Growing Your Own Food In The Sierra Nevada Foothills 2010

I've been vegetable gardening since I was child, having really intensified my efforts in the last ten years while broadening out into orchards, vineyards, and animals. Here's a brief summary of my experiences and recommendations at 3000' in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Before I go any further, be aware that growing your own food is hard work and lots of it.

First, be really careful because there's a lot more bad than good information out there. Nurseries sell fruit trees only as a sideline to their main landscaping business and are usually locked into buying from one or two fruit tree suppliers. County extension agents are government bureaucrats with no skin in the game. UC Davis has lots of publications and web pages full of just plain wrong information. Seed and orchard catalogs are full of beautiful pictures and gushing descriptions because that's the best way to increase sales. Gardening books tend to be written with an upbeat and encouraging tone that downplays potential problems. Commercial farmers have different objectives and means than home growers. Be especially diligent when researching fruit trees, because you can easily have five years of effort into a tree before you realize it's not going to work out.

Next, choose your site carefully, plan your watering system and fencing, and improve your soil. Most plants need full sun to thrive. Nearby native trees will grow taller quickly as excess irrigation water reaches their roots; they will also send out roots that can choke out vegetable beds. Veggies MUST be planted near (100' max) to the house/kitchen so as to be convenient to the cook; herbs even closer.

Poly drip pipe with a good filter is my preferred irrigation system. Drip pipe is cheap, reliable, and conserves water. I use 15' coils under each tree, coils in round or oval raised vegetable beds, straight runs along rows, and triple straight runs 30” apart under rows of trees. Conventional drip systems are a nightmare of connections and plugged up emitters. Overhead sprinklers waste water, distribute water unevenly and suffer from “water shadowing” by tall plants.

Fencing has to exclude deer, rabbits and racoons. This usually means an electric wire at the top for coons. I like a 4”concrete strip at the bottom 4” above ground to prevent dogs and varmints from digging under and to keep wire out of the dirt. I don't like to use wood for fencing as it doesn't last. Be sure to put in an 8-10' gate for equipment accessibility.

No plant will do it's best in poor soil. Soil must be loose and penetrable to the extent that you expect the roots to grow. Miniature excavators are effective, easy to operate, and cheap to rent for digging trenches for vineyard rows, and bowls for fruit trees. Hydrostatic drive rototillers that you rent are ten times more effective than any tiller you can afford to buy. Horse manure is a great soil amendment which is often available for free, though it is full of weed seeds and sometimes herbicides from hay. Soil improvement is a major ongoing project that must be researched and planned carefully .Building your soil will probably be your biggest labor input for growing your own food. Red clay takes a LOT of organic material to loosen it up. Locate good reliable sources of cow, horse, goat, etc. manure and organize your handling methods carefully.

The best bets I know of for plants are labrusca (American) grapes, Asian persimmons, pomegranates, figs, loquats, mulberries, pineapple guavas, and possibly jujubes.

Vitus labrusca is a species of grape native to North America, of which Concord is one variety. Most wine and table grapes that you've heard of are of the vitus vinifera species native to Europe. Thompson, Flame, Ruby, Monnuka, Muscat, etc. are vinifera, and so susceptible to diseases and pests that you may have to use a lot of pesticides, fungicides, and mildewcides to have any hope of getting a crop. Labrusca grapes have such superior disease resistance that you probably will never have to put anything on them, not even sulfur dust. Just plant, water, train, prune, and eat grapes. Some vinifera traits like seedlessness have been bred into predominantly labrusca varieties. Grapes make an excellent landscaping plant when used on trellises, and are drought resistant. They can be used between south facing windows to provide shade in the summer and be pruned back in the winter. Grapes don't always need bird netting as damage is usually partial and limited to specific berries while the cluster as a whole can still be used. Jupiter is the best variety of grape I grow, in fact the best plant I grow period. It's seedless, vigorous, productive, delicious, has large berries, and dries and freezes well. Glenora is even more delicious, with smaller berries, has red fall colors, but is not as productive. Suffolk red has a mild flavor and is very productive when trained to canes. Steuben is very productive, has seeds, is vigorous, with a delicious fruity flavor. I've tried about twenty varieties and these are the best. Reliance was great in every way except flavor, which no one in my family liked. Concord has been superseded by far superior grapes like Steuben. My grapes ripen from mid July through the end of September. The Grape Grower by Lon Rombough is a must buy if you are going to grow more than 4-5 vines.

