Fallish Into Winterish, So Cal Style

Beautiful fall color extends into official winter.

Sugar Magnolia peas are the first ones up.

Lettuces and celery growing nicely.

Quiches are an easy way to use too-plentiful leeks and greens from summer throughout the year.

Kniphofia adds bright orange firesticks to the garden.

Volunteer tomatoes that came up in the compost pile last summer are setting tomatoes. I couldn't bear to pull it up since it was so happy. My expectation for the flavor of the tomato isn't high since it'll ripen during February's probably cold weather, but who knows?

Rose picking up colors of the sunset.

The cue to shear Salvia canariensis is when you see new growth emerging from the base of the plant. It'll take only a couple of weeks for the new growth to hide the bare sticks that are left after shearing.

Lemon verbena can send out 5-foot shoots each year.

Prune the lemon verbena shoots down to the second whorl of new growth. This will make it bushier. More new growth will also emerge from the base of the plant. If you want, you can then trim back all the 3-foot-tall old woody growth so you end up with just a 2-foot-tall bush.

New branches emerge below old Leonitus leonurus blossoms. Prune just below the old blossom allows the new shoots to develop. Or, cut further down the plant like with the Salvia canariensis.

First Nerine (or Lycoris?) blossom. I have them planted all over the garden so they all bloom in their own time depending on the amount of sun they each get.

Daffodil Peruvian, Spider Lily, Hymenocallis festalis proliferate in my garden.

Dancy tangerine ripening up.

Artichoke multiplies itself every year, sending up new shoots from the base.

Boysenberry sends up new shoots from the underground root. When pruning out dead canes, be careful to not damage new upcoming shoots.

Eremophila glabra, bird bush or tar bush, offers little "birds" strung out on branches.

Iochroma grows up to 10 feet but the branches are easy to snap off.

Calendula keep reblooming almost all year long.

The first alstroemeria blossom.

Euphorbia blooms most of the year, confined in a pot.

Salvia keeps blooming.

Plectranthus keeps blooming its sky-blue flowers.

And this stock hasn't been out of bloom in more than a year.

Species poinsettia begins coloring up its bracts.

Schlumbergera - Christmas cactus - loves the cool and bright light.

Our 70-year-old jade tree provides creamy blooms.

Artichoke seeds coming up.

​     Despite our daytime temperatures in the 70s, even approaching 80, our nighttime temperatures in the mid-40s determine the slowness of growth and dropping of leaves.  Sleepytime in the garden.  But I still love gardening more now through spring than in the heat of summer, even with its tomatoes and squash and beans and cucumbers. 
     The perkiness of morning’s chill softens into cool-edged warmth and bright sun requiring sunglasses but nary a sweatshirt.  That wonderful rain still saturates the soil, so transplants eagerly stretch their roots into surrounding soil encouraged by nutrition provided by broken-down mulch and coffee grounds. 
     Only the harvestability is less than I’d like, with lettuces, bok choy, tatsoi, chards, kales and spinachs still growing larger but enabling only several-leaves-per-plant harvests – barely enough to keep us in nightly salads and stir-frys.  But such crunch and flavor and color!
     My husband doesn’t like cooked greens, but he does enjoy them raw in salads, so at least he’s getting their raw nutritional value. His one exception is quiche, when I use the mixture of leeks, kales, chards, and mushrooms that I cook up and freeze in 2-cup portions during the late spring and early summer.  Then, when a quiche is called for, my super mix is ready. Yum!
    
Pruning perennials
     Now that it’s almost officially winter, I still have perennials to prune back. 
     The trick for beginners to know when and where to cut back is three-fold.

1. Wait until new growth arises from the plant bases or the long branches.  Then you can see what’s old and what’s new. 
2. On clumps of perennials, shearing back to a foot-tall clump will allow the new growth to cover the trimmed bare sticks within a couple of weeks so the plant will be attractive again shortly.
3. On long branches with new growth appearing along them, cut back above the second whorl. This will guide the new growth to be full and bushily attractive.

 
Waiting to Prune Fruit Trees
     Some of my fig and other fruit trees haven’t lost all their leaves yet, so I’ll wait to prune them back until then.
     The wonderful thing for beginners about figs is that you can hack them back all the way to the base trunk, and new growth will produce lots of figs.  I talk my way through pruning my figs to remind myself why I’m pruning which branches and how far back so that I’ll be more confident when I prune the less-forgiving trees like peaches and plums and apples.
 
Always Time for More Seeding and Transplanting
     All the way through winter and spring – basically till the end of April or the beginning of May, depending on how early the intense heat settles in – is great time to sow more seeds and transplant seedlings. Especially from now through January, germination and growth is slow so you want to have as many plants growing as possible so you’ll have sufficient harvests to satisfy your family’s needs.  And the coolness enables nice slow growth for extensive root systems and therefore strong plants.