EMERGENCY!

Garden Bonanza!

A real emergency? No, not really. A bit of an overreaction on my part? Possibly. But, to be honest, I was worried. I still am worried. I have good reason to be worried about the state of the 2024 vegetable garden. It is turning out to be one of the most successful gardens I have ever planted, either directly in the ground or in a series of raised gardening beds.

The picture to your right is just one example of what is taking place in this year's garden. I started harvesting a month ago. A tomato here and a tomato there turned into two or three fairly quickly. Add that to a Sumter cucumber or two harvested from the cucumber patch, and that's a right fine salad for dinner, lunch or both.

But it didn't stay that way for long. Two to three ripe tomatoes per day turned into dozens very quickly when the five plants that I designated as Cherry Row began to produce. Combine that with the heirloom and hybrid tomato varieties that had started to show signs of turning a pleasing shade of pink, red, or yellow and things began to get interesting to say the least. But, I wasn't worried. Not yet.

Cherry Tomato Plant Row

That all changed one week ago. That is when I spotted trouble. The first sign of trouble. A pest known as a rat, or perhaps several, had discovered the ripe tomatoes waiting to be harvested at the base of a Better Boy tomato plant. This one rat, or many members of his or her family, had managed to eat a large chunk out of one very red and very ripe tomato, and had also started in on another ripe offering just behind it.

It has been some years since I spotted any kind of rat or critter damage in the garden. So, I was somewhat surprised to see this kind of critter trouble suddenly resurface. The adoption of a rescue cat from the Sacramento County Bradshaw Animal Shelter put an end to never-ending rat raids that destroyed vegetable gardening efforts of the past. The kids who live next door, and who also love home-grown garden produce, christened my new orange striped rescue with the name of Mango.

Mango Kitten: 2021

That was three years ago. Mango immediately sprung into action the moment I introduced him to the backyard garden in May of 2021. This five-week old ball of fluff immediately owned every row of garden, as well as the fruit trees planted nearby. The rat and critter raids that had decimated the gardens of the past came to an immediate end. Mango caught his fair share of rats, but in reality he scared most of the garden predators out of the yard. Possums and skunks still made an appearance every now and then, but Mango formed a kinship with both. As long as they stayed out of the garden and the fruit trees, all were welcome in Mango's backyard. It was interesting to see those relationships grow and develop.

Unfortunately, Mango developed a bit of a limp last winter. Although it was unrelated to his rat hunting escapades in the garden, it still worried me a bit. Yes, Mango received veterinary care. But, I passed when the veterinarian proposed a surgical solution that carried a cost comparable to the purchase of a new car. There are reasons why I passed. I suppose the biggest reason was that the proposed solution was largely experimental. There was a chance it would not have worked. There was also a slight chance that it would have resulted in a permanent reduction in Mango's ability to walk, let alone run.

Mango on Garden Patrol

Given time, and the onset of summer weather, I had a strong suspicion that Mango's limp would improve with time and rest. It was a correct assumption. Mango's limp vanished as the weather turned from winter to spring. It wasn't long before my rat hunter was springing over fences again and charging after unfortunate dogs who dared to walk in front of his home. All was soon right in Mango's world again. If you don't believe me, just ask the poor German Shepherd that dared to lift his leg on the corner of some inviting grass in the front yard. Mango plays with all dogs who choose to visit. Or launches a surprise attack from beneath a bush or car.

The recent discovery of serious rat damage in the garden, however, surprised me a great deal. No rat had dared to visit since Mango started his daily patrols as a small kitten. It did not take long before that recent discovery of rat damage led to another distressing sight. Mango showed up a moment later, limping badly on the same back leg that troubled him a great deal last winter. I knew immediately that Mango had done battle with a large rat or several rats, and those garden raiders had managed to get the better of him. Or, that was the initial belief. It's been a week since that discovery, and the rat or rats have not returned. There have been no further raids on the garden. Mango's limp, meanwhile, has improved somewhat dramatically.

Mystery Potato Leaf Heirloom

This did not stop me from stripping the garden of every last ripe tomato on the vine. I was not going to wait and risk further rat raids that would have laid waste to garden growth efforts. This was a very early harvest compared to years past. I normally have to wait until late August to see this kind of production out of the garden. This year, however, is proving to be one of those special production years. It might be the record heat that has hammered Northern California this summer. It could also be some changes I adopted in providing water to each tomato plant. It might have been some changes that I adopted when I prepared the garden area for spring planting. Or, I suppose, it just could be one of those years. I'm not sure.