Asian persimmons are virtually disease and pest proof and have beautiful orange fall colors- an ideal landscaping plant. Birds have never touched my persimmon fruit. Fuyu and Jiro ripen in late November with Izu a month earlier. These three varieties are all delicious (not quite as good as an apple) if picked just as they are starting to soften. American persimmons are to be avoided because of their astringency before full ripeness, and mushy texture when fully ripe

Pomegranates put on a beautiful show of red and yellow flowers in the spring, suffer from few pests or diseases, are drought resistant, and can be grown as small trees or bushes- landscaping qualified. The fruit has a tough skin that acts as an effective bird barrier. The best variety for me is Wonderful which barely ripens at my altitude, while the earlier and sweeter Granada is not as flavorful. Pomegranates have moderately nasty spikes. We juice our extra pomegranates in a lever compression type citrus juicer. Deer don't seem to bother my pomegranates too much.

Figs are a beautiful exotic looking tree that can be trained to almost any form- another great landscaping tree. They bear two crops a year, with fruit texture and flavor desirability being a matter of personal preference. Figs dry well and suffer only slight bird damage for me. Pests and diseases tend to leave them alone, but plant them in wire “gopher cages” to get them off to a good start. I have the most common variety, Black Mission. No need to plant two fig trees as the late summer early fall harvest just goes on and on. Late frosts can burn fig leaves and abort the first crop.

Loquats are evergreen, drought resistant, attractive trees, and have been very popular in the past for landscaping. Loquat trees put on most of their new growth from fall through spring, with small white flowers appearing in November. The prolific fruits are slightly smaller than apricots, yellow-orange with a three seeded pit, a superb citrus-plum like flavor and texture, and ripen in mid June. They are an important commercial crop in Asia, though they do not ship well. Named varieties like Gold Nugget and Big Jim have smaller pits, while generic loquats have a large pit. 2000' is probably the realistic limit to expect a crop at, although I always get a few fruits at 3000. It's almost foolproof to start loquats from pits, although the resulting plant will always revert to a large pitted fruit. I'm using loquats to take over an oleander hedge by simply sticking the pits in the ground by the drip pipe emitters. The deer occasionally chomp a leaf or two. There are few pests that bother loquats, birds tend to avoid the fruit, but fire blight can occasionally be a problem. Snow breaks loquat limbs because of the large leaves.

Mulberries are the female tree or bush of the well known male non-fruiting mulberry used in landscaping. They can grow just as big, with prolific crops of delicious 1 1/2” purple fruits. If there are no male trees nearby, the fruit will be seedless. Disease and pest problems are rare, but birds go nuts for the fruit, so a low pruned tree form with bird netting is required to get a crop. I've tried about a half a dozen varieties, but the traditional Illinois Everbearing has been the best by far, while Pakistan with it's huge fruits just couldn't take the cold at 3000'. I'm trying a couple of highly rated black mulberry bushes, Persian and Black Beauty, so we'll see what happens in a year or two. The Illinois tree bears late June through July. Don't plant mulberries anywhere near septic tanks or leach lines as the roots are highly invasive.

Pineapple guavas are a beautiful slender evergreen tree with a very exotic flavored, green skinned, white fleshed oval fruit that's bigger than a cherry and smaller than an apricot. Pests and diseases are minimal, but the small tree can take up to ten years to bear it's first crop. I'm on year three, with major snow breakage. The fruit ripens in the fall.

Jujubes are extremely well reviewed, very thorny, disease and pest and drought resistant, and a very attractive landscaping tree. I'm having some difficulty getting mine past the second year as late hard freezes have killed several small trees. The small 1-2” fruit can vary from dry and mealy to apple-like with a mellow spicy flavor, depending on the variety. The fruit ripens in the fall. Isolate jujubes as the roots are even more invasive than elm roots.

All of the previous trees are almost foolproof. Only the jujube requires a separate pollinator. All can be used for landscaping purposes. (Why plant and care for a non-fruiting tree when the same effort could provide delicious fruit and a beautiful tree?) The only other plants that I would consider foolproof are herbs: Mint-highly invasive, be careful, I like Spearmint for it's large leaves; Basil- plain old Sweet Basil works best for me (annual); Lemon Balm, highly invasive; Rosemary, one tough landscaping shrub; Oregano; and more I haven't tried.

