This epic wet weather in the North State over the past few weeks has me holed up and dreaming about my spring planting of seeds. I am working on expanding my raised beds for vegetables from the existing two to a productive six beds - each about 3 feet wide, 12 feet long and 2 feet deep. Photo: Raised beds framed in cedar in an enclosed and formal home garden.
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Planting a vegetable garden just seems to go along with spring, doesn’t it? Like an instinctive and seasonal rite of passage. But, says George Winter, owner of Wyntour Gardens in Redding and the Red Bluff Garden Center in Red Bluff, “if you want a vegetable garden, the fall and winter garden is generally easier and less maintenance than the spring and summer one. Time seems more measured in the fall garden - not so hectic,” in George’s opinion. “Temperatures will still be hot when you plant your garden planted in late August early September, but they cool off pretty quickly so you won’t be working in blazing heat; the lower temperatures also mean fewer bugs, and of course your chances of rainfall are much better. So if we have a normal fall and winter, you will be watering your fall-planted garden far less than you had to water your spring-planted one. Planning and planting a fall and winter vegetable garden is very similar to planting your spring/summer one, except the odds are stacked in your favor, so your chances of success are very good.”

Now, of course there are some caveats. You are unlikely to get fabulous tomatoes or cucumbers from your fall planted garden unless you have a greenhouse or other pretty serious protection from cooling temperatures. But most fall-planted crops enjoy the North State’s warm August and September weather for germination and getting established followed by the cooling nights and days of October and November for steady growth. Most fall planted crops can withstand the light frosts of late October and early November fairly well and in many cases a light frost will actually improve the health, vigor and taste of certain crops - like chards and beets.
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Lynette Gooch loves lavender. All kinds of lavender for all kinds of reasons. In the United Kingdom the gardening world has things known as National Collections, wherein when a specific garden has more species or varieties of any one kind of plant than any other garden, they can become designated a National Collection. Private gardens and gardeners are as likely to hold National Collections as larger public botanic gardens. In the United States, we do not have such a scheme, but if we did, Lynette Gooch and her husband Richard might well hold the National Collection of lavender with their 207 different named varieties of lavender at the display gardens in Whitmore: Tuscan Heights Lavender Gardens.

Grown as a culinary and medicinal herb throughout the world, throughout time, lavender (Lavandula) is a genus comprising multiple species and hybrids. Species of the genus originate from the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia, and the genus thrives in the Mediterranean climate of the North State.

The Tuscan Heights’ story started in 1999 when Lynette and Richard, farmer/gardeners at heart, were looking around the North State with possible re-location in mind. Living in Roseville at the time, Lynette is from Calaveras County originally and of strong Italian descent, with fond memories of the large family production garden she grew up helping to tend with her father. “Of five kids, I seem to have been the most gardening inclined, which I think has helped me out here!” she tells me the warm summer day I toured around the gardens. “We were about to leave and head home when Richard by chance picked a local discount classified paper and happened to read about land in Whitmore. ‘Where’s Whitmore?’, he asked me. So we drove up, I got out of the car, looked around, breathed deeply, kicked at the dirt with my foot and said - This is it. Let’s write the check.” Although the sloping land was covered in poison oak, manzanita and blackberry, Lynette knew she was home. The Fern Fire had devastated the area 12 years earlier, and Lynette could see that the soil had begun to recover and was ready for any garden she might want to grow. Neither she, the land nor Richard knew just what that garden would become.
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“Food, food, food - it all comes back to food. Being able to grow your own food, understanding where your food comes from and having access to good, healthy food.” Max Kee tells me this as we walk around a two acre plot of land on which he and his fellow workers are cultivating vegetable and herb crops for a second year. Max, and fellow-CSU Chico classmates and friends Dresden Holden, Francine Stuelpnagel and Lee Callendar founded the Chico-based group known as GRUB in 2007. GRUB stands for Growing Resourcefully Uniting Bellies.

“It started with a bike ride…Well, it started with three of us wanting to attend a sustainability conference in Santa Barbara in the spring of 2007 and realizing that it would be counter-productive to drive a car to a sustainability conference. So we decided to ride - and on the way we talked a lot about what it meant to be sustainable and how best to be engaged in solution-oriented sustainability. And as we talked we kept coming back to food.” Max is walking me through fields where irrigation lines are being set up by two people, while others are seeding llong straight furrows and still another comes along behind the seeders and top-dresses with a layer of rich, dark fine compost. The sun is already warm early on this May morning and the next field over is already producing strawberries, while another field has asparagus plants now gone to fern. “When we got to the conference, Francine and Dresden attended a workshop led by a woman from San Jose, who had started a cooperative vegtable and fruit sharing program by cooperatively gardening in people’s unused back-yard space. Francine and Dresden were so fired-up, that our bike ride home from the conference was all about how to start such a cooperative of our own.” I should note that while Francine and Lee, a married couple, had always intended to start their own vegetable garden, none of GRUB’s founding four had any gardening or agricultural background or education to speak of. I should also note the importance of the bike ride in the inception and evolution of GRUB: it all started with a bike ride and all aspects of GRUB continue through bike rides as the primary sources of transportation, beasts of burden and, of course, fun.
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David Grau is a gardener; he is also an avid supporter of sustainability, community and local food production. He has worn many hats – gardening hats and otherwise – in his life. In the late 70s and 80s, he was an organic Market Gardener selling and a co-founder of the Chico Saturday morning Farmer’s Market. His primary career for many years has been as a licensed marriage and family counselor. But he has always loved to garden and always loved the look, feel, taste and concept of locally grown food and the community that produces it. In 1990, he even produced an improved version of a popular market garden tool – the wheel hoe, which he sells through his company Valley Oak Tool in Chico. He himself has re-landscaped his urban Chico home so that its front and back yard lawns are now mulched over and edible gardening is underway in every corner: row crops of lettuces and peas run the depth of the back yard. Citrus and fruit trees are carefully enclosed in wire frames for easy covering. And all of that is greatly interesting to me as a garden lover. But, what I really want to highlight about David’s gardening life is his current project as founder/developer of/coordinator of several impressive series of organic gardening classes in Chico. Photo: David Grau in his home garden, demonstrating the ease of his wheel-hoe.

