5 things to do in the garden this week:
Fruit. Blackberries are ripening now. This is one of the most aggressive ground covers or vines you could plant, and I recommend training it as a vine unless you want to traipse through a thorny patch of growth to pick your fruit. But then there are thornless blackberry varieties such as Navajo, Prime-Ark Freedom, and Triple Crown, easily acquired from online vendors, that are eminently suitable for growing in Southern California. Blackberries produce on second-year growth. Once you have harvested their fruit, cut the canes on which they grew down to the ground.
Vegetables. To maximize your eggplant harvest, remove the first flower that forms off the main stem. Allowing an eggplant to develop from the flower will sap energy that would otherwise be channeled into the development of more shoots and stems for a more abundant eggplant harvest than if that first flower had not been removed. With determinate tomato varieties — plants that grow to a certain size and give a crop all at once, as opposed to indeterminate varieties that grow like vines and require trellising — this practice is also recommended.
Herbs. Common cooking sage (Salvia officinalis) is a blue-flowered woody perennial, generally kept for 3-5 years until its leaf production declines, even if the plant itself can persist for a decade or more. Its bumpy foliage is found on every variety, from the greyish-green leafed culinary standard to the ever-popular purple sage to white and gold variegated types and a tricolor (gray, gold, and pink) cultivar. Propagation is easily achieved by taking four-inch shoot terminals and sticking them in a mix that is half peat moss and half perlite. This is the recommended propagation mix for most cuttings of herbs, ground covers, and many shrubs as well. Just make sure the shoot or stem on your cutting is soft and flexible, since hardwood cuttings are a different story. Dip cuttings in hormone powder to accelerate root formation.
Flowers. I always thought of Sedum/Hylotelephium spectabile as a fall bloomer. Perhaps it’s due to our warmer-than-usual winter, but mine is flowering now. Although a succulent, it needs regular water to thrive and flower at maximum capacity, meaning lots of lush pink, six-inch diameter flower clusters. Sedum confusum is one of the most intriguing and seductive ground covers you can find. It is flowering now with thick yellow flower clusters, but its real attraction is foliage that, when leafed out over a large area, is endlessly soothing, appearing as though it were made of porcelain, jade, or glass. If I had to gaze at an extensive planting of a single species for all eternity, I might choose this Sedum.
Weeds. Black mustard (Brassica nigra), although alluringly beautiful when in bloom in the spring with waves of clear, butter-yellow flowers that blind the eye, is an invasive species that can be eliminated through solarization. In this practice, most effectively utilized as temperatures warm, the vegetative menace you wish to eradicate is watered heavily before being covered with clear plastic. Hold the plastic down with rocks, bricks, or U-nails. Intense heat generated beneath the plastic steams plants beneath it to death.