For cool-season edibles: Kranz and Savio recommend easy-to-grow annuals such as broccoli, radishes, lettuce, chard, kale, parsley and peas during the cool season. Plant seeds but also buy a few seedlings to speed up and stagger your harvest. And try different varieties to see which ones grow best in your soil and best suit your tastes. You’ll know your greens are done when the leaves turn bitter and the plant produces a tall flower stalk and goes to seed. That’s not all bad. Arugula flowers, for instance, are beautiful and as tasty as the leaves.
For cool-season flowers: Flowers are an integral part of Kranz’s gardens. Among her favorites are poppies, both the bright orange California native annuals that bloom and reseed themselves every year and more exotic poppies. such as breadseed, peony and Jimi’s Flag poppies. She keeps an eye on the weather forecast and tries to scatter poppy seeds between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, just before a rain, so the tiny seeds can get watered into the soil.
Other cool-season favorite flowers are sweet peas, which produce tons of fragrant, colorful flowers that require staking; bachelor buttons; and nigella, which Kranz said reminds her of fairy flowers.
For warm-season edibles: Again, consider how much space you have and prepare to plant thickly, Kranz said. Tomatoes are a summer must, but grow these from seedlings and try different varieties to stagger your harvest. Sweet cherry tomatoes such as Sungold, one of her favorites, will produce more abundantly and quickly than heirloom tomatoes, which can take many more weeks to set fruit and ripen.
Other good summer crops for beginners: summer squash, hot peppers (bell peppers can be tricky, unless you try baby bells, she said), cucumbers (which need support, such as a trellis) and green beans, which don’t need staking as long as you choose bush varieties. Corn and pumpkins are fun and easy to grow from seed, Kranz said, but require a lot of space. If you have room, try putting them in the same space with beans, which use the corn for support and add nitrogen to the soil.
For warm-season flowers: Sow flowers throughout your garden to make it pretty and to encourage beneficial insects. Kranz always plants African basil seedlings and lets them bloom because the fragrant purple stalks are bee magnets. Sunflower, cosmos and fennel can be planted from seed.
Dahlias are one of her favorite summer flowers. They grow from bulbs that must be dug up each fall in colder parts of the country but can stay in the ground in temperate Southern California. Dahlia blooms come in a variety of colors and sizes, but Kranz said she purchases organic bulbs. Her three sources are Zephyros Farm and Garden, Siskiyou Seeds and Fruition Seeds.