Sustainable Fairfax

Bringing people together to support a vital environment and thriving community

Garden Tips

Garden Tips for January

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It’s bare-root season! Plant-bare root fruit trees, roses, berry vines, etc. Some nurseries will prune the tree for you before you take it home.

Start vegetables indoors: Broccoli, cabbage (early varieties), cauliflower, celery, kale, Romaine lettuce, peas, artichoke, chard, leeks, rhubarb, spinach.

Garden upkeep: Prune fruit trees and roses, Cover frost-tender plants (Leave plants already damaged by frost alone. Prune blackened branches and leaves in April, when the true damage will be more apparent).

Take your living Christmas tree back outside If you plan on planting it in the ground, remember that most of them get very large. If your tree is going in the compost, Marin Sanitary Service is picking trees up at the curb through the month of January.

It is a great time to sheet mulch weedy areas or lawn that you want to convert to drought tolerant plantings. Find out more about sheet mulching here.

October Garden Tips

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Plant native trees, shrubs, and perennials. Fall is the time to plant natives. The cooler weather lets plants transition with less stress, rain is more plentiful, and the warm soil encourages root growth for a head-start in Spring. Also, many of the native plant nurseries in our area have sales at this time of year!

Clean up foliage but put diseased leaves in the green bin. Your home compost pile may not get warm enough to kill harmful diseases at this time of year.

Divide your spring-blooming plants like irises, as well as ornamental grasses. Later bloomers that can also be divided include black-eyed Susans, geraniums, coneflowers, and yarrows.

Leave the dead stalks of purple coneflower, black-eyed Susans, sunflowers, and other plants whose seeds or berries feeds birds through the winter.

Create habitats for beneficial insects. In our area, we have to be careful not to let brush piles accumulate because of fire danger. Creating a habitat for beneficial insects will give helpers like spiders, solitary bees, and beneficial beetles like ladybugs a home for the winter.
Find instructions here:

Building an Insect Hotel

Put your beds to bed! Any vegetable beds or unused plots can be protected over winter with mulching to help prevent erosion and weed growth, or with a living cover crop like winter peas (Pisum sativum), oats, vetch, and even fava beans. These plants improve soil biology, but should be mown or cut and either mulched in or added to your compost before they go to seed. Put your asparagus to bed with a layer of compost and a layer of straw or leaves to get them ready for a strong start in the spring.

August Garden Tips

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August is a tough month in the garden for our area. This far into the dry season, the extra heat can really be hard on tender plants. Even natives, if they’re not established, or are used to gentle coastal fogs, may need extra water at this time of the year. Stressed plants not only wither, but become more susceptible to pests and diseases. On hot days, citrus and other fruit trees may drop fruit if they do not receive enough water this month.

Make sure your trees and beds have a thick, water-retaining layer of mulch to regulate solid temperature and avoid damage from drought. Getting your garden chores out of the way early in the morning is a great way for you to avoid the excessive heat, too.

Tasks for August:

  • Deadhead the flowers that you will not be keeping for seed.
  • Prune berry vines when you have finished harvesting the fruit.
  • Place ripening melons on inverted aluminum pie tins, tiles, or boards to keep them off the soil. This avoids damage from overnight dampness and vermin, and reduces insect damage. The aluminum reflects heat, which helps the fruit ripen.
  • Prop up fruit-heavy tree branches so they won’t break.
  • Shade greens from intense sun.
  • Pick up fallen fruit so it won’t attract pests or breed disease.
  • Set out winter-garden vegetables during the next months. Peas, beets and other root crops can be grown from seed.
  • Fertilize your heavy feeders, like corn, cucumbers, squash, lettuce and onions, using an organic fertilizer. A dilute solution of fish fertilizer once a week works well.
  • Harvest herbs for drying.

July Garden Tips

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Here are some tips for managing your garden as the July heat ramps up.

Save for next year: Mark the plants that you will be collecting seed from with ribbon or string. Choose the strongest, healthiest plants. For plants with delicate seeds, wrap cheesecloth around the seed pods to collect seeds before they disperse naturally.

Keep mulching! Continue to add wood chips or other mulch to retain moisture and regulate temperatures.

Get a Jump on Fall: Start or set out your starts for fall crops like cauliflower and broccoli, kale and bok choi.

