 He specializes in organic fruit and vegetable gardening. Today's workshop Fall Vegetable Gardening will cover what to plant and when as well as other topics but in San Francisco's unique microclimate what to plant and when. Thank you for joining us today and let's give a digital welcome to Jonathan Prop. Thank you, Jonathan. You need to unmute Jonathan. Okay. There you go. Hello everyone. I'm Jonathan Prop. I'm a master gardener down here in Menlo Park in Balmy Southern San Mateo County. I've been a master gardener since 2008 and I specialize in organic fruit and vegetable gardening. I was just checking on the chat to see whether all the people in the class were from San Francisco as I've sort of targeted the presentation at San Francisco. I see we have someone from San Jose which is certainly within range. Everything should apply. We do have someone from Portland. I'm assuming that's Oregon and you're, oh wow, okay, San Luis Obispo County. Okay. And one in Portland, Oregon. Now, Portland, your fall and winter weather is going to be a little bit different and you know I can touch on that as we go along. Okay. So we'll take about an hour here to go through the presentation. As Ramon said, you'll all be getting a copy of the presentation afterward. We'll then break for questions. Oriti will be collecting all the questions and we'll do, depending on how many questions there are, we'll do roughly half an hour of questions. All right. So let's get started. Here's our agenda today. We'll just focus on microclimates a little bit. It's a little bit nerdy but I am known as the weather nerd of the local master gardeners. And I think it's important to understand our climate here so that you understand what's going on in the fall and the winter and why we're in a bit of a unique situation here compared to some other parts of the country. The main focus will be on planting. I'm sure that's what most of you are interested in. What should I be planting now? How do I plant it, et cetera? And then we're going to spend a fair bit on soil care because soil care is really critical to growing healthy vegetables. We'll cover crop rotation, cover cropping, and then just a brief bit on pest management. And there are some resources in the chat window. You see ANR which is University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. That's the parent organization of the master gardeners. They have a wealth of information there for the home gardener. And also the website of our organization, the San Francisco San Mateo County Master Gardeners, we have a wealth of information up there as well. So let's get started. Let's talk climate. So this is a map of world ocean currents. Red is warm currents. You've all heard of the Gulf Stream along the East Coast. Blue is cold. And you'll notice that California has a cold ocean current. If you're at all crazy, like my brother and sister-in-law who swim in the bay and swim in the Pacific Ocean, you know that the water temperature rarely gets out of the 50s off our coast. And it's because it's coming down straight from Alaska. And that in fact is what makes our marine ecosystem so rich and plentiful off the coast. It's that cold water supporting all the microorganisms in the ocean. Now that is basically the main influence on our climate and I'll explain why that is. If you look for other cold currents in the world, you'll notice there's one on the West Coast of South America coming up from Antarctica, alongside Chile and Peru. There's one on the Southwest Coast of Africa going up along South Africa here. And there's one along the West Coast of Australia as well coming out of Antarctica. Now what's notable about that is those are all parts of the world that have very similar climates to the climate that we have, which is generally mild winters, mild wet winters, and warm dry summers. And if you're planting things in our area, it's also worth noting that plants native to those parts of the world are going to do really well here. So a lot of Australian native plants, a lot of South African native plants grow really well in California as well as Mediterranean plants. And of course our climate is called a Mediterranean climate because that area is known for its mild wet winters and hot dry summers. That cold ocean current provides what we like to call nature's air conditioning. And this is what's responsible for our very temperate climate here in the summertime. And as we've all been watching the news and reading the headlines about the rest of the world and the rest of the country absolutely roasting this summer, we've had very pleasant summer weather. And that's because we get nature's air conditioning from this cold ocean current. This is actually a satellite photo taken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, and it's from a weather satellite. And what you're seeing is the fog bank just pushed right up against the California coast on a very typical summer day. And here's Monterey Bay in here, and here is the San Francisco Bay area in here, which are two places where the fog loves to drive in. Now what causes this? Well, the ocean currents are very cold. The water temperature is in the 50s, and in the summertime it gets really hot inland. So here's the Central Valley. The temperature gets up in the 90s and the 100s. And what happens is that cold air wants to go and displace the hot air. So it wants to go that way. And so that cold ocean air is driven inland. And we tend to call it fog, and it certainly looks that way when you're standing at the Golden Gate and it's blasting through. In reality, it's cold marine air that's condensing. And what really happens is it settles in as a layer of low clouds. It rushes in in the afternoon, sits there overnight, and then burns off the next morning. And only rarely does it actually show itself as fog along the coast. And that's our nature's air conditioning. If you drive down the peninsula late on a summer's day, you'll see that blanket of marine air going up and over the mountains and down. And this is what causes that. This is a hand-drawn topographic map of the Santa Cruz Mountains. This comes from the book Golden Gate Gardening by Pam Pierce. Pam used to be the San Francisco Chronicle Garden critic many years ago. And if you are a gardener in San Francisco, Golden Gate Gardening is still the standard for what you can grow and how you grow things in San Francisco. Now, to explain this, we're looking from the west at the Santa Cruz Mountains. T is Mount Tan up here. M is not sure what M is. G is the Golden Gate. It's the only pure gap in the mountain range. This is the San Bruno Gap. This is the Crystal Springs Gap where Highway 92 goes over to Half Moon Bay. And then this is Mount Loma Prieta, south of Highway 17. So what happens is the cold air wants to go blasting through here to the Central Valley, but it's blocked. And so it's going to go in those places where it can, which is why the Golden Gate is always so windy and cold on a typical summer afternoon. And if you've, if for those people who live in the hills of San Mateo or Belmont, they know those afternoon winds come blasting through the