David was first inspired to develop organic gardening classes when he was living in Marin County for 18 months between 2007 and 2008. There, he attended “ a series, sort of like what I have developed here,” he says. “I really enjoyed them and thought that Chico had all the resources and the need for something similar.” So he returned to Chico and put together his first series of classes, which were held at the Chico Grange almost every Sunday from January through mid-March. A second series is beginning in April and runs through June and will also be held at the Chico Grange on Sundays.
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Warm, smoky, mouth-watering and full-bodied. That was the dominant sensory experience on a walk around Nancy Heinzel and Brian Marshall’s market garden, Sawmill Creek Farm, in late summer. The entire garden was scented with the heady aroma of Hungarian peppers smoking over hickory chips at one end of the garden.

Nancy Heinzel and Brian Marshall are truly avid gardeners. That love and passion became much of their livelihood, “like all good things, by accident!” says Brian, “about 10 years ago,” when they decided to allow their 1-acre garden to continue on its ever-expanding way and become not just their garden but an outstanding market garden. Today, Nancy tends to the farm as her full-time job and Brian pitches in half time, his other half-time is spent as landscape designer and installer. Much of the goods from the farm are grown to sell at various markets around the area – including the Chico Thursday night Market and the Saturday Market in Oroville, April to November.
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Donna Bayliss grows lavender – acres and acres, rows and rows of multiple varieties of certified organic lavender – and rosemary, lemon verbena, scented geranium, lemon balm, chamomile, sage and clary sage, to name a few – for the organic botanical industry. But in my mind, Donna grows those fields of lavender for me and for the views her fields offer to me as I drive up or down Highway 99. Those fields make me dream and their fragrance – or the thought of it - makes me happy.

Which is exactly why Donna Bayliss grows lavender – because lavender – its sight, scent, and taste makes people happier and healthier. “There are curative powers in lavender oil. The scent of the oil is relaxing and the active elements in the oil are healing. If I had not experienced these qualities myself, I would not be so sure. But I have and I am,” Donna tells me passionately. “My goal for this ranch is to continue to offer the opportunity for consumers to experience the real essence – not cheap synthetic imposters – of these plants. I also wanted to protect my son’s legacy and raise the bar environmentally on our ranch - to use less water, no pesticides or herbicides. Growing these naturally drought tolerant and relatively disease free herbs, I am able to do all of that – and be surrounded by their beauty year-round.”

Grown as a culinary and medicinal herb throughout the world, throughout time, lavender (Lavandula) is a genus comprising multiple species and hybrids. Bayliss Ranch grows many varieties, including Lavandula angustifolia ‘Hidcote’, “which keeps its dark blue color much longer;” Lavandula x intermedia ‘Grosso’ and Lavandula x intermedia ‘Provence,’ “which have longer stems for arranging.”

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If Spring in the garden is brazen – August in the garden is languid. I generally think of God as an energy, but when I lean toward personification, I like to think of God as a gardener – with broken fingernails, a stiff back, a sunburned neck, bramble-scraped and bug-bitten calves, a long-term plan of harmonious design, good intentions, and a happy heart. But absolutely positively unable to get it all done no matter how many hours worked or how much effort expended…and yet… still willing to try. And even God – like us gardeners – needed a day of rest. While many climates take their rest in the deep of Winter - the heat of August in the Northstate is my Gardening Sunday.

My war with weeds has come to some kind of stalemate – I have won a few battles, but the weeds have won their share. I have a bumper crop of bindweed and to be honest, I’m really liking the pale pink morning-glory flowers of it trailing through some intensely purple lantana – it’s as nice a companion planting as I’ve ever planned. I have resigned myself to the fact that the current state of affairs IS what all last winter’s planning and spring work led to and that my summer garden for this year is what I see before me. Fruits fatten on tree and vine, some are ready now and others are waiting for Fall. The Fall garden? Well, it waits for the heat to subside. As do I.

Not that there isn’t plenty to do – watering, harvesting vegetables, watering, weeding, watering, deadheading, re-mulching to cut down on watering, collecting seeds and watering again. My roses are still going gangbusters – especially if I remember to cut back the spent blooms. Crepe Myrtle – white, red, purple and pink - sings her siren song. I even had a few late-season sweet-peas - sweet pea, nasturium, very ripe melon or very ripe tomato are good seeds to be collecting now for next year’s garden. And you have to admire those plants that live for just August’s heat - my rudbeckia, gaillardia, and oregano have never looked better. I on the other hand, am all for the siesta attitude and feel the need to contract a bit each mid-afternoon. After all, a day of rest is a day of rest - or a month. Most everything can wait until the cool of early evening, early morning or even early October.

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