I can only tell you that prime tomato production season has arrived early this year. Every plant in the garden, from hybrids to heirlooms, is sporting a fantastic early crop and enough green tomatoes to guarantee a fantastic late crop. Most of the late production is springing from the heirloom varieties like Caspian Pink, Pruden's Purple, Black from Tula and Watermelon Beefsteak to name a few. This is completely normal. Heirloom varieties are known to deliver bountiful crops both early and late.

Brewing Tomato Sauce

Hybrids are a bit different in respects to production. Those time honored favorites like Better Boy, Better Boy Plus, Big Beef Plus and Steak Sandwich Hybrid tend to produce one big crop. They tend to ripen at the same time and ripen earlier in the season than heirlooms. Which works for me. It makes for a nice garden mix. A sink full of red, pink, black and yellow colors is a pleasing sight to behold. It also means a lot of work!

As for the rats that made an unwelcome visit one night and took chunks out of two big Better Boy tomatoes, they have not returned. This is surprising because rats are very smart creatures. Once they discover a food source they normally make a return appearance. But, they have not returned. I'm fairly certain that it is due to Mango's patrol efforts. He has not provided me with any garden gifts just yet. Which is fine by me. As long as he keeps the raiders out, I'm fine with it. The rats have not returned to the garden, nor have they attempted to raid the black fig tree nearby. This is another welcome development.

Heirloom Tomato Sauce

My recent "EMERGENCY" harvest moment resulted in enough tomatoes, sweet bell peppers, hot jalapeño and paprika peppers, onions and basil to create 15-pints and five quarts of thick garden-grown tomato sauce. It has also resulted in multiple cherry tomato deliveries to the five children who live next door. They can't get enough of them. That kind of appreciative audience works for me. I hope you experience the same type of blessing.

EDIT: I am always listening to the advice of other long-time gardeners. Many are suffering from raids by rats or other wildlife this season. Rats are showing up in backyards where they have never paid a visit before. There are some gardeners who suggest that these raiders are, in reality, stressed by our extraordinary heat this summer combined with a lack of water. They have suggested bowls of water placed strategically outside of garden areas. This sounds like good advice to me.

The DRAMA Queen

WILT from the DRAMA QUEEN

Every garden has one. So does mine. I am not immune. The top portion of this tomato plant featured to your immediate right came to my garden this year with the title of "Sandwich Slicer." I am of the opinion that the name of it should promptly be changed immediately to DRAMA QUEEN. What tomato plant doesn't enjoy about 12-hours of direct heat and sunshine? This one, apparently.

Look at that thing! Just the sight of it will send a signal that it needs a good, long drink of cool, clean, water! Except, it got one this past Sunday. An exceptionally long drink of life-sustaining water from a hose set on a slow trickle. The plant, and the soil around it, was positively drenched with water following that 30-minutes of watery attention.

Other plants in the 2024 Tomato Garden look positively wonderful after receiving similar watery attention this past weekend. I took every effort to ensure that each tomato plant was treated to a low trickle of water over a long period of time. Every plant was treated with that slow trickle treatment for 30-minutes or longer. Plants in every vegetable garden do best with heavy, infrequent watering schedules. They don't need a drink every single day. They do best with that slow drip or trickle attention once or twice a week.

"Help Me! I'm Dying!"

Yet, there's always one malcontent in every vegetable garden collection. Two years ago it was roma tomato variety called Korean Long. Which is a very fancy name for one very average roma tomato. The Korean Long received more than enough water. Yet, as soon as our famous summertime temperatures broke the century mark, it started to put on a show just like the one you see out of this plant in the 2024 tomato garden.

Worse yet, I'm not even sure if "Sandwich Slicer" is the right name to apply to this garden drama queen. Google tells me the variety came to me by way of Burpee Seeds. Which isn't surprising. Burpee is a seedhouse that produces seeds for a lot of different tomato varieties. Yet, a search for "Sandwich Slicer" on the Burpee website defaults to another variety called the Steak Sandwich Hybrid. Which is another large slicing variety. Are they the same? Good question! According to Burpee Seeds, they must be. But, who knows?

The Steak Sandwich Hybrid is not a horrible tomato variety. I actually trialed it some ten years ago after Burpee made a big fuss about this new offering in the 2014 catalog they issued that year. I do recall the seed price wasn't cheap. No "new" variety of tomato seed is. But, if I was going to waste another dollar or two on an interesting variety, it was going to be for something like "Steak Sandwich." That's good marketing. Almost as good as sticking a very average roma tomato with the name of Korean Long.

