It's October... Or as it is known to Southern California gardeners, "Spring Part Deux: The Reckoning!"

It's still pretty warm, but it's supposed to cool down soon, so I began pulling up my summer vegetables to prep the ground for some cool season veggies. When I discovered, to my horror, evidence of nematodes. Guh-ross. Or at least I'm pretty sure I did. There were gnarly gall and cysts on lots of the roots. (This also explains the poor yield of cucumbers, zucchinis, and heirloom tomatoes I had all season. My hybrid tomatoes and peppers did fine, but that's probably because they were resistant varieties.) First, I flipped out. Then I started looking for a solution. I referred to all the gardening books I had at hand, scoured my favorite garden websites, and googled nematodes...

The internet mostly provided me with many yucky photos of roundworms. My favorite garden websites had a few things, but the info I've found the most useful was from my books, particularly Pat Welsh's Southern California Organic Gardening, 2009 ed., page 296. (We'll probably be starting a more thorough annotated bibliography of garden, landscape, and home repair books we like, to accompany the websites list. But we're a little behind on that. It's difficult deciding if you prefer MLA, or Chicago Manual of Style guidelines for citations.) I'm already a little obsessed with Pat Welsh because she's really nice. I emailed a question to her blog once and she wrote me back that day with really useful advice. I like to think of her as the Julia Child of gardening in a mediterranean climate. If her nematode advice works, I may have to start a fan club.

As per Mrs. Welsh's guidelines, my new two-prong attack is to amend the affected soil with compost, then assault it with French marigolds. As the photo shows, I've already started turning up the beds and amending.

[An aside: when the nuclear apocalypse happens and all that is left are cockroaches and rats, I can guarantee they will be having picnics on expansive lawns of bermuda grass. You cannot kill this stuff. I had 8 inches of hay mulch on the beds for a year now and I still found healthy plump bermuda grass roots and shoots working their way through the beds.]

Later I will be planting French marigolds to reduce the nematode population. Then I'll turn all that into the soil in the winter, and hopefully, in Spring, the nematode population will be effectively reduced. If I keep the soil well amended with organic materials, they should stay away. If this doesn't work, I'll have to solarize the soil. Marigolds are prettier to look at than plastic sheeting, so I'm trying the marigolds first.

[Oh, and a second aside: the Reemay worked and peas were fine during our record-breaking heat wave. A few singed leaves where the plants were a little exposed during part of the day, but on the whole, total survival!]
-J