That's it for my list of sure winners. After this it's much higher failure rates and much higher labor inputs. Pick your battles carefully. I'm going to switch to writing about vegetables, go back to fruit and nut trees, then briefly cover animals. Vegetables can be very labor intensive and pest susceptible, but time and expense losses are very limited compared to fruit trees.

Next on the list is kale. Plant in August either by direct seeding, or transplanting starts. Kale is the only plant I have that improves with cold weather. Snow has little effect other than to bend the plant over a bit. Freezing temps make it produce more sugar, so it isn't good to eat until December, and keeps going until April when it goes to seed and aphids overwhelm it. Red Russian is by far the best variety I've tried. Best eaten steamed, sauteed with olive oil, in salads, or as chips.

Tomatoes are the classic home garden plant. Pests include tomato worms (pick them off by hand) and russet mites (Symptoms are yellowing then browning leaves at the base of the plant, eventually working up to the top. Treatment is sulfur dust. These mites are too small to see without magnification.) Tomato diseases are numerous so be sure to rotate them to a new area every year My favorite varieties are Better Boy and Lemon Boy. Lemon boy is extremely productive, and is sweet unlike it's name. I start tomatoes in February and put them out under plastic in April.

Sweet peppers. I plant more than a hundred Red Ruffled pimento pepper plants every year. They are so sweet that the kids eat them like apples. Great in salads and tacos too. I start them in January put them out under plastic in May. I never have any problems with peppers. I don't grow many hot peppers because the degree of heat is too unpredictable from plant to plant, and fruit to fruit.

Blackberries. I no longer grow very many black berries because it seems easier to just go pick wild ones, even though they're smaller. Olallie is my favorite variety. Not too many diseases or pests, ripen in late May. Raspberries don't seem to like the heat. Nor do blueberries which I have given up on.

Carrots are a major crop for me because they're a nice change from kale and other greens in the winter. I start my carrots from pelleted seed in June and transplant them in August. Carrots start off slow, so direct seeding results in major weed problems. Carrots love tons of horse manure. Freezing weather knocks down the tops, but the roots stay good all winter. My favorite variety is Bolero which gives me good yields. We eat a lot of carrot salad prepared with a Vita-Mix blender

Greens are easy to grow when temperatures aren't too hot or cold. I plant romaine lettuce between my corn plants in April and May so it gets some shade when it gets hot. Arugula is foolproof. Mizuna is a good mustard for fall and spring along with Joi Choi and turnips. Sometimes I plant escarole and endive in March. Never plant purslane because it will seed in and take over.

Potatoes love tons of horse manure and are pretty easy to grow. Mine suffer from russet mites so I sulfur dust them. I plant them in May, reusing last years' small potatoes which I leave behind when digging the crop. I originally started with some store bought russets that had sprouted out in the fridge. The seed companies all say this is verboten but so far so good. Gophers haven't hit my potatoes particularly hard. Potatoes are so cheap at the grocery store that I don't grow very many.

Louisiana Long is my favorite variety of eggplant, which is fairly trouble free. I start it in January along with sweet peppers, and set it out in April with a plastic cover.

Sometimes I plant broccoli in August, but head size can vary. Kale does a much better job.

I use Triple Treat pumpkin as a winter keeper squash for stews and soups. The hull-less seeds are delicious roasted in the microwave. I start them in May and put them out in June. Starting them earlier results in too early ripening. Earwigs and pill bugs attack them so they (along with summer squash, cucumbers, and cantaloupes) have to be pretty big when I transplant them to survive.

Sebring and Soleil are my favorite golden zucchini. I start them in March and set them out in April for an early crop.

Garlic is easy to grow. Just get some bulbs frome the store, break up into individual cloves and plant root end down.

Satsuki Madori is my favorite cucumber, although I'm going to try replacing it with Tasty Jade for the cheaper seeds. Armenian is also a good old reliable variety. I start cucumbers in March and put them out in April for an early crop.

I start parsley and celery in June for transplanting in August. The celery can only survive the winter under plastic, with direct seeded spinach between plants.

I've never found a better green bean than Kentucky Wonder. I save bean seeds out of the garden every year and seem to be slowly breeding beans that are suited to my locale. I've got to be careful to rotate my beans or diseases wipe them out. I direct seed in April using many extra seeds to cover losses to bugs when they sprout.

Annanas and Burpee Hybrid are my favorite melons. I start them in April for late May planting. Bugs can be very hard on even large melon plants. Melons need a lot of heat.

