I have to say, my greens have been a success so far. I've focused on the containers due to the drought. They use far less water, and the production has been really good.
Currently I'm eating mustard, lettuce, turnip greens, radish greens, purslane, and chives in salads and stir fries. And I've got all I can eat, especially the lettuce and mustard. The heat and humidity have broken or tied records regularly, but my varietal selections have weathered these extremes very well. I've never seen lettuce hold up better in heat than the Kalura lettuce I grew this year. I got the seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
Air pollution levels are very high lately, most likely due to brush fires, trash burning, burning of sugar cane fields, and "controlled burns" on State and private land. This severely limits what I can do. Lately all I seem to do is keep the compost going, irrigate, and cut back the brush near the house now and then. Whenever the air clears up with sea breezes or northerly wind shifts, I do get out and clear brush for fire safety. All of the debris will get shredded and made into compost and mulch for the garden...eventually. I get backlogged at times, but when the air improves I clear the piles with the chipper/shredder.
Just to be clear about this...I don't use any commercial fertilizers at all in my gardening anymore. I buy rock powders like granite meal and mix them into my potting and bedding soil sparingly for trace elements, but the soil is fertilized primarily by compost. If you make good compost, you don't need anything else. And the results you get aren't second best, they're better than what you would get with chemicals. What's the difference environmentally between an organic garden and a chemical one? Leaching of fertilizers into ground water from chemical gardens is well over 90% according to studies that have been done on this. Most of what you buy goes into canals, creeks, lakes, and the sea.
The same number for an organic garden?...a small fraction of one percent AT MOST. The nutrients stay where you put them and they stay available for plant roots 24/7. Organic gardens are sustainable, chemical gardens are not. As far as insect problems go, my garden spaces are teeming with lizards, toads, frogs, spiders, and all kinds of insect predators. I don't get massive outbreaks of insect pests on healthy plants like my neighbor does. His pests migrate to my garden sometimes, but those problems are temporary. When I told him that the Sevin he uses decimates earthworm populations, he thought that was a good thing. So he's not a well-read gardener. He sprays his garden on a regular basis with high concentrations of pesticides, bugs or no bugs. I had to give up on a garden patch I had near his property to get away from pesticide drift and drainage of pesticide-polluted water. When I put up a small berm to block his drainage water, someone cut a trench through it.
So that's another reason to grow in containers, they keep my soil out of the polluted water that drains into my property in rainy season. So for now, I'm giving up on the planting beds and just growing in containers. But I'll do OK, I have a LOT of containers...probably thirty or forty under cultivation right now and lots more waiting for recycling of the soil and new plantings. These are almost all 34 and 57 cm nursery pots.
Right now I have chili peppers, turnip greens, chard, lettuce, mustard greens, parsley, carrots, onions, chives, sweet potatoes, radishes, purslane growing in nursery pots...and close to a hundred seedlings ready to plant somewhere. So as soon as the air clears up a bit, I'm ready to go.
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