Protecting Your Plants From the Frost

Here in mid-California, temperatures at night are reaching as low as approximately 30-32 degrees fahrenheit, and we are currently getting frost, waking up to icy blankets of white across our lawns. It's definitely not safe for many of our plants. Just like us, a change in temperature, especially in extremes, can be harmful. Frost greatly lowers the temperature in plants, causing many of them to suffer.

     What we like to do is put our frost blankets on our plants right before sunset and take them off in the morning at around 9-10 a.m. It's important to not leave these frost blankets on for long periods of time (24 hours at a time, for example). Give the plants a chance to breathe and take in some sunshine! Besides frost blankets, also consider looking into cold frames, greenhouses, or there are even these miniature "greenhouses" that go directly over your plants if they are already in the ground! Those are also great for keeping your plants warm from the winter cold in general, not just to prevent frost. Definitely look into different options, and be sure to do your research if you want your plants to stay happy and healthy. Though not all plants will suffer, it's still important to acknowledge the consequences!

Frost blankets (we used burlap) help greatly to protect your
plants from frosting over, especially those that cannot
tolerate the frost! It lays lightly over your plants, even safe
to put over seedlings, and it blocks the frost from freezing
your flowers, herbs, veggies, and even citrus. These
blankets are not too expensive and can be found at
nurseries and hardware stores.

A closer look of the frost caught by the burlap! Though we think
frost is beautiful, it can be very damaging, enough to kill off your
plants.

It's a simple task to prevent your plants from frost! Be sure to
research on your specific plants to see whether or not they
can tolerate frost (peas, for example, don't mind it at all).
Also, regularly check any weather updates; they will
often tell you when the frost will hit, so you can be
prepared beforehand!

Much Needed Rain!

Here, we have a section of our plants covered in plastic sheeting
right before the big rain storm last week! Worked very well for
our plants. It prevented the heavy winds from knocking over and
flooding out our plants, as well as create a greenhouse effect
that our plants loved.

     It's about time we let you all in on an update! So, lately there has been quite a bit of rain, but we're not complaining - with a drought and all, we need all the rain we can get at this point, that's for sure.
    Our plants seemed to love the storm last week, even though we moved most of our shelves into a covered area or into our greenhouse. We also covered some of our plants with thick, plastic sheeting, which by the way did a fantastic job with protecting our plants, especially our seedlings. More showers last night and very early this morning, but all is great with our plants! The rain, if anything, is certainly helping more than hurting.

Wow, look at that rain! Beautiful. Our plants were enjoying the
weather!

Our wildflowers have tripled in size! We planted them in about February
of this year, they began to die off from the heat of the summer, and now as
it's getting colder, they're growing more and more each and every day! We
 are so glad they made a quick (very quick) return, thanks especially to the
rain and cooler weather.

The new wildflowers we planted approximately three or four weeks
ago are growing at a faster and faster pace, even more than ever after
the rain! We were fearful the smaller seedlings would possibly be
flooded out, but these strong plants had no trouble at all!

Okay, enough with the rain. Now we have an update on our gorgeous
pansies! It looks like our pansies are about halfway until "selling
size." We are waiting until these beauties bloom before they appear
at the Farmers' Market, but boy, when they do, we will have many,
many pansies for sell, mark our word!

And lastly, we'll let you in on our cilantro plants. These babies are
growing like weeds in this cool weather! We have well over thirty
cilantro plants ready to be sold, and that's not even including all of
the seedlings. We just have to be careful to cover these plants once,
and if, the frost hits as they cannot tolerate too, too much frost or
extreme cold, but they do love mild temperatures; it sure shows in
their growth!

Grow University - Free Online Plant Courses

College courses can be time-consuming for those who have tight schedules, as well as pricey, but Harley N. Smith, a plant expert with twenty years of experience, offers free, online courses.

All you have to do is visit www.growuniversity.net, scroll down, and click 'Grow University Upcoming Trainings,' and register for a class. Classes can fill up, so be sure that you sign up!

All you need is your name and e-mail, and reminders will be sent to your e-mail with a url that will link you directly to the class. Classes are only 45 minutes long, and you can ask questions, either through the chatbox or through a microphone. These classes are great for those who want to know more about plants without paying a dime!

Massive Spring Planting

We've been getting a lot of work done lately for our spring planting. We will have hundreds and hundreds of plants available within the next couple of months! It's going to be incredible, and maybe a tad bit of a stressful (but super fun) process. This is our very first time spring-planting, but so far, it's going quite smoothly. We'll catch up and take plenty more photos when all of our plants pop out! For now, what we are planting is going to be our little secret. We will announce later on what we're doing. Stay tuned!

This is what spring planting looks like! Rows and rows of
soon-to-be plants.

Seedlings are popping already!

Can't forget the bulb planting too! We already planted over a
hundred total! Whew, that was a lot of work.

In the process of getting our grounds ready to plant some
wildflower seeds! They look beautiful in our arrangements.

Hard work churning, breaking, and smoothing out the soil.

Don't worry about the rest of our plants; they are cozy and
warm in our little greenhouse! They will be protected
until we take them out in the spring.

Autumn Sunflowers

Thought we would share some of our special sunflowers! We had two of them bloom yesterday and another one getting ready to fully bloom by this afternoon. We love sunflowers in general, but these red beauties are absolutely perfect for decorating for autumn!

Though we didn't have too many sunflowers for our first year, we are definitely going to try to have hundreds- yes, hundreds- grown for next summer and autumn. Our first time growing the sunnies turned out to be a great experience, not to mention how our faces lit up whenever we saw that one of them bloomed.

Amazing to think that a beautiful flower started out like this!
We were excited when we saw the burgundy petals peeking
out.

If you love sunflowers, then you will love this one. Freshly bloomed!

If you look closely at this sunflower, you can see other colors other
than red. Interesting!

A close up of the petals. Now you can start to see shades of
green, brown, and a hint of yellow.

Red and yellow!

Even from far away, they are gorgeous.

Woke up this morning to see a third sunflower blooming. Boy,
we are going to have some gorgeous flowers for the next
Farmers' Market! We are very excited.