Crystal Springs Gap. And if you'll remember the San Bruno Gap, which is just south of San Bruno Mountain in south San Francisco, the city of San Francisco notoriously built a baseball and football stadium named Candlestick Park right at the eastern end of the San Bruno Gap, which was a really bad place to put a stadium because it was always cold and windy. The result of this, and this is kind of the point of all this, is that we have these incredible microclimates in the summer because the fog is, or the cold air is hugging the coast, keeping the coast very cold, but it can't necessarily get over the hills. So it's going to blast through the San Francisco Bay here. It's going to filter through the gaps in here, and then it spreads on down through the bay. It spreads up north through San Pablo Bay and makes Napa and Sonoma one of the best wine growing regions in the world. And this is a map again from the National Weather Service on a very typical summer day. We had several days like this, this summer, and you can see the temperature spread from basically 60 degrees at the coast to over 100 in Dublin, Pleasanton, Livermore, what they call the Tri Valley area. That's an incredible spread for what's less than 50 miles, okay? And we get all these little microclimates, even within San Francisco, you're going to have 10 or 15 degree difference from the sunset to South of Market and Portrero Valley, right? And then you get a lot of that cool marine air influencing the bay shore here and here, but what's interesting is that it doesn't filter in to Woodside, Atherton, Portola Valley area, which is what we call the banana belt of the peninsula. So if I drive from my home in Menlo Park across town on a summer's afternoon, it'll be 15 degrees warmer on the other side of town, and that's going to influence our climate, and it's going to allow you to grow much better summer crops, but it's going to give you cooler winters. Now, key point about the fall is that this starts to break down in the fall, typically sometime in September, because it's not heating up so much in the Central Valley, and that cold marine air, which has been here for August and no sky July and June gloom in May-Grey, is starting to break down. And so what that means is that fall is actually the warmest time of the year in this area, and statistically, the warmest day of the year in San Francisco is October 2nd. Okay? So while the rest of the country worries about July and August, we have very mild sometimes, if you're in San Francisco, downright cold July and August, and October is our warm season. So that's something you need to bear in mind as you think about fall gardening. So if your garden is like my garden, it kind of looks like this right now. It's just, you know, completely overgrown. There's tomatoes and basil and stuff like that, and it's kind of hard to think about fall planting at this point, because your summer crops are still in there, the temperature's warming up, and they could be in there another couple of months. But the reality is that this is the time you need to make some decisions. It's actually a little bit late to be planting a fall garden. If you're going to be harvesting in the fall, you want to be planting in August, September, and we're really at the tail end of that. October is really your time for planting winter crops and cover crops, and we'll cover both of those things. Now, the reason for that is that even though the temperature is warming up, we're losing our daylight. Okay? And so your growing season during the day is shortening. So what that means is if you have raised beds and many of us do have raised beds or, you know, just specific areas where we do our gardening, you're going to have to make some choices. If you're going to plant a fall crop or a winter crop or a cover crop, that means pulling out your summer crops now, much as we all hate to do that. Right? The good news is that you can harvest all those green tomatoes and put them on the counter and they'll ripen eventually. But this is the time to make choices. Do I want to plant a fall crop, which means I'm probably not going to have a winter crop? Or do I want to plant a winter crop? Or do I want to plant a cover crop and not grow anything edible at all? And we'll talk about why you might want to do all those different things. So here's our planted calendar. So we have, if you go to the website of the San Francisco San Mateo County Master Gardeners, we have planting calendars. They were created by Carol O'Donnell, one of our most master gardeners. And it tells you by month what you can plant either as seeds, S, or as transplants, T. And we have three varieties. Because of our microclimates, we need to have three different planting calendars. We have one for the foggy areas of San Francisco and San Mateo County. So if you're in San Francisco, that would be pretty much everything from Twin Peaks West, okay? Sunset, Marina, Presidio, etc. Certainly, Daily City, Pacifica, all the way down the coast, Half Moon Bay, etc. Those are going to be what we call foggy. Then we have one called Hot. And I put that in air quotes because it doesn't get all that hot here compared to the rest of the country. Hot would be Southern San Mateo County, basically Redwood City on South, okay? But again, that's going to vary based on proximity to the Bay. It doesn't get all that hot close to the Bay in Redwood City, Menlo Park, etc. does get much warmer on the west side of Redwood City, Menlo Park, etc. and on into Woodside. Those are hot areas. Sunny is sort of everything in between. So think San Mateo, San Carlos, all pretty much everything says from Redwood City up to kind of Milbray, South San Francisco. Now again, things are going to vary depending on where you are. If you're up in the hills, you get cold afternoon winds, you know, that's not going to be terribly sunny, right? If you're down in the flats, not too close to the bay, that's going to be more sunny. So as I said, we get a lot of variation here and that's why, you know, when I'm answering questions for people about plants, first question I ask them is like, where do you live? Okay. All right, so let's focus in on September, October here in terms of planting. Basically at this point, there's sort of three categories of things you can plant. You can plant any of the leafy greens, okay, because they're going to grow just fine through the winter. Most of them are going to germinate pretty quickly. The one exception probably is Swiss chard. It's starting to get a little late to plant Swiss chard, so you might want to plant that from seedlings rather than from seed. Any of the root crops can be planted. Now they'll grow just fine over the winter. So that includes carrots and kohlrabi, parsnips, radishes, turnips, etc. And the root crops you always want to plant from seed, okay, they don't transplant well at all. So great to plant the root crops now. They'll grow throughout the winter. You harvest them in the spring. This is a great time of year to plant onions and garlic. If you like growing onions and garlic, you plant them now. They overwinter, they shoot up in the spring and then