We did some good work in the garden this weekend, and I wanted to share a quick update on our winter gardening adventures!  I’m going to include both a Bakersfield and Santa Barbara update, so stay tuned!

Bakersfield:

Winter plants are coming along!  I had two surviving Tom Thumb pea plants that are now producing pods.  Definitely not a bumper crop, but they are super cute plants and the peas taste really good!  We’re up to about 5 pea pods at this point – definitely not enough for a full salad or side, but still fun to watch grow.

The carrots and the chard are coming along nicely!  It’s been very cold (for California standards) over the past couple of weeks, so I feel like that has slowed down the chard growth a bit.  I’m excited that the weather will be in the mid 60s this week, so that might help things along.  We have full leaves formed on both chard and carrots, so it’s just a matter of continuing to grow at this point!  May thin out the carrots soon as well to give the roots more space to form.

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Our Early Girl tomato plant has been producing tomatoes all winter (I’m totally shocked about this), and I’ve been harvesting little handfuls every week or so.  They taste really good and the plant seems to be thriving through the cold weather.  It’s been super fun to have fresh tomatoes throughout the winter!

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My three citrus trees are hanging out through the cold and aren’t up to much as of yet.  Hopefully the warmer weather will prompt some new growth and flowers for the next year!

Santa Barbara:

We did some heavy weeding of our beds and cleared out the rest of our lettuce bed.  Our Brussels Sprouts plants are growing nicely, and our garlic is standing tall and looking great.  Our onions have all been nibbled down by something, but I think they’re still alive and growing so we let them be.  Hopefully they will bounce back.

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Our fava beans have grown up and are flowering, and I hope to be harvesting some fresh favas soon!  The flowers are super cool, so I took some pictures of those while they last!

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We did some replanting this weekend as well – adding a new bed of lettuce and spinach as well as a row of more Tom Thumb peas.  Looking forward to having more home-grown salads soon!

Finally, we pulled the remaining tomato plants (they’re all totally done down there) and cleared out a few beds.  We’ve been thinking about removing the soil and re-doing the bottoms of our beds because we have a serious gopher problem, so we may start with these empty beds to get ready for spring.  Open to any suggestions on thwarting gopher attacks as well, they clearly like our veggies just as much as we do!

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