Sow beans and late-season squash.

Start your beets, carrots, and chard.

Be patient: As hard as it is when the garden looks a little sparse, try to hold off installing new perennials, especially natives, until the fall.

Water first-season natives: Make sure newly-planted natives, even drought-tolerant ones, receive some supplemental water in this heat. Once established, these plants may need little to no supplemental water, but while they’re developing their root systems, they will need some help. Your efforts will be rewarded with tough, drought-tolerant plantings in the following years.

Oro Negro: Turning Food Waste into Gold

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Oro negro! declared the late Pedro Hernandez as he dug the compost each winter. Black gold! Pedro was from Guatemala and gardened fourteen years for my dear English landlady. My sister, who lives in Hawaii, likes to tell me about showing her house to guests; her tours always include her compost full of worms. Certain that they find this odd, she does it anyway, sharing her love of transforming old vegetables, fruits, and grass clippings into fine loose soil.

It’s organic. It will go into the earth said our mother, allowing my sister and me to throw apple cores out the car window (do not do this now, you could be arrested!). I experienced my first compost as a child, living in rural Colorado. Since then I have lived in many places—town and country—and nearly always had a compost; I cannot bear to throw out good kitchen scraps. Sometimes, quietly, I bring scraps home if a compost is unavailable.

My sister and I make an uneasy peace with uneaten food knowing it will make happy plants and worms. We also monitor our purchases as best we can, not always an easy task when plans change or we buy more than we can eat.

Food waste is a big problem in America as NPR reported last fall. Statistics indicate that we waste 40 percent of our food. In Marin, over 25% of our landfill waste is food. Recently I learned that organic matter in landfills is a source of global warming creating at least two greenhouse gases, methane and carbon dioxide (CO2). Methane is particularly harmful, 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Composting greatly reduces methane production. Additionally it holds onto the carbon dioxide it creates, making it available for plants to use. Pretty cool!

Composting not only creates less waste, greenhouse emissions, but better health with oro negro for our farms and gardens. According to Marin Sanitary Services (MSS), 20% of Fairfax residents use their green bins for food waste and 47% use them for yard waste. What do you do?

Composting Tips: Composting is an art and a science; there are many ways to do it. The tips here are simple. To get a deeper knowledge of this art sign up for Sustainable Fairfax’s newsletter and learn about upcoming composting and worm bin workshops.

First. You will need to set up a system for transferring your kitchen waste to your green bin. There are many types of containers available commercially (see photos). Or be creative like my friend Leanne who uses an etched glass cookie jar.

Second. Decide whether you want to compost at home or let Marin Sanitary do it for you. In either case, collect your food scraps!

Keep it at home. Designate a spot in your yard for your compost—even a simple pile works. Empty your container and use a shovel to lightly cover the fresh scraps with a bit of dirt, grass, wood ash, woodchips, or straw. To aerate your pile, turn it occasionally. Or dig your scraps directly into the earth as my friend does in the narrow garden bed edging his small bungalow. That’s it! Negro Oro!

For a more contained pile, purchase an enclosed compost bin; there are many types available. Or make a cylinder of chicken wire, as small or big as suits your space (see photos). Watch it become crumbly dark soil and use it to top dress your plants.

Or send it away via your MSS green bin to their composting facility in Zamora, Yolo County. Using current technology and constant monitoring they make a good hot compost, between 140º-170º. The resulting compost is distributed to farmers. Each year, several free deliveries are made to Fairfax residents (see Sustainable Fairfax’s calendar for delivery dates).

You can put all your food scraps, vegetable and animal, plus food soiled paper bags, napkins, and towels in the green bin. High heat composts kill pathogens, transforming animal products into soil. Do not put animal scraps into your home compost. Follow this link to learn what goes in your green waste bin. Please note that you cannot put compostable bio-plastics in the green bin—at least not yet!

Keep your green bin clean by putting food scraps in a paper bag before you dump them. Or line the bottom with yard trimmings, newspaper, or paper bags. Like my grandmother Grace, I freeze any animal and dairy scraps before putting them in the green bin just before pick-up. This cuts down on smells and fools the critters.

See Deborah Koons Garcia’s documentary, Symphony of the Soil. It will inspire you!

Please comment on your own composting tips and questions.

Have fun and feed the worms!