Drama Queen Production

By the way, the moment the sun goes down this thing perks right back up again and looks. well, normal. It looks the part of a healthy, happy tomato plant in the 2024 garden. Because it is. Gone is the viscious, drama queen like, wilt. Gone are the signs of some kind of disease-causing wilt. Thanks to the unique weather patterns in the six-county Sacramento Delta region, cool air flows right in from the Pacific Ocean following a blistering hot summer day. This is why tomato plants do so well in this region, and why much of the farmland in the region is dedicated to the growth of processing tomatoes. Like the roma. Plus others.

Need proof? Look no further than Yolo County, just west of my home in Sacramento County. More than 35,000 acres of cropland there was dedicated to King Tomato in 2022. That resulted in about 1.7 MILLION TONS of tomatoes, worth a cool $183 million and change. Most of that coin was realized from the common processing tomato known as the Roma, but then again, some heirloom varieties are also grown there on a commercial basis. But the processing tomato is king in Yolo County. It is the number one crop, by far.

The wilt may look bad, but it isn't hurting production. Not on this plant. At least, not hurting production so far. The "Sandwich Slicer," or DRAMA QUEEN if you will, is loaded with fat, green tomatoes. Plus, our tomato production season is just getting started. The month of June isn't up yet. There's another 3-4 months of solid tomato plant production yet to come. The Drama Queen has tomatoes all over it. Despite the wilt, it looks like it will be a good producer. Providing is doesn't UP AND DIE on me. Which it looks like it just might do. Until the sun does down. Then, everything is right in the Drama Queen's world again.

Late to the Summer Garden Party!

Sugar Pea Pod Vines

I'm late! Late to the Summer Garden Extravaganza. That picture to your right is the reason WHY I'm so late to the summer party this year. This, and two other sad plants that are not pictured, are all that remains from my fall garden planting efforts. My fall garden doesn't normally look quite this sad, but California's epic amount of rain this winter drowned just about everything EXCEPT what you see pictured to the right.

This spot happens to be the highest spot in the backyard garden. Not pictured is the rest of the garden. Why not? Because for much of the winter that section of the yard was under several inches of water. That's what happens when an area that had not see much rainfall in two or three years suddenly receives TWICE the amount that normally falls in any given year.

That was the winter we needed in Northern California. Unfortunately, a lot of good comes with a little bit of bad. Two to three inches of rain can be very good for fall and winter gardening efforts. Thirty inches of rain is a different story entirely. You needed a rowboat to pay a visit to some areas of the garden this past winter. I could only watch as the fall and winter greens drowned following one epic storm after another.

Lake Northern California!

BUT, there was one bright spot. It was that high section of garden that I'd set aside for the sugar pea pod plants that I'd received from a gardening friend. 12-of those starter plants went into one cirle. 12-others went into another. The plants in the lowest section of the yard, like many other fall garden plants, drowned after the backyard turned into a lake. But the other 12 did just fine.

The unusual winter weather not only covered some sections of the garden completely, it also stunted the growing efforts of those plants that remained above water. So, when the time came to start prepping the garden for spring and summer exploits, the sugar pod pea plants that survived the lake-like conditions were just starting to flower.

Spring Peas

I had a choice. Pull the plants out and declare the fall and winter season to be an entire bust, or wait. I chose to wait. While other gardeners were prepping garden areas for tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and other summer efforts, I patiently waited for those blooms on the sugar pod pea plants to turn into garden peas. That patience would be rewarded.

The wait resulted in a weight of 1.1 lbs. of sugar pea pods. That's enough pea pods to fill up a collander. Which is a lot of peas. The vast majority of those were added to some sliced mushrooms and put into a soup creation which resulted in a lot of leftovers. I will be eating the last of that soup for lunch today, which will put a finishing wrap on the rain-challenged fall and spring gardening efforts.

The sugar pea pod harvest did finally allow for some summer garden prep. In fact, that prep started the moment that the pea harvest ended and the plants were removed. But, I will admit, I'm a solid month behind the efforts of many others. The tomato plants are already beginning to produce pea-sized tomatoes, but there will be no "early harvest" this summer. If I get a cherry tomato to ripen up by the 4th of July holiday I'll consider myself lucky.