around May you harvest, and then you're ready to put in your summer crops. Then the last category are the cruciferous vegetables, which are broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage. It's a little late to plant those from seed. Right now they take much longer to grow than your leafy greens. So if you are planting any of those cruciferous vegetables, you'll want to plant them from transplants at this point. And again, they're going to overwinter just fine, but you're not going to see much in the way of results until the spring. Okay, so that's what to plant and when, as I said, everyone will get a copy of this presentation so you can look at this in more detail. We can also address questions later on. So winter gardening, you know, the one thing you can't grow during the winter is any of the warm season vegetables. So, you know, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, cucumbers, you know, that stuff just needs more daylight, more heat. Okay, but other than that, the things I mentioned, the cruciferous vegetables, the green leafy vegetables, the other thing I forgot to mention, you can grow peas just fine. You can grow fava beans just fine. They'll just grow through the winter. And why is that? It's because we almost never get a freeze in this area. And again, that's due to that ocean current off our coast. And because the San Francisco Peninsula is sticking right out into the middle of the ocean in the bay, you know, when all the water temperatures in the 50s, it's pretty hard for the air temperature to get down below 32. So you'll almost never see a freeze in San Francisco and you'll rarely see a frost there. Along the bay, it's pretty much about the same. It's pretty rare for there to be a freeze on the bay side of the peninsula or the ocean side of the peninsula. Now, as I mentioned, the places that are a little further inland, you know, at the sort of foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains and away from the bay, they're going to be hotter in the summer and colder in the winter because they're further away from the water. And you are, it's more possible that you'll get a frost or freeze in those areas. Again, pretty rare on the freezes, but frosts for sure. So because of that, you can grow your vegetables over the winter just fine. The problem is, not temperature, the problem is sunlight. Okay. You know, those, your vegetables need at least six hours of sunlight a day. Your summer crops like tomatoes, they need a good eight plus per day. But your leafy greens are fine with six a day. But it's hard for them to get that much sunlight. And the reason for that, it's not the length of the day, it's the angle of the sun. Okay. So this may be a little bit nerdy, but just bear with me. This shows the sun angle throughout the year at 40 degrees north latitude. We're a little lower than that. We're 38 something. And so at the vernal and autumnal equinox, so that's the spring and fall equinox or March and September 21st, the sun rises due east doesn't go straight up overhead. Okay. It goes out to the south at an angle. Okay. And then, and that's about 40 something degree, about 47 degrees above the horizon. So think about that, you know, think of a 45 degree angle. You can even measure this on your iPhone. You know, think of a 45 degree angle from the horizon. It's not as high as you think it is, right? And then it's going to go from there and set due west. Now, in the summertime, the sun is going to rise in the northeast. And it's going to raw, it's going to go just south of straight up. It's at like 76% degrees above the horizon. So it's almost straight up. And then it's going to do this wide arc and set in the northwest. So it does this wide arc around the sky, which is why you get so many more daylight hours and sunlight hours at the winter solstice, which is December 21st. The sun rises in the southeast only goes up to 23 degrees above the horizon and then sets in the southwest. So, you know, just sort of try to envision that at some point. And what, and so what you'll see is the sun is really low in the winter, which means it's going to get blocked. It's going to get blocked by trees and fences and houses and apartment buildings, et cetera. And so it's not so much that the days have less sunlight. It's just so much less sunlight is going to get through to your vegetables. And that's why they're just not going to grow very much. You know, Carol O'Donnell is fond of saying what you'll get is sort of a nice refrigerator in your vegetable bed. You know, everything will grow and it won't die, but it's just going to sit there. It's just not going to grow very much. And then you'll notice, you know, depending on where you live and how much the sun gets blocked. For me, it's kind of around February. All of a sudden, you know, the plants are going to start growing again. So what can you what'll grow through the winter? Will all the lettuce and greens, Swiss chard, kale is a great winter crop. All your root crops and peas will grow very slowly. Okay. Many of your herbs will grow through the winter just fine. Really, the only herbs that you're going to have to replant in the spring are basil, which is an annual, parsley and cilantro are annuals. But a lot of the Mediterranean herbs, which do very well here, like sage, lavender, rosemary, et cetera, they'll do just fine. Now, what you'll want to do in the winter is you want to cut those back to the, they're all, they all get these woody stems. Cut those woody stems back. You can cut them back pretty much to the ground. And they'll just grow right back in the next spring. Peppers will do fine. You know, they are biennials, so they won't tolerate a freeze, but barring that they'll come back. Rhubarb and asparagus actually prefer a freeze. And of course, they disappear late in the fall, below the ground, and then emerge the next spring. So as I mentioned, most herbs are perennial. So all the woody, all the woody herbs, I think this is culinary sage here, you cut way back to the, to these woody stems here, cut off all the green growth on them, and they'll come back in great form next spring. You're more delicate, leafy, perennial herbs like tarragon, sorrel, just leave them. They're not going to die, but you don't want to cut them back. Okay. All right. So let's talk about whether to plant from seeds or seedlings. So as I mentioned, your root crops do not transplant well. So all your root crops, you really want to direct so in the soil. Your cruciferous vegetables, on the other hand, do much better starting, because they take a long time to germinate, long time to grow, they're best off started inside, and then transplanting outside. Okay. And that includes the cruciferous vegetables and then tomatoes and egg plants, which are of course, a summer crop. And then all the stuff in the middle, you can do either one. The leafy greens, you can transplant, but they generally germinate so quickly. And they, they're very shallow rooted. So sometimes they can be hard to transplant. So I find them a little easier to plant by seed, certainly cheaper. Beans and squash and cucumbers and peas are