We did a lot of work in our Santa Barbara garden today, and I wanted to share the updates along with some pictures.  We’re new to the fall/winter gardening in California, so we’re always open to tips and fun ideas of things to grow in the winter months!

Today, we put in some flowers (zinnias and marigolds) and planted some amaranth.  I mostly bought the amaranth because I loved the way it looked, and upon further research I’ve learned that it can actually grow quite big!  Interested to see where this one goes!  If anything, it would be cool to harvest some of the seeds to include in a future bread-making project.

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We also re-planted our greens bed by adding more chard, arugula, and a cold-hardy breed of lettuce that Chris brought back from his hunting trip in South Dakota.  We also re-planted our kale (our other two plants grew big, but both have been munched down by gophers lately).  We also threw in some radish seeds at the end of a bed, mostly because they’re quick and easy to grow.  Looking forward to having plenty of greens for the winter soon!

Other things we did today include weeding the Brussels sprouts bed (Chris is a big fan so we devoted an entire bed to this enterprise).  We also weeded and thinned our lettuce bed which has really taken off.  We harvested a small handful of tomatoes and a few chard and arugula leaves from our two remaining plants.  Finally, we checked in on our fava bean sprouts (all looking good), our garlic which is just starting to sprout, and our onion starts (they’re still alive, but not really growing).

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Also, I brought back some chard seeds and carrot seeds for my two open pots in Bakersfield.  Hoping to plant those after work and see how they do!