Spring Pea Harvest

Fortunately, I get to benefit from a special climate called "California Weather." As unpredictable as it has been this year, you can still count on a long summer growing season out west. So, even if you are like me, a month behind schedule, it doesn't matter for us California types. The garden planted in late May will eventually catch up with those gardens planted in late April. When the month of September rolls around, you won't be able to tell the two apart.

The real benefit, however, is all that water stored behind our massive Northern and Southern California reservoirs. Plus, a massive snowpack that is slowly melting in the Sierra Nevada. It's a snowpack that is so very large that all of it may not melt. Our fantastically warm summers won't be warm enough or last long enough to melt all of that water trapped in the high country.

Which is fine by me. That's irrigation water for backyard vegetable gardening efforts!

It's all GRAVY!

Courtesy: NOAA

February 26th or 27th (depending upon where you live in California) turned out to be a seminal moment in our wacky and wild weather history. It doesn't happen very often, but it did happen this year. It was on these dates (again, depending upon what area of the state you call home), where most communities in California surpassed the average rainfall amount that falls in a *normal* year.

Any rain that falls between now and the official end of the rainfall year (June 30, 2023) is "gravy."

By the way, if you have lived in California for any length of time, you know by now that nothing is *normal* when it comes to the weather in this state. It can be either very hot or very cold, OR, very dry or very wet. If there is one thing you can count on when it comes to the weather in California, it's this: You Cannot Count on Anything.

C-BAR-C Park-Citrus Heights, CA

What does the term "average rainfall amount" mean and why is it important? Again, depending upon where you live, it's the amount of rain that falls over the course of 12-months (one year). In the Sacramento area, an area which I call home, that "official" number is 19.20 inches of rain. The climate station located on the campus of CSU-Sacramento hit that number on February 26, 2023 and has since zoomed past it.

Similar stations located in nearby communities all zoomed past normal rainfall amounts, according to the climate stations created and maintained by the California Nevada River Forecast Center. This is a division of a federal agency called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. Large cities and small communities alike in Northern, Central and Southern California have all blown past the *normal* amount of rainfall they receive in any given year and are now entering uncharted territory. This can be a bit nervewracking.

Mammoth Lakes, CA

Where it will stop, nobody knows. The rain continues to pelt Northern California day after day after day. That rain turns to snow as you head east of Sacramento. There is so much of that snow in the higher elevations at this moment that some homes are completely buried in it. They look like giant lumps coated in white. Snow walls are as high as ten feet in some communities. They are about to get a lot higher.

"In the Central and Southern Sierra, the snow amounts are really remarkable," said Dr. Daniel Swain, a Climate Scientist with Weather West. "Buildings are starting to collapse under the weight of the snow. This is notable because these are buildings built in places that are historically very snowy. For them to collapse under this snow load says a lot about this sequence of events."

Dr. Swain, who is now holding weekly briefings on YouTube in response to the series of storms slamming into California, confirms that the state is on the precipice of breaking some long-term weather records. This includes the most recent record set during the winter of 2016-2017. Rain and snowfall amounts, should they keep increasing, may even threaten the 1982-1983 deluge, which triggered both landslides and flooding in Northern and Central California.

NorCal Forecast

It would be useless to list actual rainfall numbers on this blog posting. Why? Because, by the time this blog posting is published those numbers will be "old news." The local weather forecast indicates Northern California is going to get slammed with seven straight days of rain as I write this. Whether we actually get seven straight days of rain is anyone's guess at this point. But, the forecast is rather ominous.

I'm kind of glad that I bought that sump pump for my garage last December. This garage rarely floods. Yet it has flooded five times this winter alone, and may flood again (several times) over the next week.

Yikes.

The rain and snow has resulted in some positive news. The giant Northern California reservoirs in Shasta, Trinity and Butte Counties should be full of water this summer. Reporters who cover news events can switch from "drought" coverage to "floods."

Courtesy: Christine Beal

But the most positive development is plenty of irrigation water for agricultural interests (hopefully), environmental concerns, summer vegetable gardens and fruit and citrus hobbyist efforts. You might even be able to water a lawn this summer without feeling a tinge of guilt over water waste. You would hope that a deluge of rain and snow like this would put at least a temporary end to California's water wars.

But that may be a bit of wishful thinking on my part. There's absolutely no proof that Mark Twain ever wrote or uttered such a line, yet, despite this, it is a true statement: "Whiskey Is For Drinking; Water Is For Fighting Over."

My thanks to the Facebook page The California Water for Food and People Movement for providing some great photos!