just dead easy to plant in the soil because they're such big seeds. But you can absolutely transplant them if you want. So do you do seeds or seedlings? Well, you know, seeds are cheaper. You know, you'll pay basically the same amount for a packet of seeds as you will for a six pack of vegetables at the nursery. And of course, you're going to get more than six plants from a packet of seedlings. So they're cheaper. There are many more varieties available via seed. You know, the garden stores are going to carry the popular varieties. But if there are certain varieties that you like that are hard to find in the garden store, then you've got to start them yourself. So there are, you know, certain things I grow, certain cucumbers, beans, et cetera, that I like that are very hard to find in the garden store. So I just grown from seed. Now, the problem with seeds is that it just requires more advanced planning, because if you go to the garden store and grab a seedling there, that thing was started six to eight weeks ago. So if you're planting from seed, you should you got to be thinking eight weeks ahead all the time. So it's like when you're harvesting one crop in your vegetable bed, it's probably time to plant the next crop. And that's the way you need to start thinking with seeds. So it just requires more advanced planning. Seedlings, obviously, you can be impulsive and say, Hey, I want to plant Swiss chard today and just run down to the store and get them. Now, if you do get seedlings, I just want to point this out to people, there's always that temptation to get the biggest one, because you think you're getting more plant. But you need to bear in mind that with a vegetable, the root is going to be roughly a third to half the length of the stem. So if you look at this tomato here, half the stem is from here to here. So the stem is probably already hit the bottom of this pot. And what happens then is the roots start to curl in on themselves. And when you transplant it, it's not going to establish itself very well. So you actually want to choose things that are much better sized for the pot that they're in. And then the other thing I would say is always look for a good dark green color. Light green is a sign that that plant has used up all the nutrients in the soil, whereas dark green is a much healthier looking vegetable. So let's talk about soil care because soil care is absolutely critical to growing vegetables. I would say soil care is 90% of success or lack of success with growing vegetables. So you have to understand that soil is an ecosystem. There are billions of microorganisms and small organisms living in the soil at any one time. And in fact, those microorganisms are interacting with the roots of trees and the roots of your vegetables. They are taking nutrients from the soil, nitrogen, carbon, et cetera, and feeding them to the vegetables. And of course, the water is in the soil and the plant is pulling the water from the soil. So a couple of things. Feed your soil, not your plants. That's sort of a mantra we say in the master gardeners. Never think about feeding your plants. Feed your soil. And then the soil and the microorganisms feed your plant. So avoid any chemical pest and weed control, chemical fertilizers. Always try to have something in the ground at all times. Bear soil loses its structure over time. Avoid walking on the soil because it compresses, compacts the soil, makes it harder to absorb water, and pushes the air out of the soil. So this is what soil is made of. So you might be surprised to learn that soil is about 25% air. And that's why I say don't compact the soil. There needs to be air in there. And it's about 25% water as well. And of course, that air provides space for the water to infiltrate in there. Much of the soil is the minerals, the sand, silt, and clay that have been breaking down for eons. And then a small percentage of it is organic matter. So that's the decomposition of plants and basically of plants. And it's that organic matter that helps create a good soil structure and that provides nutrients in the soil. Okay. So I said before feed the soil, not the plants. And so that organic matter as it breaks down into its component nutrients are picked up by the microorganisms and fed to the plants. Okay. And so you can see the contrast of that between organic fertilizers, which go through this cycle, and then the synthetic fertilizers, the master grows of the world, which are just going straight to the plant. And they're not building that healthy soil. Now, how do you maintain that soil and the organic matter in the soil? Add plenty of compost. Fall is a great time to do that. We'll talk about that in a second. But when you pull out those summer crops, a good two to three inches of a good compost laid directly on top of the soil, you can turn it into the first few inches of the soil if you want. And you should always at all times have some sort of a cover, what we call mulch on the soil. And that serves a number of purposes. It helps keep the soil cooler in summer, warmer in winter. It maintains moisture in the soil, prevents it from evaporating out in the summertime. And it also cushions the soil from hard rains. And use cover crops, we'll discuss those as a way to add nutrients to the soil and do what we call chop and drop. And we'll explain what that is. So benefits of adding compost, you can see increases organic matter, which leads to more microorganisms improves the water holding capacity of the soil and the soil structure. So when you pull out your summer crops, you need to think about nutrient requirements in your soil, and it depends on what you've been growing. So if you've been growing sort of the classic summer vegetables, tomatoes, cucumber squash, peppers, basil, et cetera, they're what we call heavy feeders. They extract a lot of nutrients, particularly nitrogen from the soil, and they will likely have depleted your soil through the summer. So that means you will need to add some nutrients back into the soil. Now these are what we call light feeders. So if you've been growing those, they're not taking nearly as much in the way of nutrients from the soil. And then this category we call soil neutrals because the legumes, which are the beans and the peas, they actually add nitrogen into the soil while they're growing. And then when the pods form with the seeds inside of them, then they start extracting the nitrogen from the soil. If you pull out a bean plant, you'll notice little white nodules on the roots, and those are nitrogen fixing bacteria. So beans and peas add nitrogen to the soil, but then as soon as they start going to seed, which is when you get beans and peas, then they extract nitrogen from the soil. So they're kind of neutral there. So the point is if you've been growing plants that are heavy feeders through the summer, you are going to need to think about adding nutrients into your soil. You're not going to do that with compost alone. You will need to add some form of an organic fertilizer to do that. So the fall is a great time to take out your old crops, add compost, add organic fertilizer if you want to