Each month offers tips on keeping the garden and the gardeners healthy
The 2025 Gardening Guide and Calendar by the Placer County master gardeners is on sale now online and next week in person at the Mountain Mandarin Festival. Courtesy UC master gardeners of Placer County
This is prime season for calendar purchases -- great for planning the year ahead, even better for holiday gifts.
The UC master gardeners of Placer County have put together a calendar that does much more than tell you the month and date. Their Gardening Guide and Calendar is packed with gardening tips, reminders and planting inspiration.
This 2025 version also explores the many ways that gardening keeps us healthy, from the physical activity to the mental benefit of working with the natural world. Specific topics include creating healthy compost, growing blueberries, the benefits of a garden of native plants, and much more.
"This calendar is suitable for climate zones from California's Central Valley to the foothills," the master gardeners note. The guidelines can be modified for colder or more moderate climates, they say. Cost is $12, or 5 for $55, a bulk discount.
How to find this invaluable calendar? In-person sales are offered this Sunday, Nov.17, at the Fowler Ranch Farmers Market in Lincoln, and next week during the Mountain Mandarin Festival, Nov. 22-24, held this year in Roseville's @theGrounds. (More on the festival will be on the blog soon.)
Shoppers also can order the publication online or via mail order; go to the Placer website for those forms.
Finally, a host of Placer retailers, including nurseries and hardware stores, carry the calendar for sale; prices maybe higher there. (There also are a few shops in El Dorado County that are selling it.) The list is linked off the website above.
For additional information on the Placer master gardeners' activities, go to https://pcmg.ucanr.edu/
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Food in My Back Yard Series
May 13: Your plants can tell you more than any calendar can
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
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Garden Checklist for week of May 18
Get outside early in the morning while temperatures are still cool – and get to work!
* 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. 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.
* Are birds picking your fruit off trees before it’s ripe? Try hanging strips of aluminum foil on tree branches. The shiny, dangling strips help deter birds from making themselves at home.
* As spring-flowering shrubs finish blooming, give them a little pruning to shape them, removing old and dead wood. Lightly trim azaleas, fuchsias and marguerites for bushier plants.
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