Sacramento Digs Gardening's booth returns this year
Debbie Arrington waves from the Sacramento Digs Gardening booth at Harvest Day in 2019. Stop by the table this year to meet Debbie and talk gardening (and recipes!). Kathy Morrison
Quite a wealth of garden and related information will be gathered this Saturday, Aug. 3, at Harvest Day. Thirty educational tables (with shade!) will be set up on the oak-ringed field between the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center and the Fair Oaks Community Garden.
Local organizations, clubs and businesses will staff the tables, offering advice and information on topics including birds, canning and food preservation, compost, irrigation systems, native plants, landscape materials, urban trees, and many others.
Sacramento Digs Gardening will be among them, returning this year after having to skip the 2023 event. Blog co-founder/lead writer Debbie Arrington will hold down the fort most of the day, which runs from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. (Fellow co-founder Kathy Morrison Hellesen -- me! -- will be present on occasion, when not handling master gardener duties in the FOHC.)
Visit the SDG booth for free stickers, plus easy links to our many recipes and other blog posts. If you're a regular recipient of the blog newsletter, make a point of stopping by and introducing yourself -- we love to meet our subscribed readers. Debbie, of course, is a master rosarian who enjoys fielding questions about roses and other flowers in particular.
Below is the official list of educational tables expected at Harvest Day. The Sacramento County master gardeners will have the new 2025 Garden Guide and Calendar for sale, but the local businesses listed here will not be selling at Harvest Day; they will have information on their products.
-- 4-H of Sacramento County
-- Audubon Society
-- California Dept. of Food & Agriculture
-- California Native Plant Society, Sacramento Valley Chapter
-- EB Stone & Son
-- Effie Yeaw Nature Center
-- UCCE Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program
-- Fair Oaks Library
-- Fair Oaks Water District
-- Florin-Perkins Landscape Materials
-- Green Acres Nursery & Supply
-- Hunter Industries
-- LeafFilter
-- Master Food Preservers of Sacramento County (recipes!)
-- Master Gardeners Gardening Guide and Calendar
-- Miller’s ACE Hardware
-- The Renaissance Society
-- Sacramento County Dept. of Waste Management & Recycling
-- Sacramento Area Community Garden Coalition
-- Sacramento Digs Gardening
-- Sacramento Perennial Plant Club
-- Sacramento Valley Urban Forests Council
-- Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control District (Fight the Bite!)
-- SavATree
-- Sierra Foothills Rose Society
-- SMUD
-- Dept. of Water Resources, Sacramento County
-- William Walker Law firm
-- Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
The Fair Oaks Horticulture Center is at 11549 Fair Oaks Blvd., Fair Oaks, just south of Madison Avenue. Admission and parking are free.
Details on Harvest Day: sacmg.ucanr.edu/Harvest_Day/.
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Food in My Back Yard Series
May 6: Maintain soil moisture with mulch for garden success
April 29: What's (already) wrong with my tomato plants?
April 22: Should you stock up on fertilizer? (Yes!)
April 15: Grow culinary herbs in containers
April 8: When to plant summer vegetables
April 1: Don't be fooled by these garden myths
March 25: Fertilizer tips: How to 'feed' your vegetables for healthy growth
March 18: Time to give vegetable seedlings some more space
March 11: Ways to win the fight against weeds
March 4: Potatoes from the garden
Feb. 25: Plant a fruit tree now -- for later
Feb. 18: How to squeeze more food into less space
Feb. 11: When to plant? Consider staggering your transplants
Feb. 4: Starting in seed starting
Sites We Like
Garden Checklist for week of May 11
Make the most of the lower temperatures early in the week. We’ll be back in the 80s by Thursday.
* Plant, plant, plant! It’s prime planting season in the Sacramento area. Time to set out those tomato transplants along with peppers and eggplants. Pinch off any flowers on new transplants to make them concentrate on establishing roots instead of setting premature fruit.
* Direct-seed melons, cucumbers, summer squash, corn, radishes, pumpkins and annual herbs such as basil.
* Harvest cabbage, lettuce, peas and green onions.
* In the flower garden, direct-seed sunflowers, cosmos, salvia, zinnias, marigolds, celosia and asters. (You also can transplant seedlings for many of the same flowers.)
* Plant dahlia tubers.
* Transplant petunias, marigolds and perennial flowers such as astilbe, columbine, coneflowers, coreopsis, dahlias, rudbeckia and verbena.
* Keep an eye out for slugs, snails, earwigs and aphids that want to dine on tender new growth.
* Feed summer bloomers with a balanced fertilizer.
* For continued bloom, cut off spent flowers on roses as well as other flowering plants.
* Add mulch to the garden to maintain moisture. Mulch also cuts down on weeds. But don’t let it mound around the stems or trunks of trees or shrubs. Leave about a 6-inch-to-1-foot circle to avoid crown rot or other problems.
* Remember to weed! Pull those nasties before they set seed.
* Water early in the day and keep seedlings evenly moist.