need to, till it in the soil, water it, let it sit for a week, and then you can do your planting. You can do a similar cycle in the spring as well if you want, but fall is really the best time to do it. Now crop rotation, just a point about crop rotation, you want to try to avoid planting crops of the same family in the same place year after year. And the reason is that you can build up soil-borne diseases, and this is a very bad soil-borne disease called verticillium wilt or fusarium wilt, which will kill your tomato plants. And so when I say families, these are the families, so we've been talking about cruciferous vegetables here. We've talked about legumes here. Many of us are familiar with the cucumber bits, which are cucumbers and melons and squash. But another one to be aware is the nightshade family, and that's these very popular plants, a eggplant, tomato, pepper, and potato. So the point is you don't want to continually grow the same family in the same location. You want to try to rotate things around if you can. Now some of us don't have that luxury, but if you have the ability, you should do so. So here's what you want to do in the fall. Remove your old plants, compost them. They'll be great compost. If you have a compost pile, you can or donate them to Recology's compost pile. Just make sure you don't compost any disease plants, because the compost needs to be really, really hot to kill the microbes in there. And they might do that in Recology's compost, but they won't do that in your backyard compost. Add a good two to three inches of organic compost to improve the texture and add some organic fertilizer if you need to add nutrients into the soil. Now an alternative to doing that is cover cropping. So cover cropping is growing crops that will return nutrients to the soil. And we cover crop in the winter, generally, and we do it in beds where you had heavy feeders over the summer. So in addition to returning nitrogen to the soil, as I talked about here, and most people are going to do fava beans to do that, in addition to adding new nitrogen to the soil, just the fact of having those root structures in your bed over the winter are going to improve the soil structure, maintain a good soil structure in the winter, prevent it from getting compacted down by the rains, etc. So people tend to do a mix of fava beans, which are going to grow quite tall with some lower crops, such as crimson clover, vetch, oats, buckwheat, etc. And you can sort of intersperse those because they're lower and the fava beans are higher. Now if you're going to cover crop, October is the time to plant because you want them to get established before the days get really short. And so what I find is my fava beans get up to like a foot high and then it hits November and they just stop. And then in February the sunlight hits it again and they grow taller and taller and they'll grow several feet tall. Now here's the key thing. You want to harvest after they flower, but before the seed pods form. And that's because as I said once the seed pods form they're now pulling that nitrogen out of the soil they're reversing the process from before. So you want to cut them after they flower and do what we call chop and drop. Don't pull them out because those roots are maintaining good soil structure. If you cut off the top of the plant those roots will die and just become more organic matter. So cut them off at the soil level and then just chop them up as small as you can and leave them on top of the soil because that's going to turn into what we call green compost and they'll break down and dry out and filter into the soil. So you know it's interesting we've been talking about cover crops for years and it just seems like people are picking it up more and more. I was at the garden store yesterday and they were completely out of cover crop seeds. So it's it's clearly you know people have gotten the message. All right so just a little bit on pest management and then we'll be done and ready to take your questions. Our parent organization you see agricultural natural resources that's what you see up here University of California agricultural natural resources. They promote this approach to managing pests it's called integrated pest management and the idea is to look at managing pests in a holistic way and use nature to combat nature I call it right. Everything out there that's a pest has something else out there that wants to eat it. Okay so you know if you can get you know a good healthy ecosystem out there in in your garden then you're going to have a lot fewer pests. So the first step of of integrated pest management is monitoring okay are your leaves being chewed are your tomatoes landing on the ground with bites out of them are your beans being chewed off etc right so monitoring okay something's going on here and then correct identification of pests okay can you see what's going on is it a vertebrate pest right a mouse or a rat or a squirrel you know you can tell by the way things are being chewed you can tell by the way leaves are being chewed are they being chewed from the outside in or they're little holes in the leaves this is where our helpline can be really helpful you can take photos of the problem that you have and send it by email to our master gardener helpline and we will help you identify that pest in addition you can go to this IPM website they have tons of photos you can search by plant or you can search by pest and you can help identify the pest your own way another great thing is to get yourself a little magnifying glass or a loop a jeweler's loop which will magnify the pest and make it a lot easier to tell what you've got is it an aphid is it a white fly is it a beetle etc now once you figured out what it is then you know how do you deal with it so one thing you can do is have habitat manipulation um what does that mean well you you know snails and slugs for example love to nest in damp dark places during the day and then they come out at night and munch your leafy greens so you want to make sure that you clear out any places that could be good snail and slug habitat close to your vegetables similarly if you've got rats look around for you know sort of dense overgrown places where not where rats love to nest okay um another example of habitat manipulation is um you know going out and hand picking um best way to handle snails is to go out at night when it's dark and the snails are out go with a flashlight and you'll find them and you just hand pick them off off your vegetables so that's what we mean by habitat manipulation i will show you some other things that i use that are essentially protective barriers okay that's another form of habitat manipulation all right and then you can plant companion flowers to support beneficial insect population so we all know that lady beetles um eat aphids so if you can maintain a healthy colony of lady beetles in your garden you'll cut down on your aphid infestations etc now just a a few things that i like to use that you know not everyone is aware of uh this is what's called a floating row cover it's a woven fabric the brand name is agribon there are