Hello Fellow Gardeners and Gardeners-To-Be! I’m co-hosting a gardening workshop on Saturday, March 13 from 10 am to noonish at a private residence and garden in Fallbrook, near the 76 and Olive Hill Road. You can register here. Space is limited to 20 people.

Brijette Pena, founder of San Diego Seed Company, will be our speaker, and she will be teaching seed-starting and vegetable growing, with a focus on tomatoes. Tomato-related topics will include:

• A demonstration of the Tomahook tomato-growing method
• Growing different types of tomatoes in different parts of San Diego County (Zones 9 and 10)
• A demonstration of deep planting and leaf pruning below tomato sets
• What Brijette has learned from trialing tomatoes in the San Diego Seed Company trial gardens

Brijette will also be bringing some special seeds for us to use that aren’t available yet elsewhere.

San Diego Seed Company is a 1-acre urban farm just a few miles from downtown San Diego. Their space is limited, and so they must rely on trials to select the very best seeds to offer in our climate, which includes everything from long dry periods to coastal marine layers.

If you have your own seed-starting trays, bring ’em. The workshop fee for bringing your own materials is $15. If you don’t have your own trays, it’s $25. My co-host has purchased some beautiful, high-quality trays from Bootstrap Farmers, the kind I use and re-use in my garden year after year. We will supply seeds and seed-starting soil / propagation mix.

Why I’m a Seed-starting Fanatic

One other note–learning how to effectively start seeds is what really transformed me as a gardener and vegetable grower. Imagine, if you will, me with 10 seed-starting trays (I may have over-purchased a bit), 50 cells per tray. That’s 500 seedlings. Well, when you have 100 tomato plants, 100 squash plants, 100 cucumber plants, etc., you can make a LOT of mistakes in the garden. If something didn’t thrive, I made the garden bed more hospitable and swapped in a brand new plant. Having an overabundance of plants meant I was bound to grow something right. And I did. So I highly encourage you to join us, learn all you can and grow so many veggies you don’t know what to do with them all!

See you in March!