, the microbes aren’t disturbed in any way. Liquid kelp and compost tea are also used for foliar feeding and soil drench. Fish bone meal, not fish meal, which is too high i nitrogen, is also applied to crops.

Starting with just a few play group moms, the farm now grows for two restaurants and harvests enough for a limited number of CSA boxes. A chef from one of the restaurants uses chicory, a bitter green   braised and used under rich meats.  Another chef makes sausages from grass fed beef and sweetens them with bronze fennel tops and young, fresh seed for flavoring. Those who subscribe to a weekly CSA box enjoy a different mix -lettuces, chard, cole crops, peppers, tomatoes herbs – to name just a few.

Next week in Part 2, I’ll talk about how Linda grows all this wonderful produce and which varieties are her favorites.
 

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