different weights ag 15 is the lighter weight and in other parts of the country where it gets colder in the winter people use floating row covers as a way to keep their gardens warmer and it gives them an extra few weeks of growing season in the spring and the fall but they're going to use the heavier weights we don't need that we don't need the warmth factor what i'm looking for is the insect barrier and the predator barrier so by putting a floating row cover and this is a four by eight bed and i've got um number nine steel gauge wire um bent into hoops um and and fastened in the ground and then i just lay the floating row cover over that and fasten it down at the ends and now i've gotten in permeable barrier um to most vertebrate and invertebrate pests okay so very effective of course if you're growing something tall you can't do this right you know this this thing is probably a couple of feet um off the level of the soil so this is for growing leafy greens particularly good for over leafy greens or when things are young and they're seedlings and they may be tempting for birds or insects you cover them with a floating row cover and that gives them time to get big enough and healthy enough so that they can resist a little leaf chewing this is tool uh tool is another uh synthetic fabric it's used mostly for um making dresses and veils and things like that and um whereas agribon you would buy from a garden supplier tool you buy from a fabric supplier and i use tool now to net all my fruit trees um against squirrels so this is an apple tree completely wrapped in tool it's very easy to work with you just drape it over and you fasten it together with those little metal binder clips or you can use clothes pins um and works like a charm um and then the best thing about it is you can take it off and reuse it the next year um so i become a big fan of tool use it on all my fruit trees this year for the first time i used it as an enclosure for my pole beans and for my tomatoes to keep the darn squirrels and other pests out of there and it worked really well and then finally uh this one's a little bit more extreme in advance but um this is an electric fence that's powered by a couple of d batteries and when you turn it on it just sends a very low voltage charge through the metal wires here which are just enough to give any critters a little shock when they touch it not going to kill them um but it's going to tell them you know you probably shouldn't go here and um i have used this against squirrels in the past okay um that's all i've got so i will um i just want to go through a few more slides here here's the Pam Pierce book so you got a reference for that uh this is the master gardener handbook which is available to the general public and is a wealth of information um this is a wonderful book by Jessica Walliser about uh companion planting called plant partners uh here's our website here lots of resources videos etc um just want to thank the San Francisco Public Library Ramon for um for hosting us today um you can sign up for our newsletter monthly newsletter um you can donate money to keep us supporting the public and then here is the links for the the master gardener helpline here's when you can visit the helpline in person here's our website and that's it so um i'll stop sharing here and we can handle questions already i think you're muted you're muted rt so jonathan i'd like to thank you for your very thorough and outstanding presentation today um as a master gardener i learn something every time uh jonathan speaks because we all have our areas that we tend to specialize in and vegetables is certainly one of jonathan so many thanks to you jonathan and the library for hosting our presentation today we do have a few questions however before i just jump into those i wanted to call your attention that all of many of the links that jonathan just reviewed on the resources are also in the rolling chat for signing up for our newsletter for going on our website um and for looking for the master gardener website and also for planting your vegetable garden there's a link for that if you ever have a plant uh that you want to identify or that may have a disease of some type we have a helpline right in the san francisco botanical garden at the entrance to ninth and lincoln and we are open wednesday we're in the helen russell library from 10 30 to 2 p.m so we ask that you um you can let people know that you have a plant or a specimen but they will idea right outside in this beautiful little courtyard and try to help you in person and if you cannot make that time on wednesday as jonathan pointed out and i'll reiterate uh there's also in the chat the telephone number for the helpline and the email for the helpline so it's a great service that we offer to san francisco master gardeners so moving on now we have just a few questions here and i'll look at the chat you have time people that are still with us today have time to get their questions into the chat but we'll start with the first three so one of the questions has to do with expiration date on seed packets like how do you view those and what could you share about that jonathan you know i don't really buy it that much and you know the more i talk to people the more i read about it um people tend to discount it i mean there's one way to find out right um and that is you know the seed packet always says packed for use in 2023 right because they want you to toss it out at the end of 2023 um there's one way to find out and that is plant those two-year-old seeds and and see what happens right you know just you know plant your 2022 seeds over here plant your 2023 seeds over here see if you get any difference in germination whatsoever all right um as a rule of thumb the bigger the seeds the longer they're gonna last so bean seeds i would say easily two to three years you're fine as long now this is an important point as long as they're kept in a cool dark place yeah any moisture and your seeds are going to start to germinate and and that's it but um i would say good two to three years for bean seeds um everything else i will definitely try it you know one year in no problem at all but again the best way to do it is just is just to track it and see if if you have any problems with germinating okay that's a good tip so in essence you're running your own little lab experiment right i'm a big fan of that i just i love people who who do lab experiments yeah okay thank you for your response um another question has to do with herbs inside and the question is are there any herbs that can keep providing keep producing indoors in the winter or will they just not get enough light to do so well again you know it depends on where they are inside and your exposure right because as i talked about that very low sun angle in the winter means you know most of your windows are not getting direct sunlight for very long um so you know there's only one way to tell and that is to try it um you know i will say that if you're looking for things that are sort of the absolute lowest light uh lowest warmth parsley and cilantro are great um cilantro in fact hates warm