If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Dig In
The hot weather of August and early September would seem to preclude gardening, but it doesn’t.
The end of summer is the beginning of a new season in the garden. You can sow seeds of things you plan to plant in the fall, prepare beds as soon as they become empty of summer’s vegetables or flowers, even plant a few things right now.
In my garden, I’ve already turned several beds and added more compost in preparation for fall. Seeds are sprouting in little wooden flats, including several kinds of lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower and some apricot-colored foxgloves.
Though they happened to germinate during that cool weather a week ago, they’ve sprouted as quickly during much hotter weather in other years. Even these cool-weather crops like a warm start.
Sowing them now means they’ll be ready to go out into the garden in September to take the place of summer vegetables that have finished.
Some gardening friends have complained that their tomatoes are already finished and that their plants are so diseased they are going to rip them out. Others say their tomatoes simply stopped bearing.
There’s not much you can do about disease at this point in the year, but tomatoes that simply stopped bearing might begin again as the weather cools.
You can also plant some varieties of tomatoes now in those areas from East Los Angeles to Orange County that have mild winters. ‘Celebrity,’ ‘Champion’ and ‘Sweet 100’ are varieties that will produce through winter if planted now.
Tomato Taste Test
We recently held a little tomato contest at The Times, to see who on the editorial staff grew the best-tasting tomatoes. We’ve held it for several years, and the winners this year were the same couple who won last year.
They entered different varieties this time but still won first and second place, which suggests that soil, location and care are more important than variety. For the record, this year they grew a nearly unknown variety named ‘Ruby cabernet,’ last year, one named ‘Euclid.’
Their secrets: They fertilize only when they plant, digging compost into the soil. They water only with drip and they water infrequently (once or twice a week). They plant the tomatoes against a warm, south-facing wall in April. And they live in Altadena, one of the better tomato climates.
Those who pulled out their tomatoes because of disease might try digging homemade compost into the soil before planting next year, then mulching the plants with more compost. Some research indicates that a thick mulch suppresses disease by keeping water from splashing spores onto the foliage.
Watering from underneath--never wetting the leaves--also helps.
The third place winner (out of 17) was a new early variety named ‘First Lady’ that we mentioned in the spring. It was grown on the cooler Westside. However, it too was fertilized only at planting time with compost dug in, was watered infrequently (every couple of weeks, in this case, since the weather is so mild) and grew against a south-facing wall, though it was planted in early March.
That it did so well against other competitors, including the beloved ‘Early Girl,’ means that it’s one you might try next spring.
Late Summer Surprise
I had forgotten that I’d planted them, so last week I was surprised by flowers that appeared out of nowhere in a wonderful dusky shade of red, a color unlike anything else in the garden.
The flowers were from a recently introduced bulb that blooms in late summer, at about the same time as the common, old-fashioned Amaryllis belladonna, the so-called naked lady. In fact, it’s being sold as “red Amaryllis belladonna” though it is actually a relative named Rhodophiala bifida.
Like the naked lady, it blooms before it makes leaves, which appear later in fall.
Don’t look for the bulbs at this time of year, however. They show up at nurseries starting in January.
The stems are about a foot tall, and clusters of amaryllis-like flowers open over several days.
The bulbs, which look a bit like paperwhite bulbs, will multiply and spread in our climate.
Hot News
Everyone is familiar with the USDA’s climate zone maps, which are printed in almost every garden book.
Now you can look forward to another map appearing in books, developed by the American Horticultural Society.
The USDA map is based on how cold it gets, and the new map shows how hot it is in different parts of the country.
It is called a “Plant Heat-Zone Map,” and the different zones are determined by how many days they experience temperatures higher than 86 degrees.
There are 12 zones and, surprisingly, much of urban Southern California is in zones 2 through 5, as is the Seattle area. Florida and Texas have the hottest spots (Zone 12) and much of the Southwest and part of our own deserts are in Zones 10 and 11.
Near the coast, however, the weather is much milder--milder than much of the East Coast.
Interestingly, the society says it found that five of the 10 hottest years on record nationwide occurred in the 1990s and that the average growing season in the 1990s was seven to 11 days longer than in the 1980s, perhaps signs that there is a greenhouse effect after all.
One of the first books to use this new map will be called “Successful Summer Gardening: How to Choose Plants That Thrive in Your Region’s Warmest Weather,” to be published next spring by the horticultural society.
The new map should make national gardening books more useful, but these heat zones will still be less useful than the zones Sunset lists in the New Western Garden Book (Sunset).
