Isn't it a little late for melons?

 I've continued struggling with the soil conditions over the past two weeks, and have managed to get about half of the soil loosened and watered enough to plant.  I found some garden gloves, and without any intervention on my part, the ants are mysteriously all but gone from my plot. There's some question as to what I should be planting right now, though.  I'm on the opposite end of my traditional growing season, and in a different climate.  Back home, I'd plant a fall garden: cool weather crops like kale, lettuce, peas, broccoli, maybe one last round of carrots, some quick or non-fussy crops like radishes, and garlic for harvest in May or June.  I won't be here in June, so garlic is off the list for now.  It's also not especially cool yet.  The daytime temperatures still hover around 90, and on Monday (October 1, for those of you keeping score at home) there's a predicted high of 104.  Yowza!  In Massachusetts, that would be considered summer weather.

After planting lettuce, sunflowers, and
spinach (left) and melons (hill on right)

Based on that, I decided to try some summer crops this September, moving into fall crops as cooler weather arrives in mid-October or November.  I ordered a bunch of things from Seed Savers Exchange, a seed-saving organization of which I'm a member.  I ended up with blue jade corn, two inch strawberry popcorn, Taiyo sunflowers, gold medal tomatoes, Cheyenne bush pumpkins, and Romanesco broccoli, and Seed Savers threw in a packet of speckled paste tomatoes and boule d'or melons as well.  I also had some leftovers kicking around from my summer garden back home: royalty purple pod string beans, provider string beans, green arrow peas, merveille des quatre saisons butterhead lettuce, and Bloomsdale spinach.  And don't forget the chiles: Thai hot peppers, mustard habañeros, chocolate habañeros, serranos, and Pearl peppers, a genetically unique varietal I received from another Seed Savers member.  I have a lot to choose from.

So far I have planted spinach, lettuce, sunflowers, melons, corn (blue jade only, for now), both tomatoes, and pumpkins.  In playing this guessing game, I don't think I've come up with all correct answers though.  I met my garden plot neighbor to the left last week, and when I told her what I was planting, she said, "Huh, isn't it a little late for melons?" I honestly had no idea if it was late for melons, so I shrugged and said, "Maybe, I guess we'll see."  I waited anxiously for a few days--I'm always convinced I've killed everything by planting it wrong until it finally comes up--and I discovered that apparently it's not too late for melons, since they germinated.  My city is in zone 9, so I don't have to worry too much about frost, although it does get cold at night in the winter months.  Maybe I'll make little blankets for the plants.

Sunflower seedlings 9/24

The only other thing that has germinated besides the melons is the sunflowers.  The seeds I saved from that sunflower head have come in with gusto, including in places where I didn't intend to plant them.  I've transplanted most of the volunteer sunflowers to more suitable locations.  However, today I discovered some more volunteers: carrots.  As I was digging up the old carrot plants, clumps of seeds shook loose and buried themselves in the dirt.  Now, with the watering and warm soil temperature, they're coming up everywhere.  I think I'm just going to go with it--leave them where they are, thin them in a week or so where there are too many, and work around it.  I had a whole garden plan drawn up, and carrots are not part of it, but only because I didn't buy the seeds, not because I dislike them.  Now I'm just waiting for the seeds I planted to germinate.

A4

After the Russian novel explaining how I got into gardening, I thought it might be time to actually talk about my current garden.  Actually, A4 isn't really a garden yet; it's more of an irrigated dirt patch.  But that's close enough! I broke ground there two weeks ago, once again with a hopelessly optimistic schedule in mind.  I went there that day with the intention to loosen the soil with a garden fork and then immediately plant the first of my fall crops.  When I got there, the garden fork went in two inches before hitting a bone-dry, hard-packed mix of sand and rock.  We're gonna need a bigger boat, folks.  I tried again with a shovel, digging down into the sand and mixing it with the thin layer of loose topsoil.  In two hours, I managed to loosen an area four feet by six feet.  Is anyone else starting to sense a theme of hubris here?

A4 before, prima vista

In the picture you can see carrots gone to seed and dead from the heat, some unidentifiable brassica likewise parched, and a toppled sunflower, easily 8 feet tall.  Add to that a fine crop of weeds, and I had my work cut out for me.  I spent a few hours clearing this 10x20 plot, and quickly realized I was going to need three things: sturdy work gloves, organic ant killer, and a lot of patience.

There are a variety of weeds that call A4 home, including creeping spurge, knotweed, purslane, and my personal least favorite, goat's head.  I had never encountered the weed known as goat's head before coming to California.  They are truly the worst little plants I have ever known.  Ubiquitous, with a sprawling growth habit and rhizomes to self-propagate, they seem to appear overnight.  I pull one up, and miss the taproot, so it's back the next week.  I pull another up, getting the taproot and also getting viciously stabbed by one of the seedpods in the process.  And since they're the hardiest things growing in my plot, they provide a shady hiding spot for fire ants.

The fire ants are the other big problem.  They aren't terribly aggressive, but when the bite, does it ever sting!  The entire parcel uses only organic methods, so I resolved to mix up a good ol' solution of Borax and brown sugar for my insect frenemies.