weather and goes just bolts the minute it gets warm so cilantro loves cool weather as does parsley um those are great you know something low growing like time will be um great you know you could try basil i i i don't know how um how well it would do right and of course if you have a little area even like a little torch or balcony uh would it be okay someone asked to put the herbs out on would that even be preferable perhaps oh yeah yeah absolutely you know what i will say is you know with that basil if you can grow your basil during basil season which is when it's warmest outside harvest that basil you know grind it up in a little olive oil put it in the freezer and then you've got basil in the winter you don't need to grow it so you know grow things when they like to grow yeah thank you the next question has to do with the tool which was a very helpful suggestion you gave for protecting um fruit trees or specimens from squirrels or animal attacks of any kind raccoons or big here in san francisco yeah so the question is does the tool reduce the likelihood of trapping small birds i've had that happen with bird netting yeah oh absolutely i mean i used bird netting for years and i just hated it you know because it destroys your finger it gets caught on the tree the birds get caught in it and then you can't reuse it so you have to throw it in the landfill and that was what led me to send out a message to the master gardeners saying you know what do people use and like half a dozen people got back to me and said tool and i've never looked back since then so tool if you if you get it it's it's much smaller holes than um then the um the bird netting stuff and um birds will not get caught in at all now there was uh one thing i forgot to mention with both tool and agribon you may be looking at that and thinking well does it block the sunlight from getting to the plant and the answer is no not much so like 90 to 95 percent of the sunlight is going to go through the the tool or the agribon and water will go through them both as well okay very good to know and tool as you mentioned is available in most fabric stores it's i believe it's spelled t u l l e and have you had success getting it at one particular fabric store or so as master gardeners we're not allowed to make commercial recommendations just get online and get online and search for it and you will find fabric stores that sell it um i mean you could run down to the corner fabric store and buy it but depending on how much you need like i buy these just bolts i don't know they're like you know 50-yard bolts um both the agribon and the tool come in like 10 foot widths and then you can get them in like 50-yard lengths or something like that yeah wonderful and besides trees are there any other applications any plants or shrubs that you put it over to or well as i said this year so for two years in a row my pole bean crop had failed and i just felt that something was munching away on my beans but it wasn't clear what it was and so this year i took that raised bed where all my beans were and i put eight foot stakes in the corners and i wrapped the tool all the way around it i fastened it down at the base and kind of flipped it up over the top of the stakes so it was almost you know completely enclosed it was it was open at the very top and um and i had a great bean crop so whatever was getting to my beans birds rats whatever didn't get to my beans um now of course you know people saying well how do you harvest the beans well i had it fastened in certain places so i would just unfasten it and open it up and go in and do my harvesting and then refasten it and i did the same thing around my tomatoes i have about 10 tomatoes in large containers outside of my raised beds and i did the same thing i just took stakes and i wrapped the whole thing in tool and um i had much less shrinkage this year than i've had in the past i was just trying to envision your tall beans wrapped in this tool like anybody looking overhead or over the fence because of the nature of the fabric it would look like a wedding party in your garden people come into my yard and like everything's wrapped in tool because i got a lot of fruit trees and i don't know if anyone remembers the artist cristo who used to wrap things yes yeah it looks like a giant cristo installation it's a little bit weird but you know i'm willing to make the sacrifice in order to actually harvest stuff okay so it does the trick for sure for sure okay um another question we have here is any tips for the western cherry fruit fly it's kind of an abbreviated question but obviously this is some kind of i know you talked about ipm and you gave the website for where people could look up what they have yeah i would i would i'm not familiar with that and i would i would you know suggest that you go to the ipm website look it up that up now on the master word right okay so i i did a little i'm curious where that question is coming from and here's why it's from i don't know care karen is still online but karen if you'd like to put in the chat uh i'm just curious where karen is growing western cherries yeah where he's growing cherries petaluma okay petaluma that yes so you can grow cherries in petaluma you can't really grow cherries in san francisco here's the thing about fruit growing fruit trees most fruit requires a certain number of what we call chill hours during the winter um which are um number of hours below 55 degrees okay and they need that for the fruit to set properly the next spring and there's a whole wide range of um the number of chill hours required for different types of fruit trees apples pears cherries peaches nectarines etc and in san francisco you basically don't get enough chill hours to grow like just about any of those of those fruit crops okay even here where i am in menlo park i i tend to grow things that are fairly low on the chill hours spectrum um but then when you get farther afield from our our our temperate summers certainly up in napasenoma down into um you know the the garden of hearts delight the old santa clara valley there you you know it's fruit tree paradise down there um so yeah petaluma is just fine for cherries i'm just not familiar with the western cherry fruit fly right um and then we have a comment from a master gardener virginia uh who mentions that cam pierce has an updated version of her book that actually just came out this year on golden gate gardening so it's the same title but it's an updated version so thank you virginia for putting that in the chat and uh and you know just putting in a plug for golden gate gardening if you're a serious gardener in san francisco you should have that book uh you know pam was the first one who broke down san francisco into its own microclimates you know like 12 different microclimates um and she really goes into a lot of depth about what you can grow where and when in in the city because it's just so unique up there right and we also already posted um all the the helpline information at the botanical garden um now if there are no more questions i have and i'm not seeing any but we have five minutes for anyone who wants