I've never found a variety of corn that reliably produce two good ears per stalk. Corn is so cheap at the store that I plant it just for fun, five at a time, on four day intervals starting in May. I use bottomless 32 ounce yogurt containers set into the soil flush with the surface. There's no soil inside the container so I plant three seeds in the bottom and cover the numerous containers with a sheet of plastic. When the corn sprouts reach the plastic, I remove the plastic and thin to one plant. After three or four more inches of growth, I put a little vegetable fertilizer in the bottom, remove the container and fill in around the plant with soil. I picked up that trick from Cubed Foot Gardening by_____. Corn loves a lot of horse manure.

That's about it for veggies. I put my drip pipe watering on a 10 am and 6 pm daily timer schedule. Weeding is an ongoing job. Pests are always creeping up on you somewhere. The best way to defeat snails and slugs is to never import them on nursery plants. I use oval concrete raised beds with solid bottoms and perimeter weep drain holes. This keeps out gophers and tree roots. I've really built up my soil over time and use fresh horse manure for a shot of nitrogen (and weed seeds!) before planting. At least the weeds are easy to pull out of the rich soil before going to feed the chickens.

Apples and pears are a pretty good bet. They can live to be a hundred years old, although fire blight is common among a slew of potential diseases and pests. I'm still experimenting with apples, since the first two I planted overlapped my grape production season and therefore aren't too useful. Mutsu on M-111 rootstock started reliably producing big crops at five years. My Fuji on M-111 is at nine years and still doesn't put on very large crops. I just put in Liberty and Pink Lady so I've got a while to go. The ability of some apple varieties (Gold Rush, Granny Smith, Pink Lady, etc.) to store through winter is a huge advantage. The fatal flaw of apples and pears is their susceptibility to attack by coddling moths and other pests which lay eggs under the apple skin that hatch into worms that eat their way to the core. Repeated use of pesticides is the usual solution, but if you're going to do that you may as well buy your apples at the store and let someone else mess with the spraying. Organic controls are either a nightmare of complexity, prohibitively labor intensive, or both. My compromise solution is to run chickens under my apple (and stone fruit ) trees to disrupt the life cycles of the moths and other pests. I remove all litter and use no mulch because that just creates a safer environment for pests to over-winter in. Then I take my losses. A bad year could see 5-10 percent useless apples that go to the pigs, 10-25 percent salvageable apples (cut out the worm area with a knife), 10-25 percent minor damage that you can eat around, and the rest no damage. A good year is 90 percent undamaged apples. Asian pears are worth looking into. Many pears bear on alternate years. Apple and pears require a separate pollinator variety.

Peaches and nectarines are the best bet among stone fruits (peaches, plums, cherries, and apricots)- all of which are short lived (usually no more than 25 years), and extremely susceptible to diseases and pests. Bacterial canker is the bane of all stone fruits. Preventative measures are few and ineffective, and infection often leads to death. Peaches and nectarines seem to be just a little less prone to bacterial canker than other stone fruits. I prefer nectarines to peaches for their flavor, color, and lack of fuzz. Independence on Citation root stock has been a steady and prolific performer for me since the fourth year. Frost peach on Citation has been very productive for me, with only average fruit quality. Unfortunately, most peaches and nectarines ripen during grape season which makes them of marginal value. I just planted Desert Delight nectarine which should precede my grapes by two to three weeks. Leaf curl disease is ubiquitous among peaches and nectarines. I just ignore it with no noticeable outcome. Peaches and nectarines dry and freeze well. Bird peck losses on all stone fruits require low pruning and bird netting. Purchase an orchard book (none of which I would particularly recommend) before growing stone fruit. The cheap orchard books in the front of big box stores are good enough.