I did get a few prizes for my work clearing the plot: the sunflower head was still full of seeds, most of which appeared to be viable.  I also found two misshapen but edible-looking carrots, and I considered taking them home, but I usually like to know something about what I'm eating.

Since there is no soil structure to speak of in my plot, I plan to essentially dig up the soil to loosen it enough for deep rooting, and then add a considerable layer of composted manure to the top.  The other major problem with the soil currently is that it is sandy and won't hold water.  Everything I dug up was dry and dusty, none of the humidity in the soil I'm used to in New England.  So I watered it all down to try and get some moisture into the soil.  I also watered a bit I hadn't dug up yet.  More to come...

The beginning, continued

The seeds showed up in the mail, and I began planning the garden. I drew up a plan for the garden beds, calculated how much wood and chicken wire we'd need, consulted growing manuals to decide where to plant each of my mini-crops, and created an impossibly optimistic calendar for my summer. I set aside one week at the beginning of the summer to create the actual garden before I started my full-time summer job. I had decided on three 3x9 deeply dug raised beds, and immediately set about digging them. It was only 81 square feet, and I was (naïvely) convinced that I could knock that out of the way in one day, maybe two days at the outside. Ha! By the end of the first day, I had dug one puny 3x9 bed, removing three large rocks from soil in the process, and I was more exhausted and filthy than I had ever been in my life. Suffice to day, it took more than a week to build the new infrastructure, even with considerable help from my family, my dad in particular. That's perhaps my most valuable lesson I've gleaned from gardening so far: everything takes longer than you have any reason to think it will. Being on schedule is a great goal, but, at least for me, it is also very rare.

That summer, I leapt into vegetable gardening. I grew three kinds of tomatoes, tomatillos, spinach, string beans, two kinds of lettuce, two kinds of potatoes, hot peppers, and sweet peppers. Growing was just as much fun as I'd hoped it would be, and with an electric fence to keep the critters out, it seemed much more possible to grow actual food. I also grew a garden this past summer, with different vegetables: radishes, beets, carrots, kale, two chards, peas, four lettuces, potatoes, two string beans, three tomatoes, zucchini, and pumpkins. I was sad to leave my garden when it came time to go back to school, until I realized that I could have a garden out here.

For my school's community service requirement, I worked on the school's "farm," which at that time was 2 weedy, sandy acres behind the on-campus apartments. Mostly I turned the compost pile and weeded the one plot of produce crops, but they were also developing community plots for any students, faculty, or staff to rent by the semester. I now live in those on-campus apartments, and decided it was time to have a school garden, too. I am now the proud tenant of plot A4. 

However, that doesn't mean it's smooth sailing from here. I've never grown in Southern California before, and consequently am facing totally different challenges than the ones I've focused on in the Northeast. Climate, weather patterns, day length, pests, planting times are all different here. This is my attempt to muddle through it, and hopefully learn from other gardeners.

The beginning: why beets?

I bet this looks like sort of a hipster blog, with a name like Drop beets, not bombs.  So what's the deal here?  I'm pretty sure I'm not a hipster.  One of my roommates said last night that I'm not a hipster, as we were coming back from seeing a band you've probably never heard of, man.  But I digress.  My intent is not to create another blog that critiques pop culture, since I don't really think I can add anything useful to that narrative.  I'm not a culture critic, I'm a musician--a classical singer, actually.  I'm currently pursuing a Bachelor of Music at a California liberal arts university.  So what am I doing writing a vegetable gardening blog?

I'm an accidental gardener.  I began composting in high school, to put my family's food waste to good use.  I didn't have any use for the finished compost at the time, so I helped my mom spread it on her flowerbeds.  I guess the compost wasn't as finished as I thought, because a few weeks later, my mom found two errant tomato plants mixed in with her bachelor's buttons.  Since they'd already gotten going, we figured we'd keep them and move them to a bed of their own.  I knew next to nothing about plants in general, much less the care and feeding of tomatoes.  I dug a hole in a sunny spot, threw them in, and hoped for the best.  I didn't water them enough, staked them too late, and did just about everything wrong.  They still set fruit anyway, and then some furry critters chewed holes in all the green tomatoes before they had a chance to ripen.  I got one tomato the size of a golf ball that year, and came away frustrated and wondering why anyone would ever try to grow food.

I remained more or less in that frame of mind until, on a flight back to school after break, I saw an excerpt in my in-flight magazine from Kristin Kimball's memoir on food and farming, The Dirty Life.  Kimball was a Harvard-educated journalist living in New York when she met Mark, a first-generation farmer, while researching a story on local, organic food.  She was immediately smitten with farming, and soon after with Mark.  The book is the story of their first tumultuous year of farming together.

For weeks, I couldn't get my mind off of Kimball's story.  I was convinced my infatuation with growing things would be short-lived, so I decided to test it by looking at some seed catalogs.  That would definitely be boring, and cure me for sure.  To my everlasting surprise, I was fascinated, and found myself pitching the idea of digging up a sizable chunk of the backyard for a vegetable garden.  My parents agreed, and thus began the intentional part of my garden adventure.