to get their question into the chat and there's no such thing as a wrong or incorrect question so now's your opportunity with jonathan so in the meantime my question has to do jonathan with my sun gold tomatoes so i've grown sun gold tomatoes i live in noe valley which is a warmer area in san francisco i have a south facing exposure and i've grown them in um my patio in like 15 gallon black plastic pots successfully for the past oh gosh i've been a master gardener for nine years so for nine years this year for the first time they did not do well in the same location same soil and they ended up with i think this is probably what you were referring to some kind of wilt but their leaves turn kind of brownish and curly and the harvest production is really low and um and i had them on a drip for like five minutes three times a week did i give them too much water no so it doesn't sound like too much water um to me i mean i'm i'm doing drip three times a week here um so you know so first of all there's so many diseases that affect tomatoes there are blights and wilts and i mean if you go on the ipm site is just you know to wonder anyone grows tomatoes right um the the key thing towards discovering if you've got a wilt is if you if you still got those tomato plants in the ground um cut open the stem okay if the stem is turning sort of tan colored where the xylem and flow and flow through the stem if those are turning sort of tan colored then you've got a wilt which means you're not going to be able to grow tomatoes in that spot anymore okay um now that's not saying you definitely have a wilt i'm just saying that's how you would find out if you do if you have a blight that's i think an airborne disease and so you you don't have a soil problem okay um some other things to think about um you know we had a really really cool and wet spring and a lot of us our tomatoes were just going nowhere um for the spring and you know it's possible your your sungolds just never established yeah well because of that um so and and you know sungolds are they're pretty reliable and pretty hardy um um so yeah i would i would look at one of those two things and of course the worst being if if it were some sort of a of a wilt and that would prevent you from growing in that spot again i'll tell you that you know over the years and it's partly due to increase shade in my yard but partly due to soil stuff all my tomatoes have migrated into containers um because that way i can control the soil and you know you don't need to replace that every year but every two years or so i'll swap out the soil and that's going to reduce your likelihood of getting a wilt on your tomatoes all right thank you so much for that answer we have a another two questions here that just came in uh we're worried about our lead paint in our area any advice about checking the soil or preventing roots from reaching through raised beds okay so when you say preventing roots from reaching through raised beds i'm assuming what you're talking about is nearby trees roots infiltrating into your raised beds and i can tell you from personal experience there is absolutely nothing you can do about that um as far as lead is concerned if you're concerned about it the only thing to do is to get a a comprehensive soil test from a certified lab and i believe we have a list on the mastery on the san francisco san matel county master gardener's website we have a list of certified labs and that'll cost you like 200 but if you're concerned about lead or other metals then you'll probably want to spend that money just to make sure okay thank you for that and for those that have joined late um in the chat the librarian has said that you'll be getting a copy of this presentation with all the links that were previously in the rolling chat so no worries there uh here's another question does compost have a shelf life oh that's a great question i i'm not sure i know the answer to that but i wouldn't i don't see why you'd want to leave it on the shelf basically um you know if you haven't just put it out there you know either work it into the top few inches or put it on top of the soil um you know that's if you've got your your you know i'm assuming that maybe you have a supply of homegrown compost if you know you're like most of the rest of us you're going out and purchasing compost in which case you're only going to buy in as much as you need okay so if you have more homegrown that you can use in your garden itself or your area that you're composting um would you recommend that people maybe give it away to a neighbor or just get it out there and use it i'd give it to the neighbors and become really popular okay all right and here's another one what do you do with discarded soil from your tomato pots yeah so soil go back into your garden so when you say garden um i think you can put it somewhere in your yard i would not put it into your raised bed um because of the possibility that there might be some you know soil borne diseases in there okay so i i just i wouldn't put it somewhere you were planning to grow vegetables again right but like could it go in a flower garden or absolutely yeah absolutely okay but just don't recycle it into your vegetable plot or area okay so i think that is it that is it for our questions today i wanted to give you um a little bit of feedback we got from some uh participants that this was jonathan a very helpful presentation i definitely learned new things today and um you inspired me to try planting again so how good nice words uh from from a participant and we thank you and again we thank the library for fall vegetable gardening and it's not too late to get out there right and clean up your garden and whether you decide to plant fall or winter crops like jonathan said we're on the cusp you've got time and the days are well when this the smoke clears completely the days ahead should be except for a little storm coming in should be relatively good so i wish everybody happy planting and remone i see you're back on from the san francisco public library do you have any closing remarks yes i would like to thank um the master gardeners of san mattay on san francisco counties thank you jonathan thank you ariti for this presentation um i was also going to mention those great comments that i'm seeing in the chat and um i would like to thank all of the people who've joined us today and look for a survey that i will be sending out um i will be sharing that with you as well jonathan and ariti and um where we get a lot of the the nice comments that i'm seeing here in the chat so thank you very much i'll be sending out the pdf of the presentation um i will be sending out those links and also um the uh some of the the newsletter that's what i was going to mention so please sign up for the newsletter for the master gardeners for their for their future programs and for the business science and technologies newsletter uh that's where we um put those programs out there uh like the one today so thank you very much again uh everyone and thank you jonathan and ariti um today's program has has ended okay thank you all right thank you bye bye everyone