“Sour” or “pie” cherries are probably the next best bet. Supposedly they are just a little more frost, heat, and disease resistant than sweet cherries ( like Bing, Lapins, etc.) I wouldn't know since I planted my first pie cherries last year after nearly a decade of wrestling with sweet cherries. The traditional varieties are Montmorency and Northstar, but the new introduction Balaton seems to be taking the market by storm. I've got all three along with Surefire. Balaton is supposedly almost as sweet as a sweet cherry, with excellent pie cherry flavor. The key factor for pie and sweet cherries is root stock selection, which often dictates the difference between success and failure. Mazzard is the traditional rootstock for pie and sweets, but it grows into a huge vertical tree that takes 8-10 years to bear. When you buy a cherry tree at a big box store and the root stock isn't specified, it's almost certainly Mazzard. Mahaleb is the best bet for pie cherries, and is semi dwarfing. Mahaleb with sweet cherries is usually killed by gophers. Colt is the standard commercial sweet cherry rootstock in California and has so many bad traits that home growers should avoid it. Gisela (G for short) is a new rootstock from Germany. Semi-dwarfing G-5 hasn't done well for me in the California heat. Krymsk is a new root stock from Russia that's getting very mixed reviews. GM61 (no relationship to Gisela) is an excellent semi-dwarfing disease resistant early and prolific bearing root stock that is no longer available mainly due to the bankruptcy of it's California producer. So sweet cherries are a bit of a problem for foothill growers until GM61 comes back. Dave Wilson Nursery has introduced several new sweet cherry root stocks that are getting mixed reviews. Sweet cherries are somewhat susceptible to crop loss due to late frosts, although on GM61 they are no worse than any other stone fruit I've grown. They ripen in June, and will be stripped clean by birds if not netted. Once the birds are excluded, the earwigs are free to move in. So I use chickens to knock down the earwig population pre-netting. Most cherries require a separate pollinator variety.

I used to have more plums and pluots than anything else. The early (Japanese) plums were more disease prone and late frost susceptible than cherries. Late plums overlap grapes, so no go. I no longer have any plums or pluots.

Two Harcot apricots were the first trees in my orchard. They grew beautifully, and set large crops every year... which always dropped to the ground in May due to cold stress. Note that I didn't say freezing, just stress like a 40 degree 5 mph breeze. Chinese apricot proved to have the same flaw. No amount of heat lamps or plastic covering made any difference. I got a total of four apricots in seven years. Discussions with other growers turned up similar sad stories. Don't plant apricots unless you see one within a mile already producing bumper crops.

So now you can see how much fun stone fruits are. I'll wrap up fruits with a few comments about kiwis from my own and others' experience. Just say no. Fuzzy kiwis, hardy kiwis, whatever, just say no.

I'm three years into walnuts, pecans, and hazelnuts. The hazelnuts look a little shaky, possibly the heat. The hazelnuts that are on root stocks are doing better than those that aren't. Nuts are a long term project.

Chickens are one of the best propositions for the home grower. Home grown eggs are vastly superior to anything available at the store. The big trick with chickens is to prevent predators from getting them. A good coop and a good watch dog usually keep the varmints at bay. Try to locate your large compost pile where your chickens can get to it and scratch. Throw your garbage, weeds, leaves, etc. on the pile and the chickens will shred it for you. A loosely stacked circle of concrete blocks about 2' high can contain the pile. Portable coops allow you to move the chickens around. We buy 4-5 chicks every spring that start laying in the fall. We keep three such separate little flocks. I have my kids manage the chickens and multiple flocks spreads the opportunity. You can't mix generations of birds in close quarters like portable coops. When a new bunch of birds comes into production, the oldest bunch goes into the soup pot. Rotating like this keeps the cumulative flock strong and productive. It helps to buy generic looking birds like Plymouth Barred Rocks or Rhode Island Reds because you tend not to get as attached to them as say, Aracanas. It's awfully easy to end up feeding a huge flock of old pet chickens and only get several eggs a day. Winter production rates for us for us are a little under 50%, and summer rates about 75%.

Homegrown beef boils down to one thing: how much fenced pasture do you have? Buying hay to raise cattle is a losing proposition. Irrigated pasture only make sense if your water is near the surface so you don't get eaten up by electric bills. Cattle can cause erosion on steep ground.

We raise and butcher our own pigs every year. Doing our own butchering allows us to trim most of the fat out of the sausage. We end up with three cuts of meat- bulk sausage, ribs, and soup bones. Pigs really stink and draw lots of flies, so locate their pen strategically. Pigs are very destructive, so use only steel and concrete to build the pen, which should be on flat ground.

Milk takes a certain type of person that loves milking goats or cows. Milking is a twice a day job that goes on forever. Then you filter and pasteurize the milk. Be sure you are the right type to take on this perpetual chore before starting.

I hate sheep, so I can't offer any objective advice. Sheep are simply the dumbest most annoying creatures on earth.

Growing your own food is a journey. Once underway, there's a lot of hard lessons that modify your plans. You won't end up where you initially expected. Good luck.